Throughout the eighteenth century, Kameralwissenschaft was understood primarily as a body of writing and teaching related to the economic management of the territorial state. It sought to delineate the practices that would foster the well-being of the population, and hence the strength of the state. As I argue in Governing Economy, the project to establish Cameralism as a science in northern German universities shaped a body of writing that reflects not how the economy of town and country actually functioned, but that was instead more normative: it articulated a conception of good order in state and economy. What we learn from studying the textbooks produced in the course of the eighteenth century illuminates therefore these conceptions of ‘good order’, not whether economic administration and practice was in fact orderly.

Cameralist teaching was developed primarily in North German Protestant universities; as a discourse of Reform and Enlightenment it also found a place in universities of the Austrian territories of the later eighteenth century, as also in Russia and in Sweden. This northern connection to Russia and Sweden ran through the Baltic Sea, which was a major northern trading area both for its coastal states, and for those areas with major rivers flowing into it. This formed a distinct and extensive common Northern European economic space which not only fostered mutual trade, but which was already firmly linked into the Atlantic trading area through the significant presence of Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century, and British in the eighteenth. The British in particular were primarily seeking timber and timber products: pitch and tar, potash, and also the Swedish iron whose production was linked not only to deposits of iron ore, but to vast forests that could provide the charcoal needed to smelt it. Also of significance was flax for rope and cordage, and linen for sailcloth. The significant expansion of the British Navy in the course of the eighteenth century was predicated upon access to the Baltic trades, despite all efforts in the earlier part of the century to source timber and timber products from the American colonies.

During the eighteenth century, therefore, long-distance trading relations linked the Baltic to the Atlantic.