Hanseatic Trade - Trust and Geography
The alliance of cities that established a monopoly of trade in Northern Europe, known as the Hanseatic League was formed during the late middle ages around 12th century and the origin of this league can be traced back to Lubeck, and several other northern Germanic cities. The Hanseatic League remained a significant trade association in Northern Europe for four centuries, before its demise in the 17th century. Many can attribute the Hanseatic League's maintaining of a powerful trade monopoly for so long due to its long standing trade agreements and strategic trading post locations. While being a established association, with its own military, an exchange of mechanism, regulated tariffs, and parliament, the league primarily operated from informal relationships. The vast array of networks operated with less formal rules or contracts, but were more based off of common goals and common culture. The Hanseatic League is truly a unique economic system but was successful because of the immense density of member cities that were located in Norther Europe, on the Baltic or Northern Sea. Not only was it because of the established cities that were members, but strategic formation of new cities and smaller trading posts that were developed and expanded by the league. The Hanseatic League thrived off a network of trust that was deeply rooted in, not only economic benefit but also created trade relationships through blood and marriage. More immediate trust was established with family deeply rooted in a web of moral obligations. Other key trust factors were beneficial to success of the league within the merchant network such as, reputation, reliability, reciprocity and obligation. Upon examination of the structure of the networks that drove the Hanseatic League for four centuries it is evident that the geographical density of cities along with a deeply rooted culture of trustworthy trade is why the league was successful for so long.
References
http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/european-networks/economic-networks/margrit-schulte-beerbuehl-networks-of-the-hanseatic-league
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hanseatic_League
It is very impressive that trade agreements lasted about five centuries. That is a long line of generations of trading between family companies and different communities. I think that during this time period, people traded between one another not to profit off of someone but to instead just survive. I think of it as community members trading livestock for food or other goods in a town center. People depended on one another for survival, esspecially in this colder region of Europe. Now days, people trade and governments set regulations to make as much money as possible. They only care about the benefit of themselves because it is much easier to survive physically and financially now days compared to those times. So the mentality of trading has changed in this big time period.
ReplyDeleteIt's true, Matt, that people did indeed place community over individual profit and probably as a function of pragmatism and as you say, survival. Here is an interesting overview of profit in medieval times: https://www.eurasiareview.com/08052017-compassionate-capitalism-in-the-middle-ages-profit-and-philanthropy-in-medieval-cambridge-analysis/
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