The title of this chapter seems to contain a contradiction in terms: one of them is associated with strength (cartel), the other with weakness (periphery); nonetheless, they are used in conjunction. The aim of this chapter is to resolve this contradiction, to explain its particularities, and by so doing to highlight certain structural features of the early modern Atlantic economy. To do so, I will first discuss the two terms – cartel and periphery – and then secondly present findings from a case study of the seemingly peripheral Atlantic World, before thirdly drawing some conclusions about the incorporation of ostensibly peripheral regions into Atlantic trade and into the Atlantic World in general.

The terms: (1) cartel

A cartel is commonly defined as a group of independent producers who strike an agreement, either in writing (a contractual cartel) or orally (a ‘gentleman’s agreement’), to increase their collective profits by means of price-fixing, limiting supply, or other restrictive measures. Cartels usually occur in oligopolies, where there is a small number of suppliers offering a homogenous product. The effects of cartels are commonly described as the following: cartels change the relations between supply and demand in the economy by providing the supply side with greater market power. Competition is curtailed as suppliers harmonize their production and investment policies, as well as their course of action against intruders or newcomers; prices are determined by the supply side, which means they are flexible upwards but are seldom or never cut; consumer choice is limited and the guiding principle of prices is suspended.

In the early modern economy, price-fixing was a well established practice, most famously (or infamously) used by privileged trading companies such as the Dutch and English East India companies. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was one of the first to deliver a fundamental critique of such merchants’ conspiracies against the public, in his major work The Wealth of Nations. Systematic theorizing about cartels and their economic effects emerged only towards the end of the nineteenth century. Contrary to Smith’s critique and to current notions, at that point in time members of the legal and economic professions rather advocated the regulating and rationalizing possibilities of cartels, highlighting their stabilizing effects.

While it may seem a peculiar place to start, the separation of the British Isles from the European mainland by water at the end of the last glacial period of the Ice Age, some 8,500 years ago, is perhaps the fundamental event which has governed relationships between the inhabitants of those islands and those of the European mainland ever since. The North Sea acted then, as now, as a natural barrier to direct and immediate contact, but one which with a little effort and some maritime technology could be quickly and easily traversed. Thus, varying amounts of contact were kept up and the inhabitants of the British Isles could opt into European affairs across this permeable barrier when they wished to, or remain relatively insular. The problem for the medieval historian is that the evidence of many of the points of contact across this natural barrier is typically sparse and brief, often poorly recorded and preserved, and of a form which rarely lends itself to thorough study. The student seeking to know something of this must be content with meagre fare, albeit usually fascinating, and more often than not leading to less than definitive conclusions.

One crucial distinction that must be made here is that of a distinction of distance, that is between England's close-range contacts with her immediate neighbours: Normandy, northern France, Flanders and northern Germany, but also under the Anglo-Danish kings Denmark and the coastline to its east, and its more distant contacts, such as Rome or the imperial court. England from its vantage point on the north-western edge of the landmass of Europe, mundanely interacted with its closest neighbours as well as sent its inhabitants on more special missions to those nearby countries. More distant contacts where traceable often involve individual travel and pilgrimage, as well as missions sent by secular or ecclesiastical elites. Such forms of distant contact involve far fewer individuals, but can provide the most startling revelations; and in the least contacts with cultural hubs such as Rome or the imperial court may indicate interaction with the core of the leadership of mainland Europe. It should be noted that some regions such as the northernmost parts of the Empire, such as Lotharingia and the Upper Rhine, seem to partly sit in both categories, as neighbours of England involved in local trade as well as points of conduit to imperial Germany and beyond.

This chapter reflects on the ways in which the two foreign kings who conquered England in the eleventh century – the Danish monarch, Cnut, and Norman duke, William – used native English saints’ cults as a means of bolstering their royal status among their new subjects. It suggests that the patronage of the Church in general, and the promotion of the cults of the saints in particular, provided a valuable mechanism for these kings to ally themselves with the concerns and religious values of the English people. That the two men proved generous patrons to the Church hardly needs stating and should cause us little surprise. As is well known, both founded new churches with generous endowments on the sites of the major military engagements that led to their acquisition of the English crown: Cnut founded a church at Ashingdon, where he had defeated Edmund Ironside on St Luke's day in 1016, and William established an abbey at Battle in Sussex. Many monasteries and cathedrals across England claimed Cnut and William among their benefactors, preserving records not only of landed estates that one or both kings had added to their endowments but also (especially in Cnut's case) evidence of the king's donation of precious books, vestments and liturgical objects. Both men depended closely on the support of leading churchmen as much as secular nobles to secure and maintain their grip on royal power (and both interfered directly in the appointment of new men to senior clerical posts). In practical terms it would seem that little had changed since the celebrated seventh-century bishop of York, Wilfrid, divided up his property on his deathbed, giving a portion of his money to the abbots of his own monasteries at Ripon and Hexham in order that they might ‘buy the favour of kings and nobles’. As foreign kings, ruling by force of arms and right of conquest rather than blood succession, both Cnut and William manifestly needed to deploy a range of strategies to build alliances across the realm, and giftgiving provided an obvious means of securing clerical allegiance to the crown. This chapter will suggest that although political expediency certainly constituted one factor underpinning at least some of the ecclesiastical patronage exercised by William and Cnut, other more complicated issues were involved as well.

RICHARD ABELS HAS an enviable knack of looking at medieval warfare from less frequently considered angles. While his work on Anglo-Saxon logistics and peace-making have helped to determine the shape of the study of the reign of Alfred the Great (and I owe Richard a debt of gratitude for these contributions), this chapter is offered in the spirit of Richard's valuable work on warrior cowardice, a topic which still remains too little considered in the study of warfare. This chapter is about the emasculation and humiliation of warriors often on the move – away from the enemy – whose identities are subverted by disguise or by error. Using a range of examples from early and central medieval narrative histories, from Bede in the eighth century to Orderic Vitalis in the twelfth, the following discussion addresses the position and perception of warriors in medieval society across a period of nearly half a millennium in which the expectations of behavior and conduct of the warrior changed but the expectations of masculine military identity remained somewhat constant.

Mistaken identity itself is a staple of medieval literature and folk literature more generally, of course. In the European Middle Ages, authors and storytellers frequently reached for the ways in which identity – normally presented as something fixed and immutable – might be subverted for the purposes of narrative. While the motif of disguised and mistaken identity is familiar in medieval literary sources, I wish to focus here less on the notion of the warrior in disguise for a particular ruse but rather on subversion of the identity of warriors who are defeated and/or on the run. This approach allows exploration of the subversion of masculine expectations of warrior behavior. By way of an example relevant to Abels’ Alfredian interests, two motifs of mistaken identity which link the Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest periods might usefully be drawn upon to establish the premise of the discussion (albeit as the only point when Alfred the Great is discussed in this chapter): the flavor of the following discussion owes less to William of Malmesbury's vignette of King Alfred cunningly disguised as a minstrel in the enemy camp on the eve of battle – the classic disguise narrative of the twelfth century as it encompasses Alfred's alleged gathering of intelligence – than to the Annals of St Neot's earlier portrait of Alfred mistaken as a poor peasant.

THIS CHAPTER DISCUSSES architectural themes and variations by identifying the form and content of East Anglian church porches built between c.1240 and c.1540. Key adjustments made to the design and conception of porches through to c.1540 were changes of greater significance than the adoption of current style. Observable shifts in the architectural form of church porches imply often subtle, sometimes more blatant, reappraisals of what porches could do and how they did it. As the previous chapter has demonstrated these buildings were intimately associated with the medieval life-course, neither neutral nor passive. This chapter continues our exploration of relationships between people and architectural spaces, attending to the formal details of buildings as a category of object and investigating how meaning was embedded in their design. To counteract any bias or predilection for the special or remarkable, the discussion is limited to East Anglia and the wealth of extant porches great and small built during the medieval period. The survey benefits from capturing the full scope of church porches as realised in this wealthy and populous region. Bounded to north and east by the North Sea, to the west by Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely (the kingdom of Mercia) and to the south by Essex (kingdom of the East Saxons), East Anglia is a geographical area of approximately 3650 square miles (9454 sq km) defined as much by its history as its physiography. Current political and governmental definitions include Cambridgeshire but for the purposes of this book East Anglia is understood to comprise the modern-day counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, thus approximating the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles and the medieval ecclesiastical diocese of Norwich.

Church Porches in East Anglia, c.1240–c.1400

The earliest extant lateral porches in East Anglia are those at West Walton, built c.1240, and Great Massingham, built c.1280. Although it has been suggested that the two heavy cruck timbers which form the porch façade at Somersham, in Suffolk, date from the late thirteenth century, on comparison with Frating and Aldham (both in Essex) Somersham is more plausibly one of many fourteenth-century timber porches in Suffolk. The paucity of thirteenth-century porches in East Anglia contrasts with their relative prevalence in counties to the north and west, especially Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.

One of the treasures of the Musee de la Renaissance at Ecouen is a set of tapestries depicting the Story of King David. Woven in Brussels during the 1520s, this is among the most remarkable surviving sets from the period and almost certainly belonged to Henry VIII. The subject was important to Henry. David, the anointed of God, was the biblical figure with whom he most closely identified and in one of the illuminations in his 1540 psalter Henry is depicted playing the harp, surely a reference to David.

As with most medieval and Renaissance depictions of biblical subjects, the events in the tapestries are made more real by being set in the present. They are in effect a panorama of contemporary court life. The architecture is a fusion of late gothic and Renaissance styles, as it would have been at the time; the costumes are courtly and contemporary; and the armour is in the latest fashions. Among the many things about them that would have been familiar to a courtier of the time was the ubiquitous presence of gold and silver and the tapestries show goldsmiths’ work in almost every scene: in buffets and dining wares, in shrines and altar plate, in gold chains.

Even though he never met the king, Niccolo Machiavelli's description of the young Henry VIII as ‘rich, fierce and greedy for glory’ exactly summed up the man and his ambitions. Unlike his father, who avoided war whenever possible, the young Henry VIII wanted to make his mark on the world. This chapter does not discuss his foreign aspirations in any detail. Instead, it focuses on the means by which he pursued them. These were essentially threefold: through loans, through warfare and through dynastic marriages. In each of these plate and jewels played a conspicuous role. As another essential element of princely interaction, we will also look at diplomacy. This covered a broad spectrum, from the spectacular embassies dispatched for some special purpose, to the altogether lower-key system of resident ambassadors that was in its infancy in the sixteenth century. We have already looked at the extravagant receptions laid on for embassies; here we focus on the munificent gifts of plate that were integral to them and the much lower level of gifts that a resident ambassador might expect at the end of his term.

Banker to princes

Henry VIII's inherited liquidity immediately made him a force to be reckoned with, for Henry had huge cash reserves, which continental rulers often did not, especially when it was most needed. Cash could buy military force and Nicola di Favri, a member of the Venetian diplomatic delegation, recognised this when he wrote in 1513 that ‘for gold, silver and soldiers not another king in Christendom can be found to compare with him’. But money could be used to influence events in other ways too; it could be used to extend loans to his more cash-strapped fellow princes. This had been a major plank of Henry VII's policy and he lent large sums to Philip the Fair of Burgundy and Louis XII of France. As we have seen, he also passed money to impecunious rulers by buying jewels and other assets from them at advantageous rates.

When analyzing the type of commodities that found their way from the peripheries into the Atlantic economy during the early modern period and how they did so, it is important to bear in mind that not only goods but also human beings were bought and sold. Whereas the African slave trade is obviously an essential and well explored subject in this respect, the economic structures underlying the trade in European – in this case, German – migrants are not exactly an entirely new research field. However, they remain a lesser-known part of the story that should be borne in mind when answering the question of just how both goods and people from Central European regions were integrated into the transatlantic trading system.

Involving an estimated 100,000 people, German emigration to North America during the eighteenth century was not the mass phenomenon it became during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, in numbers it lagged behind emigration to Prussia and more or less equaled the number of German settlers recruited by Austria during the same period, although it is difficult to make exact calculations. It is, however, remarkable that despite the costs, the difficulties and perils involved in crossing the Atlantic, so many migrants preferred this route over the much shorter and safer journey to, for example, Prussian, Austrian or Russian territories, whose monarchs issued invitations to potential settlers throughout the century.

While the prospect of religious tolerance and ownership of a piece of land were certainly powerful incentives for Germans to emigrate, these goals could also have been achieved in regions that were much closer to home. This chapter will argue that the reasons behind the irregular but increasing flow of German emigrants to North America until the eve of the Seven Years’ War are in large part to be found in the economic interests and business structures which began to form with William Penn’s efforts to attract settlers to Pennsylvania, and which developed further during the first waves of emigration in 1709 and later during the 1720s and 1750s. The following pages aim to examine the various stages of the migrants’ journeys, insofar as they are related to these economic implications.

Early modern Central Europe was a major market for colonial goods, particularly plantation crops such as sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco and dyestuffs, imported from France, Britain, Portugal and Spain. Until the disintegration of the anciens régimes, mercantilist restrictions issued by the Western European Atlantic empires impeded direct trade between their colonies and Central European ports. Consequently, colonial goods were first imported into Western European ports such as Bordeaux, Nantes, London, Lisbon, Seville and Cádiz, and reshipped to ports like Amsterdam and Hamburg. These two cities were important hubs for the processing of colonial goods and for transportation to the Central European hinterlands.

This chapter illuminates the long-term development of Hamburg’s sugar market and the market portfolio of a sample of major sugar importers in Hamburg in the course of the eighteenth century. The primary sources for the following quantitative data analysis are the Admiralitäts- und Convoygeld-Einnahmebücher (the Admiralty and Convoy Duty records), hereafter referred to as ACEB. Sugar was one of the – if not the – major colonial commodity traded throughout the eighteenth century. It was cultivated on plantations in several regions within the Americas, and is well suited as a case study to explore Western European colonial trade and Central European markets in a long-term perspective. Of all taxable products imported into Hamburg and listed in the ACEB database, sugar made up a total value of 247 million Mark Banco (36.75 per cent), followed by coffee (131 million Mark Banco, 19.6 per cent) and woollens (30.2 million Mark Banco, 4.5 per cent). Who were the merchants that imported sugar into Hamburg? How many merchants dealt with sugar and what were their market shares? What were their business strategies and how did they adapt to changing market conditions in times of warfare and during the Atlantic Revolutions?

To answer these questions, the first part of the chapter analyzes Hamburg’s sugar market by quantities, types and origins, between 1733 and 1798. The second part deals with the sugar importers in Hamburg. The figures used in this chapter are taken directly from the ACEB database and not from the figures published by Jürgen Schneider, Otto-Ernst Krawehl and Markus A. Denzel.

THE TWENTIETH DAY of August 2019 marked the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Brémule, when an army under the command of King Henry I of England defeated an army under the command of King Louis VI of France, one of the relatively rare high medieval battles where reigning kings fought each other directly. The fortunate coincidence (for me) of this anniversary with the opportunity to contribute to a Festschrift for my friend and longtime colleague in medieval military history, Richard Abels, gives me the chance to reexamine the battle for the first time since I wrote a short section about it in my book Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, which was published in 1994, though that section (and much of the rest of the book) was actually written in 1982, the delay being a result of the vagaries of academic hiring in the early 1980s, an environment Richard, myself, and many others in this volume, all endured. During that almost forty-year gap since I last thought closely about Brémule, the profession of history has changed pretty significantly, especially in terms of the rise of various forms of cultural history embodied in what has come to be known as The Cultural Turn (though “Cultural Turns” is probably the more accurate characterization of the proliferation of self-conscious “turns” the profession has witnessed since the mid-1990s). Richard and I have talked extensively and collaborated on applying aspects of these turns to medieval military history, especially in putting the analysis of culture more centrally into the interpretation of military activity in the Middle Ages.

Thus, happy coincidence leads me to reconsider Brémule in some particular ways. This chapter focuses not so much on what the battle can tell us about twelfth-century military practice, as it turns out that the conclusions we can draw about Brémule from the traditional “what happened?” perspective of political, military, and even social history, have not changed much in forty years. Rather, it reexamines the battle in terms of its rhetorical presentation in the primary sources that describe it, using that reexamination for a deeper look at the newer cultural history question, “What did it mean?”

The changes that took place in England in the two decades from 1534 were arguably more profound and far-reaching than in any other comparable period in English history. During that time England's ancient ties with Rome were severed, its ways of worship fundamentally changed, and a patchwork of hundreds of religious communities that extended across the country erased. The last of these – the dissolution of the monasteries – was justified by the authorities as a purge of abuse and hypocrisy, but morphed into a smoke screen for the greatest asset grab of the reign.

This chapter is not directly concerned with the break with Rome, nor with the events that gave rise to it, or the royal take-over of the Church that followed it. But the events on which it is focused – the confiscation of the vast collective wealth of the monasteries – cannot be entirely disentangled from them. Henry's failure to secure papal consent to the annulment of his marriage led directly to the break and to his own self-elevation as ‘Supreme Head of the Church in England’. This, together with his marriage to Anne Boleyn, isolated him on the international stage and raised the threat of invasion by Katherine of Aragon's nephew, Charles V. Such a threat called for a massive and costly strengthening of coastal defences; separately, it was also a contributing factor to the Pilgrimage of Grace. All these things created an urgent need for money, part of which influenced the course of the dissolution itself.

As this chapter opens, Henry was still a loyal son of the Church, basking in his newly awarded title of Fidei defensor. In 1524 the recently elected Clement VII sent him another golden rose. It was received with great pomp and ceremony and when, two years later, St Peter's basilica in Rome was desecrated by part of the imperial forces Henry immediately responded by sending Clement 2,500 ducats in aid. The first cracks in the relationship appeared in 1529 with Cardinal Campeggio's ill-starred mission to London to settle the divorce.