Richard W. Unger

Integration of Baltic and Low Countries Grain Markets, 1400–1800

Integration of markets, the flow of goods among them, serves to eliminate problems of dearth or great abundance. Consumers in regions of shortage gain from lower prices while producers in regions of surplus gain from higher returns. Integration also makes possible specialization in the production of goods in which a region enjoys a comparative advantage. The more integrated markets are the stronger is the tendency for the same price to be paid for the same good at the same time. If prices should be different traders and shippers will move goods from places of lower price to meet the higher demand. The goods most likely to be traded are those with a universal demand, which can be shipped long distances without deterioration and which can be easily and exactly described.1 The shipment of grain from the Baltic to the Low Countries had begun by the 14th century. That trade was to last for centuries and to be one of the most important exchanges in terms of volume and value, at least in northern Europe, down to the Industrial Revolution. Though traders maintained contact between the Baltic and the Low Countries through the years from 1400 to 1800 their success in integrating the markets in those two areas was limited.

Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping, 1450–1875

Assessing change in shipping productivity has always been difficult due to the lack of adequate, precise and comparable data. Evidence and serious scholarly studies are dispersed chronologically and spatially. To evaluate the evolution of long-term change is even more problematic. Yet two separate studies, one of the labour requirements of European merchant marines and another of their sizes, offer a basis for a preliminary examination of developments in the economics of ocean shipping from the Renaissance to the introduction of steam. I The former summarizes much of the extant information in the sixteen other chapters of a volume on maritime labour markets in different countries over time. A comparison of the two series yields very rough approximations of the ability of Europeans to acquire the necessary labour and gives some indication of the carrying capacity in different states and regions. The results also isolate significant shifts in productivity. Finally, the scale and timing of the improvements suggest where we might look for the principal sources of these productivity changes. A standard proxy for measuring labour productivity is the ratio of tons per man on board. But it is well to admit that this ratio suffers from serious problems in both the numerator and the denominator. The total number of men employed in shipping does not indicate the degree of participation in the workforce. The days of part-time farmers and fishermen who also went to sea lasted well into the nineteenth century. There are also questions about the categories of seamen. Including data for manpower serving on naval vessels could skew the ratio, especially since by the eighteenth century the purpose, function and criteria for effectiveness on naval vessels was very different than on cargo ships. Including manpower in the fisheries creates another problem, since inshore operations had different requirements than the deep-sea fishery.

Working on Labor

Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.

Worldly consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy

Erasmus, in the 1522 colloquy Convivium religiosum, described a homeowner showing guests the most important room of his house, the library, which had as a central feature a globe hanging in the center and maps of every region of the world on the surrounding walls. Though Genevieve Carlton does not mention the most prominent of northern humanists, it is exactly that sense of the value of geographical knowledge to an educated man and of having a room in the house decorated with maps and globes that she finds among well-to-do Venetians in the late-sixteenth century. In a closing chapter, Carlton, relying on the records of who owned maps and on advice manuals, points to the display of maps in Venetian houses as a way to enhance the status—intellectual and social—of the owner. Though for her that was the ultimate impulse for sixteenth-century Italians for having maps in the house, she devotes much of her book to another and critical factor in the wider distribution of cartographic output. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

TRADE, TAXATION, AND GOVERNMENT POLICY IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

The sustained growth in long distance trade in the high Middle Ages, most of that shipped over the seas around Europe, provided a potential source of income for governments. Rulers only rarely had a role in promoting expansion in commerce. By the middle of the fourteenth century, though, they could and often did benefit from the potential for a continuing stream of tax income that levies on commerce might provide. At the end of the Middle Ages governments, urban and royal, relied heavily on taxes on trade. It was not be until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that governments developed economic policies directed at promoting overall growth in production but the foundation for any programs that did emerge had their basis in the high medieval growth in trade.

Commerce, Communication, and Empire: Economy, Technology and Cultural Encounters

Henri Pirenne (1863–1935), the renowned Belgian medieval historian, in his interpretation of the early Middle Ages married commerce to communication and to the politics of empire. He enjoyed two things all scholars lust after: someone to do his footnotes and extended study leave. The man who checked his sources, cleaned up errors, and added citations for him was his son, Jacques, who was a good medievalist in his own right. The all-expenses-paid retreat that allowed extended time for learning languages and reflection came courtesy of the German government. The holder of the chair of medieval history at Ghent—or Gand, as he would have called it—had impeccable nationalist credentials as the author of a multivolume Histoire de Belgique. He refused to teach while much of Belgium, and specifically Ghent, was occupied by German troops during the First World War. He was a vocal proponent of a faculty strike that kept the university closed. He also was caught up in what were serious culture wars. He resisted calls for greater use of Flemish, something promoted by the German authorities who saw potential allies in those who wanted to decrease the importance of French language and culture in the country. When the university did go through full “vervlaamsing” in 1930, Pirenne would resign his chair, though it was rumored that he did it because he was not sure if his accent in Flemish was up to the proper standard for lecturing.

Income Differentials, Institutions, and Religion: Working in the Rhineland or Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century

Rotterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a principal Dutch port of departure for transmigrants to America. Typically they came from the Rhineland and their goal often was Pennsylvania. By the first two decades of the eighteenth century the colonys trade to the West Indiesand Britain was already flourishing. The growth in trade included carrying more immigrants. The influx of new people whose language was not English and with no legal ties or tradition of allegiance to the British crown created anxiety among the original settlers. In the early days of the colony settlement was often by religious groups travelling together to Philadelphia. In 1683, Francis Daniel Pastorius laid out a new settlement just to the North and West of the city called the Germantownship. During periods of fighting among states the numbers of Germans going to Philadelphia usually fell to zero as shipping was all but suspended. Keywords:Dutch; Eighteenth Century; Francis Daniel Pastorius; Germantownship; Pennsylvania; Philadelphia; Rhineland; Rotterdam

Making Maps without Ships, with Ships

To the mid fifteenth century putting a ship on a map was a radical act. By the mid sixteenth century it was still a conscious act but no longer unusual. Starting as far back as about 1300 map makers generated an expanding range of pictorial signals which became more stylized, artistically economical and, therefore, more conventional and standard.1 Over time they developed a complex and ingenious vocabulary of signs and symbols. After 1375 the vocabulary included ships. While ships might share many of the same trends toward standardization of representation of other map features they stand out from all those objects because of their numbers, their variety, their accurate depiction, their ubiquity and their rapid disappearance in the eighteenth century. The many examples of the efforts of cartographers stretching from the Middle Ages down through the sixteenth century show an increasingly obvious tendency toward more consistent signs and symbols, ones that might be generally recognized by users. By the late sixteenth century map makers had generated some homogeneity in lettering styles but also in symbols for things at sea like wave patterns or sea monsters or fish and — ships.2 In the Renaissance European cartographers created the ideas about maps, what they should look like and what they should do, that have dominated practice ever since. Even the definition and use of the word geography went through a process of clarification in the sixteenth century.

Mapping before the Renaissance

The transformation to covering waterways with ships came at a time of a revolution in mapping. Between the late fourteenth and the mid sixteenth century medieval philosophical traditions merged with newly discovered, or rediscovered, classical knowledge and with empirically derived practices to create a confusing and varied array of types of maps. The sharp divergence from past practice in decoration and the appearance of ships was part of a more general development in cartography. Maps changed at the same time as European sailors were making voyages across the world’s oceans to places previously unknown over distances Europeans had never covered at sea before. The short period from 1492 to 1522, a time of a concentrated series of geographic discoveries, fall in the middle of a golden age of Western cartography when maps were subject to highly volatile and rapidly changing perspectives and when they took on new functions and purposes. Modern cartography was born in the early sixteenth century when progress in mathematics and the diffusion of new techniques of engraving combined with the great discoveries to create very different ways of representing the world.1 The simultaneous changes in knowledge and in symbolizing knowledge leave the compelling impression that the two were more than just coincidental. The mid sixteenth century too marks something of a watershed in the history of maps. In the course of the 1500s maps came into common use as governments especially but also individuals began to see their value.

Ships, Geography, and Humanism

The mid sixteenth century marked a watershed in the character of maps and their place in the thinking and practices of Europeans. So too did the second half of the thirteenth when the Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon described the use of a grid of latitude and longitude, when Raymond Lull in the Balearics called for the greater use of maps, and when the first surviving portolan chart was made.1 In the period between about 1250 and about 1550 European cartography changed beyond all recognition. While the later date is not definitive and should be understood somewhat loosely, still in the middle of the sixteenth century the pattern was set in the production of maps and in the forms and types of decoration for those maps, including having ships on the oceans. In those years up to 1550 the bringing together of scholarly work on geography and the practical experience of navigators combined with information generated by voyages of discovery to create new kinds of cartography and to change what had been charts for sailors into world maps with claims to universality. While, ‘The sixteenth-century world map became known as a cosmographia, and the oval world projection became a pervasive cosmographical icon for modernity, universality, and the integration of heaven and earth.’2 that transformation in the scope, the use, and the assessment of the value of maps applied not just to charts or world maps but to all maps no matter their topic or coverage.