The reliability of the english port books

Abstract

Modem trade statistics start with the series of English customs ledgers from 1696 onwards. The French ledgers of imports and exports follow twenty years later, the Swedish series (including Finland) begins in 1738, and the Scottish one in the 1750s.1 For other European countries they are even more recent. This means that before 1700 we have to rely on the customs books of various individual ports, except in occasional cases where reliable (or unreliable) compilations for a particular year, a commodity or an area are preserved. Of the latter, a Scottish historian, T. C. Smout, has recently written: ‘Customs books are an invaluable source for the historian of trade. In them he may discover the commodities exported and imported, he may read the names of ships, skippers and merchants, he may learn where they were bound and whence they came, and from them he may perhaps judge which places within the realm had the greatest traffic with foreign parts. Given a sufficiently long and unbroken series of customs material, he may be tempted to cull statistics about these and other matters. This, however, is a dangerous practice, for the books of the seventeenth century were designed merely as a record of dues paid to the Crown, and were not meant, like modern Board of Trade returns, as a mirror of commercial trends or as a register of the volume and value of goods passing in and out of the country.’²

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Sven-Erik Aström

Sven-Erik Ashöm, born 1921, lecturer in Social History at the University of Helsinki 1954–60, since 1961 research professor of Social and Economic History, Head of the Institute of Economic and Social History (founded 1966). Professor Astrom is a specialist in the history of town planning. He has also published several studies in English concerning the Anglo-Baltic trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.