North Eurasian Trade in World History, 1660–1860

The Economic and Political Importance of the Baltic Sea

Werner Scheltjens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This book offers the first long-term analysis of the protracted struggle between Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden for economic power and political influence in the northern part of the Eurasian continent between 1660 and 1860. This book shows how their commercial, diplomatic, and military entanglements determined the course of Baltic trade from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, provoking, among other things, the decline of the Dutch Republic and the partitions of Poland-Lithuania.

The author conceptualizes the Baltic Sea as one of North Eurasia's western border basins, alongside the White, Black, and Caspian Seas, and employs novel statistical series of Baltic trade as a proxy for the long-term development of North Eurasian trade in world history. Based on extensive quantitative evidence and sources for the history of international relations, this book outlines how North Eurasian trade became an object of growing tensions between various larger and smaller powers with a stake in North Eurasia's riches. The book addresses the long-term impact of mercantilist policies, territorial greed, and military conflicts in North Eurasia's border basins, and accentuates the significance of developments in the preindustrial transport and commercial infrastructure of the North Eurasian landmass. Employing the concept of North Eurasia and its different borderlands and border basins, this book overcomes previous limitations in the historiography of globalization and sheds light on a large, continental landmass, which researchers tend to leave aside for the benefit of a predominant maritime perspective in historical studies of globalization.

North Eurasian Trade in World History, 1660 – 1860 will be invaluable reading for students and scholars interested in world history, East European history, and the history of international relations and trade.

1 An exploratory analysis of trade through the Danish Sound, 1670–1856

Introduction

Based on a conversion into tonnes of one thousand metric units of the commodities carried through the Danish Sound and meticulously inscribed in the toll registers of the Øresund between 1670 and 1856, it was found that in 1670 the estimated total tonnage of Baltic commercial exchange (i.e. imports and exports) amounted to 426,978 tonnes, whereas in 1856 it had risen to 2,802,175 tonnes (see Figure 1.1).¹ In other words, between 29 May 1669, when the much-reduced and largely irrelevant Hansetag gathered for the very last time in Lübeck,² and 14 March 1857, when the leading advocates of free trade – the United Kingdom and the United States – finally achieved the abolition of the Danish Sound dues in the Copenhagen Convention,³ the estimated tonnage of commercial exchange with the Baltic underwent a fivefold increase. During this period of almost two centuries, different commodities started to dominate imports and exports, while new centres of gravity emerged and replaced formerly dominant gateways. Like the Hansetag in 1669, the abolition of the Danish Sound dues in 1857 had a significant symbolic meaning. It confirmed, once again, the commercial dominance of the British Empire, and showed that the ‘young’ United States had established themselves on the international arena, even in supposedly peripheral ‘Baltic affairs’. At the same time, the eradication of the Sound dues in 1857 also made clear that ‘Baltic affairs’ were anything but peripheral: whereas in 1669 a small, regional gathering of cities concluded that their method of doing business had become outdated, the abolition of the Sound dues in 1857 had been preceded by years of negotiations between the leading maritime and political powers of the world. Alongside the United Kingdom and the United States, Russia, Hamburg, and Lübeck contributed to the one-time fee, which was paid to Denmark in compensation of the Sound dues.⁴

Figure 1.1 Estimated total tonnage of imports and exports through the Danish Sound, 1670–1856. Includes estimates of Swedish tax-free shipping between 1670 and 1720.

Source: Tetradas [VSWG-JDA], 1_Turnover: Estimated total turnover.

This chapter presents a concise overview of the long-term development of trade through the Danish Sound, and it formulates a set of research questions based on the exploratory analysis of flows and commodities passing through the Danish Sound and registered at Elsinore (Dk. Helsingør) between 1670 and 1856. The flows are described based on annual series of total tonnage estimates of imports and exports through the Danish Sound. The survey of commodities shipped through the Sound relies on a broad categorization into foodstuffs, raw materials, and manufactured goods. Since the latter typically had a higher value-to-weight ratio than foodstuffs or raw materials, the use of tonnage estimates might seem to be misleading. At the same time, value-based analyses of the development of international trade tend to underestimate (or even ignore) the economic significance of low-value bulk commodities, such as salt, coal, grain, naval stores, and perhaps even wine. Though their exchange value was low, especially compared to manufactured goods, their intrinsic value (i.e. economic significance) was potentially high and as D.A. Iredale had noticed, “(…) salt, like coal, had an economic importance which value of exports belied.”⁵ Similar concerns are expressed with regard to the contribution of grain and naval stores to the British Industrial Revolution.⁶ The value of these commodities in export trade statistics was usually low, especially when expressed in terms of a value-to-bulk ratio, but the high volumes shipped had an economic significance that is difficult to express in monetary terms. Since trade through the Danish Sound was defined primarily by bulk goods, volumes rather than values were taken as the starting point for analysing long-term changes in the economic significance of commercial exchange with the Baltic.⁷ However, tonnage estimates typically cannot provide any information about the value of the registered commodity flows. Hence, whereas the volume of commodity flows (mostly) remains unchanged during its movement in space and time, this cannot be the case for the value of these flows.

The tonnage estimates used throughout this study have an important advantage over estimates of monetary value. Tonnage estimates provide an indication of the volume of commodity flows; while monetary address the value of such flows. Both are subject to the same reasonable doubt, inaccuracies and restrictions towards their interpretation. However, whereas monetary estimates and the trade statistics based upon them provide information about the value of trade at a certain node in a network (in which the node may be a single port, region or nation), typically, they contain much less information (or none at all) about the connections between different nodes. The tonnage estimates based on STRO, however, provide precisely this kind of information. Moreover, thanks to the structure of the original data and the bottom-up methodology of conversion, information about the connections between different nodes is preserved at all times. Using tonnage estimates, commodity flows and their geography can be analysed both at the level of single cargo items, ships, ports, or transport routes and at higher levels of aggregation, such as port clusters, regions, nation-states, or even the Baltic Sea as a whole.

The most significant foodstuffs exported through the Danish Sound comprised different types of grain: rye, wheat, barley, and oats.⁸ During the entire period covered in this book, they account on average for more than 92% of the estimated total tonnage of foodstuffs exported through the Danish Sound. Different types of timber, tar, pitch, iron, tallow, hemp, flax, and linseed largely determined the volume of raw materials exports.⁹ These commodities (except tallow and linseed) are commonly referred to as naval stores, indicating their significance for (naval) shipbuilding in the Age of Sail. The exportation of potash was significant as well, but because of its resemblance to other raw materials, it is not treated separately in this study. During the entire period, the estimated tonnage of these raw materials accounted for 86% on average of all raw materials exports through the Sound. The tonnage of manufactures exported through the Danish Sound was small compared to that of foodstuffs and raw materials. The most significant manufactured goods exported from the Baltic were sailcloth and raven duck.¹⁰

Whereas the vast historiography of Baltic trade tends to rely on selective observations and case-studies (or the ‘sum’ thereof) to describe long-term changes in trade through the Danish Sound, the goal of this chapter is to describe the whole, i.e. all commodities and all directions, as observed and registered in the Danish Sound between 1670 and 1856. The bulk of the historiography of Baltic trade deals with bilateral trade relations, the study of ports, the role of the Baltic in the commercial history of a certain region or political entity (often during limited periods of time), or trade in specific commodities. One will look in vain for a general, long-term history of Baltic commercial exchange, which places the water basin in a Braudellian framework encompassing geographical expansion, international politics, infrastructural development, and conflicting commercial interests. Previous general histories of the Baltic have dealt with trade through the Danish Sound m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• About the author
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• 1 An exploratory analysis of trade through the Danish Sound, 1670–1856
• 2 The Baltic as arena of a quest for North Eurasian trade
• 3 The emergence of the Baltic as a privileged outlet for North Eurasian trade, 1670–1721
• 4 The consolidation of the Baltic’s special role in North Eurasian trade, 1703–1766
• 5 The culmination of conflicting commercial and political interests in North Eurasian trade, 1764–1814
• 6 The reconfiguration of North Eurasian trade in the first half of the nineteenth century
• 7 Conclusions
• A note on statistics
• Index