Introduction
The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and towns that gained a stranglehold on trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Lübeck and other elite centres waxed fat, while to varying degrees towns from Novgorod to London were forced to accept restrictions on trade and political interference as the price of doing business. The yoke was heavy, and it chafed.
AND here we come to the secret of the power of the Baltic cities — the head and centre of the Hanseatic League.* Hemp for ropes, flax for sails, pitch for caulking and cordage, timber for masts, all these things came from the Baltic, and the cities which commanded these commodities commanded the sea. And if we add to these command of the Baltic corn-supply, command of the salt-fish trade, and the supply of wax, the necessities of light and religion, we shall be able to estimate the ‘pull’ which the Baltic cities had over the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages.
And Germans would not have been Germans if they had not got full value for all these advantages.* There was, as we shall see, a time when the German cities could pass a law that English foreign trade was to be carried only in German ships,* and this monopoly was at other times so well recognised that an English Government could forbid its subjects to engage in oversea trade. By skilful and usurious use of these manifold sources of power the Germans established themselves like a flourishing mistletoe in the clefts of our English apple-tree.*
* Lübeck was the Brussels of the League; see A map of the extent of the Hanseatic League in 1400. There were forty-one major towns, including Berlin, Cologne, Danzig (Gdansk), Dortmund, Hamburg, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Krakow, Lüneburg, Münster and Stockholm. Then there were the Kontore, foreign trading posts that were not full members of the bloc. The easternmost Kontor was Novgorod in Russia; the westernmost were in the British Isles at London, Ipswich, and Bishop’s (later King’s) Lynn. Lastly, there were ‘factories’ (warehouses), which in Great Britain could be found at Berwick-upon-Tweed, Boston, Bristol, Hull, Leith, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Great Yarmouth and York, and as far north as Shetland.
* Colvin’s study The Germans in England was published in 1915, a year into the Great War, which may help to excuse this little lapse in courtesy.
* A similar law, the Navigation Act, was passed in 1651 under Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England. Aimed at Dutch competitors, it provided that only English ships, or ships of the country originally producing the goods freighted, could import into London. The rules were tightened in 1660 and again in 1663, and became one of the main grievances in the American War of Independence (1776-1783) — confirming John Buchan’s warning that “the hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it”. The Acts were not repealed until 1826.
* See this picture.
Précis
Early in the Great War, Scottish historian Ian Colvin looked back at trading bloc known as the Hanseatic League, which by the fifteenth century had acquired a monopoly on Baltic trade. So essential were goods from that region for food, for shipping and for basic amenities like lighting that German merchants exercised almost complete control over English trade and shipping. (60 / 60 words)
Early in the Great War, Scottish historian Ian Colvin looked back at trading bloc known as the Hanseatic League, which by the fifteenth century had acquired a monopoly on Baltic trade. So essential were goods from that region for food, for shipping and for basic amenities like lighting that German merchants exercised almost complete control over English trade and shipping.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: despite, just, may, not, or, ought, whereas, whether.
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