Balancing the Baltic trade: colonial commodities in the trade on the Baltic, 1773–1856

Abstract

This article attempts to look at the connection between the Atlantic and the Baltic economies during the transition from early modern to the modern era. Previous research has seriously underestimated the importance of colonial commodities traded on the Baltic during this period. Colonial commodities, particularly from the American plantation complex, became ever more important for the Western European balance of payments on the Baltic. Already by the late eighteenth century, these commodities were on aggregate worth approximately as much as the exports of strategic commodities such as grains or iron from the Baltic at the same time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the value of colonial commodities imported to the region far surpassed the value of such key exports from the Baltic. The colonial commodities thus constituted an important part of the balance of payments for the trade on the Baltic.

Keywords:

• economic history
• price history
• balance of payments
• sugar
• coffee
• cotton
• iron
• grains
• Baltic
• mercantilism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Staffan Granér for the original idea for, and constructive comments on, this paper. He would also like to thank Göran Rydén, Leos Müller, Carl-Johan Gadd, Hans Christian Johansen and Irene Elmerot for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

2. Kristof Glamann, ‘European Trade 1500–1750’, in The Fontana Economic History of Europe. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Carlo Cipolla (Fontana, 1974), 427–526; Kristof Glamann, ‘The Changing Pattern of Trade’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 5: The Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe, ed. E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 185–289; see also many essays in W.G. Heeres et al. (eds), From Dunkirk to Danzig. Shipping and Trade in the North Sea and the Baltic, 1350–1850 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1988) or J.Ph.S. Lemmink and J.S.A.M. van Koningsbrugge (eds), Baltic Affairs. Relations between the Netherlands and North-Eastern Europe 1500–1800. Nijmegen: Institute for Northern and Eastern European Studies, 1990).

3. Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty. Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millenium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2007).

4. See, for example, Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Hans Christian Johansen, Shipping and Trade between the Baltic Area and Western Europe 1784–1795 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983), ch 4; Staffan Högberg, Utrikeshandel och sjöfart på 1700-talet. Stapelvaror i svensk export och import 1738–1808 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1969); Eli Heckscher, ‘Europas kopparmarknad och den svenska kopparen’ i Historieuppfattning: materialistisk och annan (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1944); J.A. Faber, ‘The Decline of the Baltic Grain Trade in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in From Dunkirk to Danzig. Shipping and Trade in the North Sea and the Baltic, 1350–1850, ed. W.G. Heeres et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1988), 31–51; Milja van Tielhof, The ‘Mother of all Trades’. The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, Baltic Iin the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

5. See, for example, Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism. The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), ch. 6.

6. Dutch Primacy, 49

7. Dutch Enterprise in the World Bullion Trade 1550–1800 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och vitterhets-samhället, 1983); Artur Attman, ‘Precious Metals and the Balance of Payments in International Trade 1500–1800’, in The Emergence of a World Economy 1500–1914. Part I: 1500–1850, ed. Wolfram Fischer, Marvin McInnis and Jürgen Schneider (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986),113–121; Artur Attman, American Bullion in the European World Trade 1600–1800 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och vitterhets-samhället, 1986). See also Jacob Price, (1961): ‘Multilateralism and/or Bilateralism: The Settlement of British Trade Balances with ‘the North’, c. 1700’, Economic History Review 14, no. 2 (1961): 254–74.

8. Sven-Erik Åström, ‘From Cloth to Iron. The Anglo-Baltic Trade in the Late Seventeenth Century. Part I’, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum XXXIII, no. 1 (1963): 1–260; Sven-Erik Åström, (1965): ‘From Cloth to Iron. The Anglo-Baltic Trade in the Late Seventeenth Century. Part II’. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum XXXVII, no. 3 (1965): 1–86; Henryk Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972); J.K. Fedorowicz, England's Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century. A Study in Anglo-Polish Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Aksel Christensen, Dutch Trade to the Baltic about 1600. Studies in the Sound Toll Register and Dutch Shipping Records (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1941); Israel, Dutch Primacy.

9. Eli Heckscher, Sveriges ekonomiska historia från Gustav Vasa. D.1. Före frihetstiden, Bok 2, Hushållningen under internationell påverkan 1600–1720 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1936), vol. I: 2, 550–60; Eli Heckscher, Sveriges ekonomiska historia från Gustav Vasa. Vol 2:2 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1949), ch. 10; John Rice, ‘Patterns of Swedish Foreign Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Geografiska annaler 47 (1965), 86–99; Högberg, Utrikeshandel och sjöfart på 1700-talet; J. Thomas Lindblad, Sweden's Trade with the Dutch Republic 1738–1795 (Assen: van Gorcum, 1982); Åke Sandström, Mellan Torneå och Amsterdam: En undersökning av Stockholms roll som förmedlare av varor i regional- och utrikeshandel 1600–1650 (Stockholm: Kommittén för Stockholmsforskning, 1990); Christer Ahlberger and Magnus Mörner (1993): 'Betydelsen av några latinamerikanska produkter för Sverige fore 1810’, Historisk tidskrift 113 (1993): 80–104; Stefan Carlén, Staten som marknadens salt: en studie i institutionsbildning, kollektivt handlande och tidig välfärdspolitik på en strategisk varumarknad i övergången mellan merkantilism och liberalism 1720–1862 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1997); Leos Müller, ‘Swedish East India Trade and International Markets: Re-exports of Teas, 1731–1813’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 51, no. 3 (2003): 28–44; Lili-Anne Aldman, En merkantilistisk början: Stockholms textila import 1720–1738 (Uppsala: Acta universitatis upsaliensis, 2008).

10. Kalevi Ahonen, From Sugar Triangle to Cotton Triangle. Trade and Shipping between America and Baltic Russia, 1783–1860 (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2005).

11. W.S. Unger, ‘Trade through the Sound in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review 12, no. 2 (1959): 206–21.

12. Hans Christian Johansen, ‘How to Pay for Baltic Products?’, in The Emergence of a World Economy 1500–1914. Part I: 1500–1850, ed. Wolfram Fischer, Marvin McInnis and Jürgen Schneider (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986), 123–142;

13. David Ormrod, ‘Britain's Role in the Shift from the North Sea–Baltic World to the Atlantic, 1650–1800’, paper presented at the Uppsala pre-session for the Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009. This seems to be a development of the argument put forward in David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires. England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 3. The same argument has also been put forward in passing Jacob Price, ‘What did Merchants do? Reflections in British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History 49, no. 2 (1989): 267–84.

14. Patrick O'Brien, ‘Colonies in a Globalizing Economy, 1815–1948’, in Globalization and Global History, ed. Barry Gills and William Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006), 263.

15. Klas Rönnbäck, ‘The Sound Toll Chamber Commodity Records – Estimating the Reliability of a Potential Source for International Trade History’, International Journal of Maritime History (forthcoming).

16. Klas Rönnbäck, ‘Integration of Global Commodity Markets in the Early-Modern Era’, European Review of Economic History 13 (2009): 195–120.

17. Johansen, ‘How to Pay for Baltic Products?’, 137–8.

18. Attman, Dutch Enterprise in the World Bullion Trade 1550–1800, 91.

19. This is pretty similar to the picture shown by Peter Kriedte for the period at the end of the sixteenth century, when European imports of spices from Asia or precious metals from the Americas were worth significantly much more than all the European imports of cereals from the Baltic, even though the quantity of the former was only a small fraction of the latter, see Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists. Europe and the World Economy 1500–1800 (Leamington Spa: Berg publishers, 1980), 41.

20. Kurt Samuelsson, De stora köpmanshusen i Stockholm 1730–1815 (Stockholm: Ekonomisk-historiska institutet, 1951), ch. III.1. See also Leos Müller, The Merchant Houses of Stockholm, c. 1640–1800. A Comparative Study of Early-Modern Entrepreneurial Behaviour (Uppsala: Studia historia upsaliensis, 1998), ch. 4; Klas Nyberg (ed.), Kopparkungen. Handelshuset Björkman i Stockholm 1782–1824 (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2006), 55–8.

21. Aage Rasch, Niels Ryberg 1725–1804. Fra bondedreng til handelsfyrste (Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus, 1964), ch. 7-12.

22. Danish National Archive Sound Toll Chamber Commodity Records from the North- and Baltic Sea, 1773–1856, data not shown.

23. Klas Rönnbäck, ‘Flexibility and Protectionism – Swedish Trade in Sugar during the Early Modern Era’, in Varans vägar och världar. Handel och konsumtion i Skandinavien ca 1600–1900, ed. Christer Ahlberger and Pia Lundqvist (Göteborg: Historiska institutionen, Göteborgs Universitet, 2007).

24. Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), tables 57–64.

25. Price, ‘What did Merchants do?’.

26. Louis Sicking, ‘A Wider Spread of Risk: A Key to Understanding Holland's Domination of Eastward and Westward Seafaring from the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Dynamics of Economic Culture in the North Sea and Baltic Region in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. Hanno Brand and Leos Müller (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2007), 128.

27. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 10.

28. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 50. See also Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires, ch. 3, where he generally seems to agree with Israel.

29. See, for example, Chung Tan, China and the Brave New World. A Study of the Origins of the Opium War (1840–42) (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), ch. 4.

30. Danish National Archive Sound Toll Chamber Commodity Records from the North- and Baltic Sea, 1773–1856.

31. Rönnbäck, ‘The Sound Toll Chamber Commodity Records’.

32. Swedish National Archive Chamber of Commerce annual reports on foreign trade 1773–1856.

33. N.W. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis (Leiden: Brill, 1943); Arthur van Riel, Prices of Consumer and Producer Goods, 1800–1913. IISG, http://iisg.nl.

34. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, table 57.

35. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, table 79.

36. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, table 121.

37. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, table 168.

38. Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, tables 1,2, 7, 8, 11 and 14.