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Werner Scheltjens, Ph.D. (2009), is Assistant Professor at the Chair of Social and Economic History at the University of Leipzig. He has published several peer-reviewed articles on maritime history and is a project member at Sound Toll Registers Online. He is the author of Dutch Deltas: Emergence, functions and structure of the Low Countries’ maritime transport system, ca. 1300-1850 (Leiden/Boston 2015). His current research project is The political economy of Baltic trade, 1660-1860.

Commodity Flows between Central Europe and the New World

Abstract:
In this paper, a general outline of the changing geographical structure and intensity of commodity flows between Central Europe and the New World is presented. From a Central-European perspective, the survey of commodity flows encompasses a large part of the Northern hemisphere, from the Caribbean and North-America across Western Europe and the North-Eurasian continent all the way to the Bering Sea and the Pacific. Throughout the analytical survey, significant attention will be paid to strategies employed by the major economic and political powers of the time to generate, increase, secure, divert or blockade commodity flows between the Americas, Asia and Central Europe. The proposed survey is based on a combination of (published) primary sources, maritime transport statistics and secondary literature. First of all, a long-term analysis of structural changes in the geography and composition of commodity flows will be executed on the basis of transport statistics derived from the Danish Sound toll registers online. Secondly, novel statistical data from Russian archives will provide valuable new insights into the commodity flows between the vast Russian hinterland (stretching all the way to Kyakhta on the Russo-Chinese border) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before and after the partitions of Poland. Finally, the rich historiographies of Baltic trade and the system of markets and fairs in central and eastern Europe will complement and enrich the above-mentioned analyses. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the panel on „Commodities“ by outlining structural changes in the geography and composition of the main commodity flows directed to, from and through Central Europe, thereby maintaining a focus on the impact of international power politics on these flows. In this way, the paper aims to provide a firm background for the analysis of the reception and impact of cultural „colonial“ commodities on the material culture in Central Europe.