I arrived at the topic of the London Steelyard via a rather circuitous route. My primary academic interest lies in the political geography of Holy Roman Empire – specifically northern Germany – and the Baltic Sea, from the outset of the Wendish Crusade (1147) to the beginning of the 30 Years War (1648). To the extent that I came into this with an a priori interest in the Hanseatic League (or Hanse, as it alternatively known), I was largely focused on the League’s activities in the Baltic Sea. But I do not read German at an academically competent level yet, and I wanted to figure out a way to draw in German history without needing to rely on a historiography entirely dominated by German sources. Professor Martha Howell at Columbia clued me in to the importance of the Hanseatic League’s main outpost in London in the 15th and 16 centuries, called the Steelyard. The Steelyard was one of four Hanseatic Kontor, or extra-territorial “headquarters” spread across northern Europe, and housed and provided workspace for hundreds of merchants and their apprentices and assistants. Along with the other Kontor in Bergen, Bruges, and Novgorod, the Steelyard stood as a critical space of Hanse activity in the lands beyond the German kingdom.
I would like to reiterate early on that I do not read German or other relevant languages other than English (and Middle English if necessary) at a competent level. I aim to be passably competent in German by the time I start writing this dissertation in full, such that I may engage on some level, perhaps with the help of a translation assistant, with the far richer German-language historiography of the Hanse. However, this dissertation has the benefit of occupying a dual space: that of the historiography of England and of the historiography of the Hanse; thus, as the project progresses, there will be room for re-balancing and negotiation about how exactly the paper engages with the history of the Steelyard.
The Hanse comprised a community of cities organized almost entirely around shared trade networks and practices, and as such, most historiography of the Hanse has been squarely centered in traditional economic approaches. My interests, conversely, lie rather more in the realm of political history. Indeed, although the Hanse figures significantly into the politics of northern Europe in its time, the League frustrates a simple political history approach. It is difficult to write about the political institutions of an organization that in fact had few if any formal political institutions. In the words of Philippe Dollinger,
“the Hansa remained… an anomalous institution which puzzled contemporary jurists. It was not a sovereign power, for it remained within the framework of the Empire and its members continued to owe some measure of allegiance to many different overlords, ecclesiastical or lay. It was an amorphous organization, lacking legal status, having at its disposal neither finances of its own nor any army or fleet. It did not even have a common seal or officials or institutions of its own, except for the Hanseatic diet or Hansetag, and even that met rarely, at irregular intervals and never in full strength.”[1]
Given both the informality of the Hanse organization and now its chronological distance from our current time (with the implied loss of source material over time), defining the Hanse and piecing together how exactly it worked has long been a challenge for historians. But, like my affection for the history of the Holy Roman Empire, my affection for the history of the Hanse rather grows because of its singular and singularly misunderstood structure.
I intend to make this project an exercise in local history, and not traditional economic or political history. I am interested in the intimate and personal narratives of historical study, whether these narratives apply to people, places, or transregional networks. Two books have thus far defined my approach to this dissertation, neither of which focus on the Hanse: Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000), and Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism. Mignolo focuses on the decolonial space of Latin America and other parts of the world; but his philosophies on history, with particular focus on conversation with local narratives and the ways they fit into broader contextual spaces, can apply to the study of anywhere in the world, including the Steelyard. Braudel covers the economic-political history of Europe and thus is more obviously relevant; but, like Mignolo’s local history, Braudel’s philosophies on networks and spatial relationships—including those between metropoles and peripheral or “local” regions—have had a huge influence on my thinking about the Steelyard. In his structuring of the extractive and imbalanced center-and-periphery dynamics of geo-economic systems, Braudel’s writing has particularly inspired me in this project; not because I agree with his argument necessarily, but because in his analysis of commercial relationships[2] he develops the language with which other historians can speak[3] of these systems and even deconstruct and counter his own arguments.
In their own ways, both authors get to the importance of story-telling and personal warmth in the writing of history. Through these books, I realized I want to enter the philosophical space of the northern-European world-system, in which the Hanse was for a couple centuries the preeminent bonding agent. This dissertation will not merely address the forces at work in the world of the Hanse and the Steelyard; it will tell a story—or at least one part of a story—of the world of the Hanseatic League through the local history of the London Steelyard.
A Companion to the Hanseatic League, edited by Donald J. Herald, holds a couple of the defining sources for my journey into the historical space of the Hanse. As a collection of essays, this book may not grasp one overarching narrative of Hanseatic history, but it does serve as a kind of “encyclopedia” on the League; and, more importantly, the essay format allows for specificity and diversity of approaches that I found refreshingly easy to understand. Two essays from this collection stand out particularly.
Firstly, Michael North’s “The Hanseatic League in the Early Modern Period” makes a good introduction to the economic and political patterns in which the Hanse operated during my time period of focus (broadly, the 16th century). The decline of the Hanse in this period forms the “big picture” of this essay, and thus conveniently addresses many of the macrocosmic economic-political forces at work in the northern European world, in which I want to situate the Steelyard in my own project. North provides a helpful birds-eye view of the shifts in trade centers and practices occurring in this period across the Hanseatic space, from England and the Low Countries to the eastern Baltic; effectively showing how a change in policy or practice at one end (e.g., in England) could have repercussions as far away as Danzig or Novgorod.
The second essay, Mike Burkhardt’s “Kontors and Outposts,” engages directly with the Hanseatic Kontor—of which the Steelyard was one. This essay may only be 35 pages long, but it marks by far the deepest dive I have yet found (in English-language historiography) into the Kontor themselves. Burkhardt’s analysis covers all four Kontor together, with periodic descriptions of each specific place (e.g., the Steelyard), and the politics therein. This piece feels like an approximation of the kind of local history with which I would like to experiment in my project, in that he voices the social and cultural experiences of the Kontor occupants—for example, the “family” structure of the merchant communities within the Kontor—and connects these experiences to the macrocosmic networks and political geography of the Hanseatic world. Burkhardt goes deeper into social history specifically than I may be interested in, and certainly the Steelyard itself only features as a minority part of his discussion. But he nevertheless provides a good model for how to situate my writing at the intersection of different scales (micro and macro) and historiographies (e.g., political, economic, spatial, cultural, social) in a format as concise as a 10-15,000-word essay.
This idea of the relative spaces and networks of the Hanse brings me to my next source: Institutions of Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organisation, by Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer. The subtitle of this book alone gets to the work’s relevance to my own project; my goal is to engage with the Steelyard not on its own but as part of a Network Organisation. All networks have nodes of activity; the Steelyard was part of an actively moving and shifting network space, and I aim to both contextualize the Steelyard by looking at this network and ground this network by speaking of the specific place of the Steelyard. The word “institution” is also noteworthy, given the Hanse’s relatively loose structure and informality of organization. I believe it is right to call the Hanse itself an institution. But really, it was an institution of which the fundamental building blocks were other institutions—namely, the institutions of local merchant communities, manifested in many different forms. The Kontor happened to be the foremost Hanseatic institutions on the geopolitical periphery of the Hanse world—compared with the varied merchant communities and other organizations in Germany proper.[4] This book addresses the hierarchies, lateral partnerships, overlapping social spheres, and diverse circumstances of the Hanse and the institutions within the League. This analysis of Hanseatic networks and institutions, and their component parts, will be a critical tool for my project.
Given that I am entering into the historiography of these networks and institutions via Fernand Braudel’s theories on world systems and economies, there are two further works in this space that will be critical to developing my own argument. In the realm of world systems theory, the theories of Immanuel Wallerstein and Robert Brenner emerge as two sides of a critical debate. The books I will be looking at in this paper are Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, and Wallerstein’s Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Both authors confront the origins of capitalism via analyses of production commercial networks and institutions in the 16th century, and both write at an intersection of economic and political history. These authors’ greatest point of contention lies in the transfer of European states and economies from feudal to capitalist modes; as Denemark and Thomas note in their article “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate,” Wallerstein argues from a more traditionalist (Smithian) viewpoint wherein Europe—in its long-held free trade institutions—held the seeds of capitalism all along, while Brenner argues for an analysis of the emergent extractive economic relationships between core and peripheral regions.[5]
How do these books fit into my study of the Steelyard? If the Steelyard is a microcosm of the Hanse’s macrocosm, then the Hanse is in some sense a microcosm of the European macrocosm in this era of transfer from feudal to capitalist economic-political systems. Wallerstein’s and Brenner’s arguments often operate at a much grander geographic and historiographic scale than I can or want to bring into this project. But I intend to situate my study in the theory and philosophy of political and economic networks in 16th century Europe—in other words, the space of world systems or world-economies—and Wallerstein and Brenner both loom large in that space. Furthermore, Brenner’s specific work in Merchants and Revolution does focus on the political-economic developments in England during my time period, and will be invaluable for my understanding of the patterns surrounding the Steelyard.
Refocusing on the Hanse itself, let us now turn to Philippe Dollinger’s The German Hansa (1970). Originally written in German in 1964, this book is one of the premier works of longue durée style history of the Hanseatic League. Dollinger’s book covers in detail the geopolitical space occupied by the Hanse in northern Europe. He addresses the rise and fall (and rise and fall again) of Hanse power and prominence in the peripheral regions of the League’s operation, from Novgorod to England. He analyzes the political structure of the Hanse that, despite victory over England in the Anglo-Hanseatic War (1469-1474), still prevented the League from regaining or improving its economic relevance in the 1500s. He also discusses the ebb and flow in relevance of various trade goods, where those trade goods were produced (e.g., fish in Bergen), and how shifting markets affected the Hanse and the northern European world-economy.[6] I am interested in geopolitical history, but I am not interested in writing the geopolitical history of Dollinger’s style. He recites the names, events, and institutions of these periods in a helpful but rather impersonal way, in the manner of an introductory college-level history course. My goal is to look at specific, local instances of Anglo-Hanseatic interaction in the London Steelyard, in order to shed a more humanist (at least, philosophically critical) light on the world-economic space in which both the Kingdom of England and the Hanseatic League operated.
Lastly, let us look at T.H. Lloyd’s England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611 (1991). Lloyd’s book, per my research, is the most up-to-date English-language book covering the specific relationship of the Hanse to the kingdom of England. Lloyd narrates the individual evolutions of English and Hanseatic politics and economic policy, and their co-evolution as linked economic actors. The introduction to this book sums up its relevance to my project quite nicely:
The relationship between England and the Hanse was based upon commercial exchange, and as a consequence much of this work is devoted to trade… But trade was often made possible only by intensive political and diplomatic bargaining between the two sides, sometimes at the level of merchant and merchant, at other times between the English government and the Hanse diet, the highest authority within the German organization.[7]
Like Dollinger’s seminal work, England and the German Hanse provides a rather sweeping longue durée survey of the subject matter. However, the specificity of the subject matter itself—the relationship between England and the Hanse—makes this work a good reference point for my own understanding of the political-economic context of the Steelyard. Although this book gives an annals-style narration[8] rather than situating the growth and decline of the Hanse in any theoretical space, it does provide exceptionally detailed context within which I can situate my approach of the philosophical theory and local history of the Hanse and the Steelyard.
The arcane structure of the Hanse frustrates an easy attempt at the telling of its history. As one of the many building blocks of that structure, the London Steelyard also occupies a rather complicated historiographical space. The Steelyard formed its own community, standing out from the rest of London but also inextricably linked to the society, economy, and politics of that city; just as the Hanse formed its own community, standing out from the states of northern Europe as its own semi-autonomous organization but still deeply linked to the political, economic, and social forces of the northern European world. Although the Hanse itself and its ties to England has received a great deal of study, per my research, very little has been written[9] on the Steelyard itself as an individual institution or as a building block of the Hanseatic world-economy. With the works discussed in this literature review, I intend to contextualize the local history of the Steelyard, and to ground a theoretical understanding of the Hanse’s extensive system in the specific locality of the Steelyard.
Principal Secondary Sources:
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, vols. 2 & 3. London: William Collins Sons, 1985.
Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. London: Verso, 2003.
Colvin, Ian D. The Germans in England, 1066-1598. London: National Review, 1915.
Denemark, Robert A., and Kenneth P. Thomas. “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate.” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1988): 47-65. Accessed March 15, 2021. doi:10.2307/2600412.
Dollinger, Phillipe. The German Hansa. London: Macmillan, 1970.
Ewert, Ulf Christian and Selzer, Stephan. Institutions of the Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Organisation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.
Fink, Alexander. “The Hanseatic League and the Concept of Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions.” Kylos International Review for Social Sciences 65, no. 2 (May 2012): 194–217.
Fudge, John D. “Cargoes, Embargoes, and Emissaries: The Commercial and Political Interaction of England and the German Hanse, 1450-1510. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.
Harrison, Gordon Scott. “The Hanseatic League in Historical Interpretation.” The Historian 33, no. 1 (1970): 385–97.
Harreld, Donald J., ed. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015.
Lloyd, T.H. England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611: A study of their trade and commercial diplomacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Schildhauer, Johannes. The Hanse (History and Culture). Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1985.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.
Wernham, R.B. Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485-1588. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966.
Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna, and Stuart Jenks, eds. The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.
Principal primary sources to be consulted:
Butler, Arthur John, ed. Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 14, 1579-1580. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol14/pp359-371.
“Forste v Thurstcrosse,” 1504-1515. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7465371.
Hardy, and Page, eds. “Extracts from Various Documents Concerning the Steelyard,” 1735 1489. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/bad2f5ec-2835-41eb-b74f-77fd5fdeafc2.
“Marshed v Stone,” 1502-1503. http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7463511.
“Plan of Steelyard Wharf in Dowgate Ward, City of London, Showing a Crane and Boats,” n.d. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3981967.
“Port: London. Warrant to Allow Merchants of the Steelyard to Export Cloths. 1598,” 1598. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C1880433.
“Vanwardon v Darnell,” 1529 1518. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7475849.
Douglas, David, and C.H. Williams, eds. English Historical Documents. Vol. 5(A). London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967.
UK National Archives https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
Institute for Historical Research, https://www.history.ac.uk/
[1] Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. D.S. Ault and S.H. Steinberg (London: Macmillan, 1970) xvii.
[2] E.g., that of Venice to the merchant communities of the Levant.
[3] And often have spoken; see, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein and Robert Brenner, whose works are discussed later on in this paper.
[4] For example, in Lübeck, Hamburg, or Rostock
[5] Robert A. Denemark and Kenneth P. Thomas, “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate,” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1988): 47-65. Accessed March 15, 2021. doi:10.2307/2600412.
[6] Dollinger does not use this term, and in fact wrote too early to have much participation in the developing world systems theories of the 1970s and onwards. But if the “world-economy” is a useful concept, then Dollinger’s book is most certainly a study of the world-economy which the Hanse operated in and which it shaped.
[7] T.H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611 (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), Abstract. This is a slightly misleading claim, as on occasion the Holy Roman Emperor himself became involved in the commercial diplomacy of the Hanse with England. The Hanse may have been an independent political entity at some point, but its core still lay within the Empire and thus I would argue that the Emperor could in fact be called the highest authority in the diplomatic space of the League.
[8] By this I mean an “x happened, then y happened as a result, then z happened after that, et cetera” narrative.
[9] At least, English-language work
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “The Fall of the Steelyard” MA Thesis at Columbia University, March 2021
Haus Lilienfeld 