Overall, though, this is an inspiring book, full of surprises: Irish monks inventing punctuation; the
Hanseatic League foreshadowing the conflict between nation states and global capitalism; medieval scribes applying their skills to forging institutional charters besides their better-known work of illuminating manuscripts." PETER FORBES
Chapters are: the Early Hansas; the oGolden Ageo of the
Hanseatic League; the
Hanseatic League in the Early Modern Period; Kontors and outposts; social networks; the Baltic trade.
In addition to proprietary quasi-sovereign communities, the
Hanseatic League, which existed from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries in modern-day Northern Germany, provides an example of another typology of market governance: functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions (Fink 2012).
The sides discussed the cooperation in economic and trade relations and the connection of the Great Silk Road with the
Hanseatic League.
You'll be catapulted right back into the 1600s when Bremen was a wealthy and successful member of the
Hanseatic League.
In its heyday the
Hanseatic League was a powerful organization of German merchants that dominated overseas trade in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century.
"Had the English left everything to itself," he wrote, "the Belgians would be still manufacturing cloth for the English, (and) England would still have been the sheepyard for the (
Hanseatic League)." Coherent programmes to promote economic catch-up are relatively straightforward.
As a member of the Mediaeval
Hanseatic League, Riga remains full of mediaeval guild buildings and historic churches.
Are there any left there now who still hold to the merchant adventurer beliefs of our forebears, who fought their way northwards to open new routes to Moscow and destroy the trading monopoly of the
Hanseatic League, before then turning to explore westwards?
It is tragic that Beirut, Smyrna (Izmir), Alexandria and Istanbul were not able to form an international alliance of free ports, a Mediterranean version of Germany's
Hanseatic League. Yet history is too cruel for fairy tale endings in the Middle East.
These attempts included antipiracy agreements of the type forged during the Middle Ages by the Cinque Ports (a group of harbor towns on England's southeast coast) and by the
Hanseatic League (city-states on the North Sea and the Baltic).
The town also became an early trading member of the
Hanseatic League and erected a statue to honor its famous founder, Roland, at the entrance to the City Hall.
Known as the "
Hanseatic League," it was a loose bur effective alliance that negotiated trading privileges, regulated prices, collected tariffs, maintained primitive navigational aids, and provided protection for its members.
Or will globalization create a new class of cities, a sort of global
Hanseatic League, increasingly divorced from surrounding hinterlands that may wither without them?
