Amsterdam and the Baltic in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID3268496
AuthorsMaria Bogucka (corresponding author)
Year1973
Volume26
Issue3
Pages433
Publication date1973-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Economic History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2593544
OpenAlexW4249662845
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited1

T HE object of this article is to analyse the share, in the early seventeenth century, of certain Baltic ports in the great East-West trade which centred in Amsterdam and was so important in the world economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The principal sources for the study are I,784 freight contracts discovered whilst working on an inquiry into I 24 notarial books in the Gemeente Archief in Amsterdam.1 Because of the scarcity and fragmentary character of other data, these sources, although in some ways incomplete and onesided, constitute a basis for certain conclusions and comparisons. Freight contracts, valuable for such research into the history of commerce, have already been discussed in the works of A. E. Christensen and J. Schreiner2 and are of the greatest importance for the study of the Baltic trade. The existence in Amsterdam of over 2,000 notarial books with entries referring to the first half of the seventeenth century provides a rare mine of further valuable information on the subject. That they have not yet been sufficiently explored is due to lack of indexes as well as paleographic difficulties. Although the books studied by the present author came from those notarial offices whose main concern was the Baltic maritime trade3 a number of freight contracts could undoubtedly still be discovered in the wealth of material excluded from the inquiry. On the other hand, even the most thorough investigation of the 2,000 volumes would not furnish an exhaustive statistical picture of Amsterdam's sea-borne trade with the Baltic. Part of the notarial records has been lost; not all the agreements between ship's captains and merchants had to be certified in notarial offices; and when ships carried goods of the shipowners themselves there was no necessity to sign any such contracts. Moreover, some of the contracts may not have been realized; or may have been carried out with certain modifications. So we can never hope

Ancient history · Economic history · Geography · Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History

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