Early Dutch trade

Understanding the dynamic process by which the Northern Netherlands came to dominate the shipping, commerce, and, later, the finance of the European economy has long eluded the historian. The preference shown by economic historians in the last two decades, to shift attention from the often dramatic story of Dutch foreign trade to such prosaic dimensions of economic life as agriculture, energy supplies, and demography, has been motivated in part by the perception that the surprising emergence of Dutch trade can only be understood when placed in a broader and deeper context – broader in its internationalism, deeper in its domestic wellsprings.

In the absence of analysis, descriptions and celebrations of Dutch trade abound. And, indeed, there is much to admire and cause wonder. The first quantitative data at our disposal, dating from the very beginning of the sixteenth century, reveal the trade of Holland and Zeeland – the provinces in which almost the entire story of Dutch maritime trade is played out – as but a modest foreshadowing of what it would later become and yet at the same time as full-grown. In the early sixteenth century, no Dutch port city was of a size to be mentioned in the same breath with the long-established trade centers of Europe, yet fully half of Holland's population lived in cities.

The geographical range of Dutch merchants, and the variety of products in which they traded, were both sharply limited, and yet the first extant Danish Sound Toll Registers of 1497 and 1503 reveal Dutch shipping to be dominant in the Baltic trade.