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Die Hanse
Unusual book
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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October 5, 2020The Hanseatic league (Hanse) was a grouping of North Sea and Baltic merchant communities operating under a common legal system and that acted, sometimes, in concert to pursue collective legal and trading rights in various jurisdictions.
From a starting point of trading in salt and herring they dominated trade and commercial life around the Baltic and were a powerful presence in North sea ports, running parts of Norwegian and Swedish commerce in ways that appear colonial, during the middle ages.
This brief book like this, in a series similar to the Very Short Introductions published by OUP, focuses on a limited number of questions: how did the Hanse come to be, how did it function and finally did it eventually decline or change. In a typical way for medieval institutions these turn out to be questions that are difficult to resolve, it may be that the Hanse only ended in the nineteenth century when the Steelyard in London (1853) and their offices in Antwerp (1862) were sold but equally you could fairly argue that it was effectively over as an organisation by the end of the sixteenth century.
Reading this I am, of course, looking for a northern equivalent to Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, something that can give me insight in to the Baltic and North Sea regions as a dynamic system. Obviously that wasn't the intention of the author who had his own agenda and, significantly, the source material for northern Europe is far less rich than for the Mediterranean world to the point that its speculative quite when and how or why the Hanse emerged.
Commerce in the north was different to the south. I'm inclined to suspect that, to use Michael Porter's term, there was no competitive advantage in adopting double entry book-keeping (first seen in Lubeck only in 1549) or in forming companies that lasted for longer than one generation. If credit was not generally available in the north perhaps, while restricting trade, this was symptomatic of an economic system that didn't demand it.
What we can see is that families that become powerful in the later middle ages can be traced back to twelfth century ancestors who were 'old-free', or linked to ministrales. These families were intermarrying in the late middle ages and not only within the same towns. Presumably the family gave, at least to a sufficient extent to keep business going, the functional benefits that companies and credit could provide in the south (the family that trades together - stays together?). Equally volumes of trade appear to have been far lower in the north - there wasn't the economic demand perhaps to require more developed trading tools like the structure of companies or credit.
A picture emerges of towns in the early period not as centres of population, but rather as specialised legal zones that facilitated the clustering of business activity in certain areas. The success of the Hanse was about being able to gain and maintain legal rights to trade. Something that as Hammel-Kiesow points out led to divergent views in the historiography between German and non-German historians. Since law in the semi-colonial world of the Baltic served not only as a system of dispute resolution but also of creating categories of people who were allowed to operate in particular ways, in certain zones.
The Hanse arose it seems if not in an power vacuum then in a region of contested and limited political authority, but it did not itself develop into a political union, despite which it was able to go to war against Denmark and to blockade Flanders (not necessarily very effectively which meant that such conflicts dragged on for years). Even as a trading body there was conflict between local offices and the leading citizens of the Hanse cities over how to develop trade in London, or Bergen, or where-ever else in the beer drinking, herring eating world.
From a starting point of trading in salt and herring they dominated trade and commercial life around the Baltic and were a powerful presence in North sea ports, running parts of Norwegian and Swedish commerce in ways that appear colonial, during the middle ages.
This brief book like this, in a series similar to the Very Short Introductions published by OUP, focuses on a limited number of questions: how did the Hanse come to be, how did it function and finally did it eventually decline or change. In a typical way for medieval institutions these turn out to be questions that are difficult to resolve, it may be that the Hanse only ended in the nineteenth century when the Steelyard in London (1853) and their offices in Antwerp (1862) were sold but equally you could fairly argue that it was effectively over as an organisation by the end of the sixteenth century.
Reading this I am, of course, looking for a northern equivalent to Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, something that can give me insight in to the Baltic and North Sea regions as a dynamic system. Obviously that wasn't the intention of the author who had his own agenda and, significantly, the source material for northern Europe is far less rich than for the Mediterranean world to the point that its speculative quite when and how or why the Hanse emerged.
Commerce in the north was different to the south. I'm inclined to suspect that, to use Michael Porter's term, there was no competitive advantage in adopting double entry book-keeping (first seen in Lubeck only in 1549) or in forming companies that lasted for longer than one generation. If credit was not generally available in the north perhaps, while restricting trade, this was symptomatic of an economic system that didn't demand it.
What we can see is that families that become powerful in the later middle ages can be traced back to twelfth century ancestors who were 'old-free', or linked to ministrales. These families were intermarrying in the late middle ages and not only within the same towns. Presumably the family gave, at least to a sufficient extent to keep business going, the functional benefits that companies and credit could provide in the south (the family that trades together - stays together?). Equally volumes of trade appear to have been far lower in the north - there wasn't the economic demand perhaps to require more developed trading tools like the structure of companies or credit.
A picture emerges of towns in the early period not as centres of population, but rather as specialised legal zones that facilitated the clustering of business activity in certain areas. The success of the Hanse was about being able to gain and maintain legal rights to trade. Something that as Hammel-Kiesow points out led to divergent views in the historiography between German and non-German historians. Since law in the semi-colonial world of the Baltic served not only as a system of dispute resolution but also of creating categories of people who were allowed to operate in particular ways, in certain zones.
The Hanse arose it seems if not in an power vacuum then in a region of contested and limited political authority, but it did not itself develop into a political union, despite which it was able to go to war against Denmark and to blockade Flanders (not necessarily very effectively which meant that such conflicts dragged on for years). Even as a trading body there was conflict between local offices and the leading citizens of the Hanse cities over how to develop trade in London, or Bergen, or where-ever else in the beer drinking, herring eating world.
August 28, 2025
Hervorragende problemorientierte Einführung, nicht wie oft bei Werken dieser Art ein reines Faktengerüst.
Der Schwerpunkt liegt - dem Forschungsstand entsprechend - auf dem Spätmittelalter. Behandelt werden die Entstehung der Hanse, gegründet wurde sie ja ebensowenig wie aufgelöst,* die Schwerpunkte der Handelsaktivitäten, der Charakter des mittelalterlichen Handels, der viel stärker kapitalisiert war, als lange angenommen.
Hammel-Kiesow zeigt vor allem, dass die Hanse ein auf Freiwilligkeit basierender Bund war, der wenig Möglichkeiten hatte, Mitglieder zu Handlungen wider ihre Interessen zu zwingen. Zudem agierten Untereinheiten ("wendische" und "sächsische" Städte) oft separat. Westliche und östliche Städte waren uneins mit Lübeck, was den dänischen Øresundzoll anging, während sie frei Durchfahrt wünschten, war er für den von der Stadt an der Trave bevorzugten Weiterhandel über Land vorteilhaft. Die Garantien des deutschen König/ Kaisers ermöglichten unter der Herrschaft eines Territorialherrn stehenden Städten einen größeren wirtschaftspolitischen Spielraum.
Als Gründe für den Niedergang der Hanse macht der Autor neben dem Machtzuwachs der Monarchien in England und Skandinavien, sowie der Stärkung der norddeutschen Landesfürsten (altbekannte These), das Faktum verantwortlich, dass die Hanse primär Zwischenhandel betrieb, und nicht wie die niederländischen und italienischen Städte Waren aus dem eigenen Hinterland exportierte.
* zudem taucht der Begriff primär als Fremdbezeichnung auf.
Der Schwerpunkt liegt - dem Forschungsstand entsprechend - auf dem Spätmittelalter. Behandelt werden die Entstehung der Hanse, gegründet wurde sie ja ebensowenig wie aufgelöst,* die Schwerpunkte der Handelsaktivitäten, der Charakter des mittelalterlichen Handels, der viel stärker kapitalisiert war, als lange angenommen.
Hammel-Kiesow zeigt vor allem, dass die Hanse ein auf Freiwilligkeit basierender Bund war, der wenig Möglichkeiten hatte, Mitglieder zu Handlungen wider ihre Interessen zu zwingen. Zudem agierten Untereinheiten ("wendische" und "sächsische" Städte) oft separat. Westliche und östliche Städte waren uneins mit Lübeck, was den dänischen Øresundzoll anging, während sie frei Durchfahrt wünschten, war er für den von der Stadt an der Trave bevorzugten Weiterhandel über Land vorteilhaft. Die Garantien des deutschen König/ Kaisers ermöglichten unter der Herrschaft eines Territorialherrn stehenden Städten einen größeren wirtschaftspolitischen Spielraum.
Als Gründe für den Niedergang der Hanse macht der Autor neben dem Machtzuwachs der Monarchien in England und Skandinavien, sowie der Stärkung der norddeutschen Landesfürsten (altbekannte These), das Faktum verantwortlich, dass die Hanse primär Zwischenhandel betrieb, und nicht wie die niederländischen und italienischen Städte Waren aus dem eigenen Hinterland exportierte.
* zudem taucht der Begriff primär als Fremdbezeichnung auf.
February 4, 2022
Concise overview of the origins, development, structure, and transformation of the Hanseatic League. Particularly strong when discussing the trends over the last 200 years of historical interpretation. Written in a somewhat opaque style.
July 23, 2023
Quite dense; needs concerted effort to take in.
August 18, 2023
Zeit Geschichte - Die Hanse
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September 20, 2017hansel cogelo plis loco para que la profe no me meta en prolemas
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