Presented in partial completion of the MA/MSc in International History at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, Thursday May 5, 2022

Word Count: 14995

“We learn that whereas the Hanse Towns have long enjoyed certain privileges in respect of the export of cloth from England… nevertheless certain malicious and envious citizens of London calling themselves adventurers have gone about to alter the ancient trade of the Hanse Towns, and have so contrived that the English councillors have cut off the privileges of the towns.”

• Rudolf II von Habsburg to the Count of Friesland, 1579.

“Their wealth is grown such by beggaring of us that it is no charity to have this pity on them to our own undoing. It is to be noted in the stranger they will not commerce with us. They marry not into our nation. They will not buy anything of our country men.”

• Fuller, Councilman for the City of London in City of London v. Strangers, 1593.

Introduction

When Queen Elizabeth I banned all German Hanse merchants from their London headquarters in 1598, she ended nearly a half-century of tensions between England and the Hanseatic merchants of the German Holy Roman Empire. The two states, and merchants from their lands, regularly came to diplomatic blows across the second half of the 16^th century, over various trading rights and privileges across the economic zone of the North and Baltic Seas. Commerce in this system, which comprised most of coastal northern Europe, had been dominated by the German merchants of the Hanseatic League since the 1200s. Before the 16^th century, the Hanse had in fact been the only trading organization of substance in Northern Europe, and most maritime trade in the waters between London in the west and Novgorod in the eastern Baltic occurred on Hanseatic man-hours. By the late 16^th century, however, England was the last foreign market in which Hanse merchants still retained a major presence.

This dissertation will analyze the decaying Anglo-Hanseatic relations in the late 16^th century, culminating in Elizabeth’s seizure of the Steelyard and the banishment of the Hanse merchants in 1598. Previous historiography has primarily treated these tensions as an issue of commercial practicality, as London merchants merely wanted to monopolize English markets long dominated by the Hanse. However, this dissertation will show that the story was far more complex, in the moral and philosophical arguments made by each side in the disputes. By examining the language of debate over Hanseatic rights in London in the second half of the 16^th century and particularly the 1580s and 1590s, this paper will argue that the Steelyard issue was primarily a problem of “Us vs. Them,” which emerged in new language and with new ferocity in this critical period of English political-economic development. As many 16th-century English argued, though the Steelyard merchants were permanent residents of London, they were neither Londoners nor Englishmen. Why not? What were they instead? And what power, if any, did they have against the English? All of these questions will be addressed, informed by larger changes taking place in the history of English and European political economies at the time.

This topic is narrowed to the last few decades of the 16th century because Anglo-Hanseatic tensions reached a fevered pitch during this time. Beginning in the 1550s, the Hanse’s role as the main exporters of English products (particularly cloth) to Germany and other central European lands came under threat (or perceived threat) from the expansion of an English trading company called the Merchant Adventurers. The Merchant Adventurers sought to divert trading power in the North Sea into their own hands. Feeling the pressure from this company, the Hanse merchants in London began demanding a return of their historic trading privileges from the English government, leading to greater and greater conflict between all three parties. Finally, in 1598, Queen Elizabeth I’s office expelled all Hanse merchants from England (there were also Hanse merchants in smaller numbers in port cities such as Hull and Boston at the time). Although they were allowed back decades later, by that time, Hanse commercial power was but a vague memory in the northern European economy.

The key groups in this story are Hanse merchants in London, the English Merchant Adventurers as the countering force to the Hanse, and to a lesser extent, the English government and other residents of London. All of these actors acted in the context of the changing world economy of the 16th century, wherein the old medieval economic system crumbled, taking its institutions (like the Hanse) with it, while new centers of power emerged.

London as a setting allows this paper to explore a microcosm of the changing world-economy of the North Sea. We know that English-Hanseatic relations were heated at a macrocosmic level; this paper seeks to find out how the local scene in London fit into this paradigm. The Hanse’s core commercial activities lay in the Baltic Sea, but the Hanse and England often clashed in the North Sea, where England’s commercial center lay. Most of the prominent incidents involving the English Merchant Adventurers and the Hanse occurred either in England, or in northwest Germany on the other end of the North Sea from England.

Background: England, the Hanse, and the Steelyard

The Hanseatic League was a community of German merchants and trading cities in northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. The name “Hanse” comes from a German word referring to small groups of merchants; as these individual groups began coming together in the 12^th century, their members and their foreign contacts began labeling the new umbrella organization (which became the Hanseatic League) with the same name by the middle of the 13^th century.[1] The Hanse made their de facto headquarters in Lübeck on the southwest Baltic coast, and by the 13^th century, Hanse merchants and trade networks had spread as far as England in the west and Novgorod in the east. The Hanse was one of the most important trading communities in medieval Europe, rivalled only by the Italian city-state commercial empires such as Genoa and Venice.

Historian Phillipe Dollinger refers to the Hanseatic League of the late 14^th century as “a great power in northern Europe.”[2] Different groups of German merchants from individual towns had been present in London since at least the year 1000, and the Steelyard itself can be dated to the early 13^th century. However, as T.H. Lloyd illustrates, “the earliest clear reference to a united Hanse” in London “is found in 1281, and it is possible that then, or shortly before, the German merchants decided to form a common front against Englishmen, particularly Londoners, who were seeking to curtail their privileges.”[3] By the 1300s, the Hanse had grown in London and across northern Europe, and gained something of a monopoly over English exports.

This project will explore the social and political relations between England and the Hanseatic League in the late 16^th century, at a crucial turning point in the history of each. In that period, where Hanseatic economic power was waning and English power was surging, how did Hanse and English merchants relate to each other in London? Were Hanse merchants in London part of the “dying world” of Hanseatic power? Or did they occupy a “border identity,” not really Londoners but also not really Hanseatic Germans given their permanent residence outside of the Hanse’s core in north Germany?

By 1500, the Hanseatic merchants had lost their commercial monopoly in England, as Dutch merchants and others from the Low Countries began organized commercial ventures into traditionally Hanseatic markets. Despite the competition, Hanse trade at many points during the 1500s continued to grow, in England and the Low Countries as well as the Baltic; as historian Philippe Dollinger notes in his book The German Hansa, this growth continued particularly explosively in England.[4] However, by the 1550s, Hanseatic fortunes began to decline steadily, and notably in England where the English Merchant Adventurers guild began competing in English market. Many concerned parties—including the English government, English traders, the Hanse merchants themselves, and even the distant offices of the Holy Roman Empire—became rapidly aware of this trend.

The Steelyard was a walled community that Hanse merchants had constructed for themselves to create essentially a German enclave within the city of London. It was in what is now the Dowgate ward, 21^st-century London’s main financial district. The complex abutted the Thames for easy access to trade ships, and contained many buildings that made it almost like a village within London, with its own church and a number of standard businesses for its residents. 19^th-century German historian and Atlas-maker Gustav Droysen, in his Allgemeiner Historischer Handatlas (1886), created the following map of the Steelyard.[5]

Johann Gustav Droysen’s map of the Steelyard in 1667.  A “Rhenish wine house” (8), “German Auditorium” (4) and living spaces (15 & 16) can all be seen here.

In 1552, English King Edward VI’s privy council banned merchants of the Hanse from the Steelyard and from trading under old privileges in England. In the words of T.H. Lloyd, in England and the German Hanse, 1157-1600, “the franchises were suspended until such time as the merchants could produce proof they ought to enjoy them; until then they were to trade on the same footing as all other aliens.”[6] This dissertation will examine the complexities of Hanseatic privileges in the Steelyard later on; for now, it is merely worth noting that, while the crown granted the Hanse rights to the Steelyard once again in 1553, the council’s decision in 1552 set off the chain reaction of political conflict that eventually led to their more meaningful ban in 1597. As this paper will show later, the 1552 banishment set a legal and written precedent with which the English later on in that century would argue for permanent removal of Hanse franchises in their country.

Before continuing into analysis, it is prudent to introduce some of the historical “actors” at play here more thoroughly. The key groups in this story are Londoners, the Steelyard merchants, and the English and German governments that respectively oversaw them. All of these actors acted in the context of the changing world economy of the 16th century, wherein the old medieval economic system crumbled, taking its institutions (like the Hanse) with it, while new centers of power emerged.

The Hanseatic League certainly makes for a poorly-understood player in medieval European history. In the 1100s, lords in the German kingdom began conquering and expanding northeastward across the Elbe River and into the Balto-Slavic lands of Pomerania, Prussia, and Livonia, to pursue commercial profit and to expand their farmland acreage.[7] They did so under the auspices of a papal-sanctioned “Wendish Crusade” against the pagan peoples of northeastern Europe, but this crusade brought the German kingdom untold wealth and territorial gains.[8] As German armies and farmers moved into the newly acquired Baltic territories, merchants came with them; these merchants came together to form a union against German imperial interference in their trade and exploitation of these new territories. This may appear ironic given that the Hanse developed as part of German imperial expansion; however, the Holy Roman Empire was a highly decentralized state, and it expanded into the Baltic region largely through the actions of local elites rather than the Emperor himself (who was usually busy in the south and west of the Empire). These merchant groups eventually formed the Hanse (or the Hanseatic League), which, by the middle of the thirteenth century, had spread all across northern Europe and established a base in London.

In the late 1300s, the structure of the Hanse shifted fundamentally from a less formal organization of individual merchants to a more formal organization between German towns whose legal charters bound them to the Hanseatic structure. It was immediately after this restructuring that the League reached its peak—Philippe Dollinger argues the “Hansa of the towns” in this period reached “the position of a great power in northern Europe, which it was to keep for about a hundred and fifty years.”[9] This claim is particularly noteworthy for this dissertation because—as Dollinger identifies—the Hanse’s power lay outside that of its theoretical sovereign, the German Holy Roman Emperors. After all, all of the Hanse towns still fell into the feudal jurisdiction of the German kingdom. But the Hanse, for their own benefit, successfully maintained their affairs (political, economic, and even military) separate from Germany proper—the Emperor seems to have mostly left them alone, in large part because the Hanse’s powerbase was geographically removed from imperial concerns in southern and western Germany, and Italy. The Emperor’s lack of direct involvement in German Baltic affairs is corroborated by the history of Imperial oversight of the Teutonic Order (1226-1466). The Teutonic Order was a massive German-controlled territorial state on the coasts of the eastern Baltic, but, like the Hanse, the Teutonic Knights largely avoided the Imperial gaze.[10]

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. 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.”[11]

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 Hanseatic affairs and piecing together how exactly it worked has long been a challenge for historians. It is precisely because of this singular and singularly misunderstood structure of the Hanse that the story of the Steelyard is so interesting.

The English crown had originally granted trade privileges to the Hanse because the Hanseatic network allowed English merchants to sell their goods (mostly cloth) on the European continent, out of the reach of English trade routes. However, economic and political relations had been fraught between the English and the Hanse for at least a century running up to Elizabeth’s reign, as the Hanse merchants had substantial economic privileges and investments in London trade, both of which they occasionally needed to protect and/or reinforce with a navy formed of German privateers (see, for example, the 1469-1473 Anglo-Hanseatic War).[12] However, the two parties had never formally broken off commercial ties until 1598, when Elizabeth’s government expelled the Hanse merchants from the Steelyard and stripped them off their historic trading privileges.

Until the precise moment of history on which this dissertation focuses, the Hanse continued to operate their own functional economic state in northern Europe without particularly substantial interruption; only during the heady and (for the Hanse) cataclysmic decades of the late 16^th century, in conflict with the English, did the Hanse council feel such threat to their commerce that a plea (to the Holy Roman Emperor) for outside help was necessary. Their desperation by the late 16^th century resulted from a number of factors: as the League gradually lost markets in the eastern Baltic to the expanding Russian state, and Dutch merchants began competing more aggressively across northern Europe, the long-established Hanseatic monopoly on English trade (particularly in textiles) had become the League’s most profitable venture.[13]

Historiography: Hanseatic and English

This paper will intervene in Hanseatic historiography and the history of Anglo-Hanseatic relations; it will not be an English historical narrative with the Hanse as a convenient backdrop, but rather, a look at Hanseatic merchants from the outside, to understand their changing place in the world. This paper is 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 the 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 (1979).[14] 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 this paper’s approach to the Steelyard. In his structuring of the extractive and imbalanced center-and-periphery dynamics of geo-economic systems, Braudel’s writing has particularly inspired this project; not because his argument is perfect, but because in his analysis of commercial relationships he develops the language with which other historians can speak of these systems and even deconstruct and counter his own arguments.

Through these books, this paper will enter the philosophical space of Anglo-Hanseatic relations in London, in a changing world in which the Hanse had long been a preeminent bonding agent. This dissertation will not merely address the forces at work in the world of the English and the Hanse; it will tell a story—or at least one part of a story—of the local history of London.

World systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein speaks of the “Flanders-Hanseatic trade network of north and northwest Europe” as one of the two economic systems that defined Europe in the Middle Ages.[15]  Much ink has been spilled on the hey-day of the Hanse in the 13th through 15th centuries, generally in the form of empirical longue durée histories outlining the big events and big narratives in the Hanseatic world. But little English-language work exists on the local history of the Hanse outpost in London and the tensions between Londoners and Hanse merchants in the English capital. The disciplines of British historiography and German historiography have largely stayed too separate to have produced a substantial catalogue of works diving deep into Anglo-Hanseatic relations. British historiography has likewise tended to seek the roots of England’s meteoric rise to commercial power in the 16th century, rather than the fading power of the economic institutions it displaced.

            A Companion to the Hanseatic League, edited by Donald J. Herald, holds a couple of the defining sources for this 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 are 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 this time period (the 16^th century).[16] 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 the Steelyard can be situated. 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 four Hanseatic Kontor—of which the Steelyard was one—which were the League’s main outposts in non-German lands.[17] Burkhardt’s essay may only be 35 pages long, but it marks by far the deepest dive (in English-language historiography) into the Kontor themselves. Burkhardt’s analysis covers all four Kontor together,[18] 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 this paper would like to experiment, in that it analyzes 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. The Steelyard itself only features as a marginal part of his discussion. But he nevertheless provides a good model for how to situate this dissertation at the intersection of different scales (micro and macro) and historiographies (i.e., 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 this paper to the next source: Institutions of Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organisation, a book by Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer.[19] The subtitle of this book alone gets to the work’s relevance to this project; the 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 this paper aims to both contextualize the Steelyard by looking at this network and to 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. It is right to call the Hanse itself an institution. But really, it was an institution of which the fundamental building blocks were smaller institutions—namely, the institutions of local merchant communities, manifested in many different forms: small outposts in foreign lands, to chartered towns in Germany, to the full territorial state of the Teutonic Order in Prussia and Livonia. 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. This book addresses the hierarchies, lateral partnerships, overlapping social spheres, and diverse circumstances of the Hanse and the institutions within the League: Ewert’s and Selzer’s analysis of Hanseatic networks and institutions, and their component parts, will be a critical tool for this project.

            This paper will address London and the Steelyard as a looking-glass into the changing paradigms of commerce and political economy in the late 16th century, and thus there are two further works that will be critical to developing this paper’s argument. The theories of Immanuel Wallerstein and Robert Brenner emerge as two sides of a critical debate. This paper will look at 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 16th Century.[20] Both authors confront the origins of mercantilism and capitalism via analyses of production and commercial networks and institutions in the 16^th 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 Robert Denemark and Kenneth Thomas illustrate 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.[21]

            How do these books fit into a 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 this project can. But this paper will be situated in the theory and philosophy of political and economic networks in 16^th 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 this time period, and will be invaluable for this paper’s understanding of the patterns surrounding the Steelyard.

Refocusing on the Hanse itself, Philippe Dollinger’s The German Hansa (1970) comes into view. 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 goods were produced (e.g., fish in Bergen), and how shifting markets affected the Hanse and the northern European world-economy.[22] 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. This dissertation’s 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 comes a look at T.H. Lloyd’s England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611 (1991).[23] Lloyd’s book 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 the previous historiography on the Hanse in London 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.[24]

Like Dollinger’s seminal work, England and the German Hanse views Anglo-Hanseatic relations in terms of commerce and practical politics. Although the work is valuable, it is this precise narrative which this dissertation seeks to problematize: Lloyd’s book does provide exceptionally detailed context within which this paper can situate its approach to 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 people of the Steelyard formed their 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 and its ties to England has received some study, very little has been written 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, this paper will contextualize the local history of the Steelyard, and help ground a theoretical understanding of the Hanse’s extensive system in the specific locality of the Steelyard.

Part 1: Kontor and control against the “Other”

            In order to understand the tensions in London over the Steelyard merchants, it is important to understand why the Steelyard existed in the first place. As mentioned before, the Steelyard was one of four Hanseatic Kontor—the other Kontor were in Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod. Mike Burkhardt illustrates that, because the four Kontor all fell in the peripheral regions of Hanse activity—far from the core Hanseatic region of Germany—the greatest achievement of these outposts was security.[25] But control makes for an even better word, as this paper will soon show from both primary and secondary sources. Socially as well as physically, the structure of the Steelyard allowed Hanse merchants to control members within and control against incursion from the foreign city—London—outside the Steelyard’s walls. The legal “privileges” from the English crown with which the Hanse dominated the English market also granted the residents of the Steelyard “a certain amount of self-jurisdiction,” according to Burkhard.[26]

            As Ulf Christian Ewert illustrates in Institutions of Hanseatic Trade, Kontor like the Steelyard also allowed for the Hanse merchants to control for the extreme heterogeneity of the Hanse’s massive geographical network. Kontor such as the Steelyard allowed for an ever-negotiable ‘borderland’ area between the communities of the German Hanse and the foreign cities—in this ‘borderland,’ Hanse merchants could adapt their community structure to fit local practices while still maintaining Hanseatic identity and practices. Ewert argues that a “massive gap… existed between the Northeast and West” of the Hanse network “in commercial as well as cultural matters, a gap that was visible in the marked differences between the westernmost and easternmost trading posts.”[27] Although this paper will not address the other Kontor in great detail, these points nevertheless stand out. The Steelyard has to be understood as a sort of geographical point of negotiation between the Hanse and London, intentionally designed as such by the Hanse merchants to account for the heterogeneity and unpredictability of their vast “catchment area.”[28]

            But negotiation did not equate with utter malleability of Hanseatic identity in London. Quite the opposite. In many ways, the Steelyard became a place of unique and at times unmalleable identity: certainly not the identity of “Londoners,” but also not quite “German.” Rather, members of the Steelyard often based their social identity primarily on the Steelyard itself. The Steelyard provided a social space in which a Hanse merchant could “feel at home, leaving him free to concentrate on business.”[29] Furthermore, the Kontor controlled “the economic and social activities of the merchants as effectively as possible. The more control a merchant was exposed to, the lower the risk of him violating the rules”—all in the name of business efficiency.[30]

The aim of the Hanse, and thus of its outposts such as the Steelyard, may have primarily been business efficiency. But the question remains, precisely what outside influences did the Hanse merchants fear would corrupt their business efficiency in foreign lands? Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz presents a fascinating study of Hanse merchants’ perception of the locals from the Kontor in her article “’Hansards and the ‘Other’” (2013). This article primarily addresses Hanseatic affairs in the Bergen Kontor, but this will still provide this paper a window through which to view the Steelyard merchants’ perceptions of outside threat to their business as well. Wubs-Mrozewicz provides a crucial summary of the issue in reminding the reader that, while the fundamental business of the Hanse was “trade with strangers,” this relationship has been long misunderstood. She continues, “contact with the ‘Other’ has mostly been discussed in pragmatic terms as contacts between Hanseatic traders and foreigners,” and historical analysis has rarely progressed beyond that.[31]

This paper will largely address the two-way nature of this “Us vs. Them” paradigm of the Steelyard in London. To Londoners, the Steelyard merchants were just as “Other” as the English were to the Hanse. This relation, too, has long suffered from a mere “pragmatic” understanding of business security practices such as trade privileges, without an understanding of how things actually played out in London. The pragmatic facts of the merchant business only tell a small part of the story; it is critical to understand that perception shapes policy and law just as much—if not more—than fact.

Fear of the “Other” shaped Hanse policy of exclusion in the Kontor. The ultimate aim may have been business efficiency, but the means were far more complex, and ensured Kontor members would keep their loyalties entirely to the Kontor. In the Steelyard as in other Kontor, new members had to undergo intense initiation rites. This included beating and other forms of physical abuse, in order to “shift their private environment and loyalties” and create a perceived “equalization of all members” which “was an important mental pillar of loyalty of all boys, assistants, and merchants to the legal and social rules at the Kontor and to each other.”[32] Neither Wubs-Mrozewicz nor Burkhardt address in any great rhetorical detail the causal links between these rituals and the “Us vs Them” mentality, but the social affairs of the Steelyard and the other Kontor take on a decidedly cultish appearance that leaves no grey area between “within” and “without.” The intensity of such community rituals shows that the Hanseatic elite at the Kontor perceived loyalty in absolute terms and as being utterly necessary. Wubs-Mrozewicz also shows that “these ordeals constituted a form of ‘control at the entrance’ of potential new members,” meaning that the existence of these rituals ensured a self-selecting community: presumably, only those whose minds and bodies were already committed to the Hanseatic or Kontor community would willingly undergo such treatment in order to join.[33]

Why did the Kontor require such unwavering loyalty? Hanse merchants’ own answers to this question may be lost to time, but the presence of these ‘ordeals’ nevertheless paints a picture quite different from older historiography of the Hanse and their Kontor. Inclusion and exclusion were not dry legalistic decisions between disinterested businessmen who thought only of profit. Rather, the ‘ordeals’ portray a psychologically and emotionally complex process of belonging in a community whose identity extended well beyond business affairs. It is unlikely that Kontor initiates were thinking of commercial profit when “having their nose and mouth filled with cats’ and dogs’ excrement” as part of the initiation rite;[34] neither would thoughts have been toward business in ball games, games of chess, nightly communal drinking, and all other aspects of life that were confined to the Steelyard and the other Kontor.[35] Hanse members would have lived, worked, and likely died in the Steelyard,[36] in the name of securing their affairs against the unknown “Other” in the city around them.

Part 2: The Steelyard as “Other” to the Londoners

In the historiography of the Hanse, the Steelyard merchants’ relationship with the world outside the Kontor walls has thus received some focus. But English perceptions of the Steelyard merchants have gone largely unstudied. This is a critical gap in the historiography, precisely because the late 16^th century was the moment in which Londoners began stripping the Steelyard merchants of their centuries-old rights and privileges. Like the socioeconomic practices of the Kontor dwellers themselves, this trend cannot be understood as a dry and unsentimental act by the English merchant community; and of course, this trend cannot be understood from within the walls of the Steelyard, either. How did Londoners perceive the Steelyard merchants in the late 16th century? And how did this affect the evolving English policy and political economy?

A turn to the primary sources reveals tensions. In 1593, English Parliament held a hearing over a proposed law to ban merchandise retailing in London by foreign merchants. The title and description of this hearing, “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing, 1593,” does not name the offending parties against whom this bill was formed; however, the only group of foreign retailers named anywhere in the document are the Steelyard merchants.[37] On such basis, this paper will presume that the Hanse merchants at the Steelyard at least figured prominently among the groups of foreigners that this bill sought to control. Even this late in the 16^th century, there would have been no groups of foreign merchants in London more powerful than the Hanse.

At this point, it is also important to define retailing: as opposed to goods trade between merchants, retailing refers specifically to the sale of goods from a merchant or goods-transporter to the general public as final sale. As Fernand Braudel illustrates, the concept of fixed retailing operations in European cities was relatively new in the 16^th century.[38] Whereas goods were primarily marketed in temporary trade fairs throughout the Middle Ages, such fairs gradually became replaced by brick-and-mortar retailing operations in city centers in the 15^th and 16^th centuries—and in some states, these shops did not become a prominent urban feature until the 18^th century.

This Parliamentary hearing, then, fell in a period of great flux for retailing laws and practices across England and Europe more broadly—connecting the experiences of the Hanse merchants in London to broader European trends.

The 1593 debate occurred between two parties: “the counsel for the City of London” and “the strangers’ counsel”; the former party had proposed a law to ban foreign retailing and “denizenship” in London. This debate reveals a great deal about perceptions of foreigners and the tenets of anti-foreignism that dominated Elizabeth’s government and much of London’s merchant community.

The strangers’ counsel argued that to strip foreigners of their retailing rights was to strip them of any means of survival—and that such removal of rights would go against the principles of “the privilege of St. Martin,” referring to the provision of sanctuary to foreigners.[39] To this, the anti-foreign contingent argued that the strangers’ commercial activities parasitized the economy of London and England as a whole. Francis Moore de Medio Templo, the primary counsel and speaker of the anti-foreign group in this debate, led most of the hearing against the strangers’ counsel; however, a man named only as “Fuller” also joined on Moore’s side to argue that the wealth of foreign merchants “Is grown such by beggaring of us that it is no charity to have this pity on them to our own undoing.” That is, London and its merchant community lose profits because of the foreign merchant activity in the city.

Fuller continues, “It is to be noted in the stranger they will not commerce with us… The retailing stranger buys nothing of our country commodities, but all the money he takes he vents over beyond sea.”[40] This statement is most remarkable for the zero-sum nature of the commerce that it defines. Two overlapping points can be taken from it: first, if Fuller’s argument is correct, the Hanse merchants made a concerted business practice to only retail goods for currency and then send the money back to the German market, rather than re-entering it into the English economy by doing wholesale trading with London merchants. Second, Fuller believes that this practice was damaging to Londoners and their economy, and continues arguing that this policy only served to drive up Hanse profits in the English market and bankrupt Englishmen.

Notably, this debate occurred at the approximate inception-point of mercantilism as a philosophy in the political economies of England and other western European states. In “Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” historian Henry Turner defines mercantilism as “a set of ideas and policies for economic regulation undertaken by governments to secure treasure and a favorable balance of trade in the context of an international sphere populated by other nation-states.”[41] Although it is impossible to mark a specific point or location in which the practice of mercantilism first took hold, Turner argues “it becomes possible to identify the 16th century, rather than the seventeenth or eighteenth, as a crucial moment of transformation in the way that ‘economic’ and ‘political’ ideas came to be redefined in relation to one another”; and notably, when the foreign merchants sent money back to their home countries after retailing to the English, they deprived the English community of “the collective benefits of profit making over narrow individual interest.”[42]

Fuller argued that the foreign merchants’ economic gain came at the price of English merchants’ loss, and he argued this in order to influence English government policy. Throughout the speeches of Fuller and Francis Moore de Medio Templo, both speakers envision the issue of foreign merchants in London as a problem of societal ethics: Fuller complains, for example, that “They marry not into our nation,” while Moore argues that the privileges of the foreign merchants in London are “Not to be allowed above the privilege of birth,” and laments that “our own natives are not allowed both to merchandise and retail as they do.”[43]

Turner explains this melding of the economic and political as an importance piece of early-modern ‘mercantilist’ thinking that stemmed from Aristotle, who believed that the economy was a subset of societal ethics: “For medieval and early modern thinkers alike, the Nichomachean Ethics was a long-standing authority on economic and not simply moral problems—and he understood [the economy] as part of the household, through which it became necessary by extension to the larger political community of virtue.”[44] Fuller’s and Moore’s statements can be understood in this context as well: the Hanse merchants expressed no interest in joining the English ‘family’ (through marriage), and Hanseatic privileges should still place them lower on the political hierarchy than natural-born Englishmen.

Fuller and Moore were not wrong in many of their claims: if one considered the population of London a ‘family,’ then the Steelyard merchants almost unilaterally refused to join it. This can be seen in the physical structure of the Steelyard, which resembled a veritable fortress in the middle of the city; as Burkhardt notes, the Kontor was “barricaded with strong palisades because public opinion could change quickly and if things became hostile, the Hanseatic merchants stood alone.”[45] The Steelyard merchants created their built environment for defense, knowing that they were always at risk as a minority group in London. This would have had a substantial impact on Londoners’ perceptions as well, because geographically the Kontor merchants showed no particular desire to assimilate.

The Steelyard merchants kept themselves at a strict social remove from the city as well. Only individuals from German lands could take up residence in the Steelyard, meaning that it was unlikely anyone outside this cultish community understood or regularly witnessed the social practices of the Kontor residents. Curiously, however, this exclusion came by design—not only from the German residents themselves, but from the English crown. Here, a critical overlap between the social and economic spheres of Steelyard life comes into view. The Crown had long maintained Hanseatic privileges in the English market by assigning these privileges to residents of the Steelyard. In the early centuries of the Steelyard’s existence, the English government had evidently felt that no more regulation was required; however, in “London’s Steelyard Certificates 1463-1473,” Stuart Jenks shows that the Crown became more concerned in regulating this in the middle of the 15th century. In 1463, the heads of the Steelyard issued a list of the Kontor residents certifying their status as “merchants of the said realm of Almain of the said Guildhall of the Teutons”—that is, members of the Hanse in London.[46] Jenks argues that “in issuing this certification, the Steelyard was reacting to growing English concerns that non-Hansards were claiming the Hanse’s privileges. Indeed… the English government appears to have come to the conclusion that the enjoyment of the Hanse’s privileges had to be restricted… it was precisely this membership that the Steelyard certified on 9 July 1463.”[47]

This reveals a point at which the English government and the Steelyard began cooperating to ensure the exclusivity of the Steelyard community. Although Jenks argues that the Steelyard representatives falsified or deliberately obfuscated some elements of the Steelyard Certification, this nevertheless makes for an interesting case in which the Crown perceived the exclusivity of the Steelyard as necessary for English benefit. The research for this dissertation has never encountered another discussion of this perception but this likely stems from the lack of historiography on English perceptions of the Hanse generally. However, as Jenks argues in a footnote, the English had a rather timeless fear of non-Hansards claiming Steelyard benefits: “English suspicion that the hordes of merchants claiming the protection of the Hanse’s privileges in England were not, in fact, genuinely Hanseatic” reached “back to the early fourteenth century,” and likely continued until the fall of the Steelyard in 1598.[48] Wubs-Mrozewicz illustrates that the Hanse likewise continued to make inclusion in Kontor stricter: “in 1560, not only burghership in a Hanseatic town but also birth in a Hanseatic town became the prerequisite for admission in the Kontor.”[49]

The social divisions between the Steelyard and London penetrated far deeper than just residence restrictions, however. Wubs-Mrozewicz shows that “it was forbidden to house, employ, or defend non-Hansards” in the Kontor—“these rules were recurrently read aloud,” continues Wubs-Mrozewicz, “and traders who became Kontor members had to swear they would follow them.[50] Furthermore, Kontor residents could not marry locals, and women were entirely excluded from the Kontor (but the merchants still brought in prostitutes frequently and covertly).[51]

All of this is to say, although the Kontor’s strict rules would have occasionally been broken, Londoners nevertheless would have perceived the Steelyard merchants as an exceptionally self-Otherizing community. Far beyond the practicalities of business, Steelyard residents could not dare to stray outside the social community of the Kontor—hefty penalties awaited them if they did, which could even include loss of “Hanseatic rights.”[52] The very premise of the Steelyard, that strong Hanseatic social ties strengthened commercial power in London, began weakening the Kontor as London merchants grew more powerful in trade and government. As the arguments of the anti-foreign contingent in the 1593 debate illustrate, the Steelyard’s English competitors could use the Steelyard’s intentional segregation from the London community as a basis from which to argue against the Kontor’s privileges. Presumably, if the anti-foreign contingent used this justification in a public forum, then they would have been building on public perception of the Steelyard merchants as a rather sinister “Other,” who expressed no communal bond with English Londoners. This falls in line with the general trends of Elizabethan socioeconomic expansion, which often sought to displace foreigners socially and commercially to advance English interests. Furthermore, it is corroborated by Elizabeth’s eventual complete banishment of Hanse merchants from the Steelyard in 1598. Popular perception of the Steelyard put pressure on London and the Crown to solve the issue in favor of the English, Steelyard merchants often got in trouble with the English government because of the Kontor’s perceived exclusivity and increasingly anathema status as a privileged foreign community in a newly developing nation.

This point is critical because it complicates the lukewarm analysis of older Hanseatic historiography, which viewed Elizabethan anti-foreignism merely as a ‘rational’ economic choice to take the English commercial monopoly out of Hanseatic hands and put it in the hands of the Crown. Certainly, profit-driven economics played a big role in anti-Hanse policy in London in the 1590s; but this policy was deeply rooted in moral philosophy and social perception. It does also pose an interesting question which cannot be covered in a paper as short as this: would the English have welcomed the Steelyard merchants to intermarry with Londoners, or otherwise establish deeper social links? Or would Londoners have resisted intermarriage on the grounds that the Kontor residents were foreign and may ‘corrupt’ the English family with their influence?

The philosophy of “Us vs. Them” would soon define the English mercantilist political economy, wherein the state began inserting itself into commerce more than ever before. The economy of the English ‘family’ (read: state) needed protection against foreign intrusion, since gains for foreign merchants meant losses for the English. This last claim may indeed be true, if the German merchants in London guarded their money as covetously as Fuller and Moore wanted to guard the English coin purse. The German merchant’s own actions here will be examined further later on, but Fuller’s solution to this issue was simple: of the foreign merchants, “there ought none to be sworn a denizen but he that should first swear he is not worth above £5.”[53] Perhaps foreigners could be allowed to stay—but they had to live cheaply so Londoners could live better.

Part 3: The Merchant Adventurers and the Steelyard

From the record of this debate, the affiliation of each party remains unclear. Who did the anti-foreign contingent represent, and were they members of a specific group of merchants? These questions are unanswered; however, other records reveal that one specific company—the English Merchant Adventurers—made perhaps the strongest opponent to the Steelyard merchants in the development of English commercial law in the second half of the 16th century. The Merchant Adventurers were a Crown-sponsored trade company that dealt in imports and exports across the North and Baltic Seas, making them an important competitor to the Hanse itself. Although they were the most prominent merchant organization in England by the 1500s, in the broader northern European market they nevertheless had remained and continued to remain in the shadow of the Hanse through the middle of the century. However, the tides began to turn in the 1550s. In 1551, the Merchant Adventurers in London exploited a small scandal involving a Steelyard merchant to raise the issue of Steelyard privileges and franchises in court. T.H. Lloyd illustrates that in December 1551, the Merchant Adventurers mounted a “wholescale attack,” which brought the Steelyard merchants to the court of the Privy Council under various charges. These charges would come to define English perception of Steelyard business practices through their banishment in 1598, and look familiar to perceptions discussed earlier in this paper. The following is a list of the charges (in italics) found in Lloyd’s book, with my own brief commentary:

1) all privileges claimed by the Steelyard were invalid in English law, since the merchants did not possess a sufficient corporation to exercise them. [54]

This is an interesting claim, because it addresses the fact that the Hanse was an ill-defined group of merchants and had no legal/governmental incorporation in the way that the Merchant Adventurers would have had in England.

2) none of their charters named particular individuals or towns so that there was no way of knowing who ought to enjoy the pretended privileges[55];

Similar to English fears discussed in the 1463 Steelyard Certificate context, concern over the nebulous Hanseatic membership practices and claims of German merchants in London made the Steelyard highly suspicious to Londoners.      

(3) as a result the Steelyard admitted whomsoever it pleased, at a cost to the king’s revenue of 17,000 pounds a year[56];

Similar to the previous point, this addresses specific financial losses based on the commercial privileges and discounts that merchants claimed based on suspicious membership to the Hanse.

(4) even were the privileges valid the beneficiaries ought not to colour strangers’ goods, as they allegedly did[57];

This references the scandal which launched the Merchant Adventurer’s attack. Steelyard merchants had been processing (colouring) non-Hanseatic goods for sale, which was illegal and against their charter in London because it infringed on other native non-merchant industries.

(5) for 100 years after the grant of the pretended privileges the Hansards had been content to trade between their own ports and England, but now, despite recognizance made in the reign of Henry VII, they meddled with the trade of the Low Countries[58];

The Merchant Adventurers primarily operated in the Low Countries, in Antwerp and other commercial hubs which were outside of the Hanse’s main network. The Adventures saw the opportunity here to argue that the Hanse operated in the Low Countries in poor faith based on their agreement with the English Crown. This is a curious claim because the Hanse had always taken some part in the Low Countries trade; more analysis of this larger geo-economic issue will come later in this paper.

(6) the Hanse charters had been forfeited in the reign of Edward IV and renewed only upon condition that Englishmen should enjoy reciprocal rights, which were still denied. [59]

The case of the forfeiture of the Hanse charters under Edward IV (r. 1461-1470, 1471-1483) falls out of the purview of this paper, but another point in this claim stands out: that of reciprocal rights. Further detail is unfortunately not provided, but these reciprocal rights likely referred either to the desired rights of English merchants to the same privileges enjoyed by the Steelyard merchants in London, or the Merchant Adventurers’ desire to gain privileges in German markets that equaled the Hanse privileges at the Steelyard. The former, rights within England, foreshadow synonymous claims made by the anti-foreign contingent in the 1593 hearing, in which Fuller and Moore argued that Steelyard merchants held more economic privileges and rights in London than Londoners themselves. The latter, meanwhile, is corroborated by tensions in diplomatic documents between England and the Holy Roman Empire, which show the Merchant Adventurers often ran into difficulties when trying to establish themselves in markets under the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire—difficulties which were, according to the adventurers, quite unfair given the extensive privileges that the English Crown granted the Hanse merchants in the Steelyard.

As early as the 1550s, the Merchant Adventurers successfully capitalized on English perception that the Steelyard community negatively impacted English commerce and society. The claims against the Kontor merchants laid out above were well received in the English Privy Council, and the decline of Hanseatic trade in London began in earnest. This paper will now examine the impact of this the decision the Privy Council made based on these arguments. Robert Brenner, in his Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, makes a crucial intervention in the historiography of English commerce that this dissertation will apply to the historiography of the Steelyard. Economic historiography has long told a story of decline and economic depression in England in the 16th century based on total numbers and data. However, as Brenner illustrates, such narratives miss the forest for the trees: only the foreign merchant communities bore the brunt of 16th century English economic depressions. In other words, total numbers may have declined in the 16th century, but this occurred primarily because the English began limiting the commercial rights of foreigners—that is, Hanse members—in England.

These foreign merchants hemorrhaged profits and goods export, and this was particularly visible in the cloth trade, which the Hanse had dominated in England for centuries. Brenner illustrates that in total, these declines painted quite a “dramatic” picture, “with [export] totals falling from record highs of 125,298 and 132,660 cloths in 1549 and 1550 to 112,710 in 1551 and 84,968 in 1552.”[60] However, a closer examination reveals the Steelyard merchants were the ones suffering. Brenner shows that Hanse merchants’ cloth exports decreased “from 43,584 and 44,302 in 1549 and 1550, to 39,854 and a remarkable 13,829 in 1551 and 1552, the greater part of which resulted directly from the government’s canceling of the Hanse merchants trading privileges early in 1552.”[61] The Steelyard merchants could build a wall around their community to guard against the physical incursion of Londoners on their space, but they could not defend against the catastrophic reassignment of their relative position in London commerce by the English government. This moment symbolizes an important fact of the newly developing mercantilist philosophy in England at the time: public perception, national-state authority, and the state economy were slowly but surely becoming coterminous. As a result, deeply entrenched centuries-old institutions like the Steelyard crumbled to make way for English state-sponsored commercial endeavors.

And whether or not the public (or even the state) benefited from such a transfer of commercial power, the Merchant Adventurers certainly gained, even in times of difficulty. Brenner argues that in times of economic trouble, London merchants

could, and did, more effectively exploit the existing market… Above all, foreign competitors, who had controlled a major part of the cloth export commerce, were deprived of their privileges and ultimately largely excluded from the trade.[62]

This era may have led to a period of early modern economic expansion that would end in a British Empire on which the sun never set, but in the 1500s, the home market remained the most important one for English merchants to control. The first step was to push foreign competitors out, in this case by exploiting age-old distrust toward the Steelyard community. Corrigan and Sayer also illustrate that the English government was crucial to the evolution of commerce in this period, arguing that “the field of economic regulation in which the Tudor governments were most successful was probably that of foreign trade.”[63] This point reveals the importance of Anglo-Hanseatic affairs in this period, as the true fulcrum point of economic change in the late 16th century. The Tudor government made foreign business their business, and the Steelyard merchants paid the price. Corrigan and Sayer continue, “government intervened extensively at all levels of the textile trade, then England’s major export (and, through customs, an important source of royal revenue).” Furthermore, “Crown policy was crucial to the outcome of rivalries between English and foreign merchants—the Hanseatic merchants being effectively ousted in the 1560s—and to the direction of English cloth exports.”[64]

The statement that the Hanse merchants were ‘effectively ousted in the 1560s’ sounds quite simplistic, since Anglo-Hanseatic relations vis-à-vis the Steelyard remained a critical issue in the English political economy until the 1590s (as evinced from the 1593 debate discussed above). The decline in Hanse trade power in the mid-century was drastic, but it cannot be viewed as inevitably leading to the final death knells in 1598 without a deeper understanding. T.H. Lloyd illustrates this perfectly in his argument that, despite Edward VI removing the Steelyard merchants’ privileges, the Crown continued to perceive the Kontor community as important. Lloyd shows that in the 1560s, many English merchants petitioned Elizabeth to fully banish the Hanse from London, but Elizabeth took a conservative approach and merely forced the Steelyard merchants to sign a less favorable treaty. Lloyd argues that “Elizabeth could not afford to adopt a more severe line at this time, since she was still dependent upon Hanse ports for the supply of munitions. They were continually pressing for assurances that she would not send weapons to Muscovy for use in its war against Livonia and would have needed little provocation to cut off the supply entirely.”[65] The Steelyard merchants had staying power that even a removal of their privileges could not immediately knock down; even as late as the 1560s, the Hanse remained a major trade network across northern Europe (from England all the way to Muscovy), and if the German merchants threatened to cut off a supply, it had still had serious impacts on government policy. The Steelyard remained the nodal access point between the Hanse and England, and Elizabeth thus still had to walk somewhat softly around the Kontor community.

Moreover, English elites still felt the weight of Hanse commercial power by the late 1570s. Queen Elizabeth’s advisor and spymaster Baron Burghley (full name, William Cecil) wrote a “Memorandum on the Anjou Match” dated to April 19, 1579, in which he decried the various Catholic states across western Europe that he feared would collaborate to harm the English state: for example, he writes that he fears the Auld Alliance of the French and the Scottish, and also French and Spanish influence in Ireland. He concludes that “the present time also proveth very evil in accelerating of this peril for that there is newly controversy betwixt the merchants of England and the Hanse towns, where if traffic be interrupted or suspended the enemies abroad will take no small advantage.” Even in 1579, the English still felt critically reliant on Hanse trade for imports and revenues, and if England lost access to the Hanse network, this would put the Crown at a significant disadvantage. In this moment, it seems, the foreign merchants actually played quite an important role in the maintenance and protection of the English ‘family.’

Although it held onto some power, the Steelyard had certainly lost a great deal of its age-old commercial monopoly by the late 16th century. The Merchant Adventurers, who came to completely dominate English commerce by the last decades of the 16th century, had successfully argued that the Steelyard community was not English and had no place in English commercial affairs. In this sense, when Elizabeth later banished the Steelyard merchants entirely in 1598, she was merely adding insult to a rather grievous injury. Meanwhile, the English merchants were refining their sense of identity as representatives of the English state, leading to “a specifically moral revolution, in which people like Hakluyt and his followers ‘defined and invoked a national spirit,’ and a new literature…propelled forward a new cosmography and new conceptions of history. Such visions energized new forms like the joint-stock companies.”[66] English merchants and elites were unsettling the long-established status quo of the state’s political economy, based not only on commercial practicalities, but on moral and political philosophy. It should of course be a truism that political economics cannot be separated from the more humanist aspects of the human experience, but until recently, the historiography of the Hanse has largely ignored these complexities of the changing world of the 16th century. Thus, a melding of Hanseatic and English historiography of this period presents the best way to understand this story. That being said, the reformation of the English political economy vis-à-vis the “Us vs Them” identity cannot be said to have created a “national spirit” as Corrigan and Sayer argue. This project was, per their own words, a project of the elites—and elites alone cannot be said to represent a “national” body. However, elites certainly often drive efforts to create a national spirit later on in the development of nationalism in Europe; the historian can view this moment as an inception point of a pseudo-national English political philosophy that may have snowballed into a full-blown “national” identity in the 17^th century.

Part 4: The counter-argument to anti-Hanse measures

Many English people across the 16th century resented the influence of the Steelyard merchants in London, and believed the Kontor community was anathema to the newly developing English political-economic identity and prosperity. However, members of the Hanse and English people alike provided counterarguments to anti-Hanse sentiment in a variety of ways. This paper will now examine the various defenses proposed by those who would see the Hanse retain power in London.

In 1585, the board of Hanse Commissioners in Lübeck issued a statement to Queen Elizabeth’s Council decrying the heavier customs taxes that the Council had recently imposed on the imports and exports of the Steelyard merchants. In the document “Answers by the Hanse Commissioners to objections raised by the Council,” the Commissioners argued that, because the Hanse towns treated English merchants fairly vis-à-vis tariffs, the Hanse had a right to “petition that excessive burdens be not imposed on their citizens in England,” because “since no merchant will trade without profit, all burdensome charges will fall in the long run on those who consume wares, so that those heavy charges of yours will press on the multitude.”[67] This understanding of supply and demand economics may strike the reader as almost Smithian in character, and presumably the negative “trickle-down” effects of higher taxes on Hanse activities in London would have impacted both the English and German ‘multitudes,’ per this argument. Furthermore, the concern for the consumer in this statement is also notable. As seen earlier, English merchants and elites began to take concern with the welfare of people at various different rungs of the English commercial ladder, as part of a growing and pseudo-national political-economic identity. This statement by the Hanse Commission suggests a similar awareness of groups—i.e., the ‘multitude’ outside of the elite tier of merchants and policymakers.

Additionally, the Hanse Commission noted in this statement that the English merchant community acted quite hypocritically. Under the current state of high taxes on Hanse exports, the Commission argued that “the advantage is all on the side of the English, and if the Hanse towns raised their rates on the innumerable articles that must be bought from them, there would very soon be complaint from the people of England.”[68] And indeed, English merchants and particularly the Merchant Adventurers could often be found complaining about difficulties and unfair treatment in Hanse towns and other lands of the Holy Roman Empire. However, the Hanse merchants themselves had little claim to “just” trade practices in the Baltic and the English merchants did complain with good reason. In Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation 1485-1588, R.B. Wernham illustrates that Hanse merchants had a history of betraying their promises to English merchants, stating that “by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1474 [the Hanse] had promised, in return for the restoration of their former privileges in England and their headquarters, the Steelyard, in London, to give the English reciprocal freedom in their territories. But they had shown no inclination to perform that promise,” and the English continued to remain “virtually excluded from direct trade with Scandinavia and the Baltic.”[69] Although the English were able to regain their footing in the Baltic in the middle of the 16th century, Hanse merchants and towns continued to ignore or conveniently forget the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht and made many efforts to gatekeep English merchants throughout. By the Commission’s own words in the 1585 document, “no merchant will trade without profit”; in the case of Anglo-Hanseatic tensions, it appears that each side saw the other’s profit as detrimental to its own. This may contain elements of mercantilist economic theory, but it also smacks of a basic competitive business attitude.

The Commission’s statement does address an interesting philosophical disparity between the Hanse and the English political economy, to claim unjust treatment at the hands of the English policymakers. The Commission states that, “as a method of raising money, the Hanse Towns do not consider high customs just, or in accordance with nature. So, while leaving the exercise of commerce free, they exact their necessary contributions, not from their friends and allies, but from the richer of their citizens and subjects.”[70] From the historiographical standpoint of changing philosophy around commerce and political economy in the late 16th century, this statement stands out as perhaps the most interesting in this entire document, because it reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the English political economy and Hanseatic commercial practices. The merchants of the Hanse thrived on their ability to avoid state regulation and interference in Hanseatic commerce;  Hanseatic elites strived and for centuries were successful in keeping their affairs “as distant as possible from the princely geopolitics of the European continent.”[71] They not only kept their trade free of regulations within the Holy Roman Empire, they also made it their business model to gain privileges from other states—such as the privileges for the Steelyard merchants in England—that would allow them to bypass foreign regulation as well. Here, then, the Commission reaffirms the Hanse’s age-old business philosophy of minimal customs, tariffs, and other regulations.

But this very practice of Hanse merchants doing commerce on their own terms without state sponsorship at home weakened the Hanse by the 16th century compared to its rivals. The world was becoming too vast, and opportunities for speculation and exploration too many, for a commercial organization to subsist on its own coffers alone. As Turner illustrates, the economic tides of the era were shifting away from the haphazard economies of the Middle Ages toward a “political economy, a set of ideas and policies for economic regulation undertaken by governments to secure treasure and a favorable balance of trade in the context of an international sphere populated by nation-states.”[72] As the Merchant Adventurers and their successor companies discovered, working with the state created opportunities for funding, expansion, and speculation of which the Hanse could not conceive and with which it certainly could not compete. Robert Brenner illustrates that, by around 1600, the Merchant Adventurers “controlled about one-half of London’s total export trade,” and that furthermore “its leading members enjoyed a disproportionate share of London’s highest political positions.”[73] Beginning in the Tudor period, English merchants began launching various state-sponsored expeditions to the Levant and the East Indies, both of which would soon become explosive markets for English trade and which would completely eclipse the profits even of the Merchant Adventurers in northern Europe themselves.[74] In the Tudor period, English merchants performed a two-pronged attack on the status quo of late-medieval European commerce, which can be visible in London with the Steelyard: English merchants worked with the state to deprive their old rivals (the Hanse) of trading power, and worked with the state to launch their own expansionary missions out into the world.

            But could this be said to have been inevitable, looking from the ground in Tudor London? This paper will address some complexities regarding the English merchant companies’ push outward vis-à-vis the Hanse. Many pro-English voices in this period labelled certain groups of English merchants as the greatest threat to English economic growth. This formed one of the main counter-arguments in the 1593 hearing against Fuller, Moore, and the anti-foreign contingent. In that debate, Sir Edward Hymock argues that “the beggary of our home retailers groweth not by the strangers’ retailing but by our home engrossers. So as if our retailers might be at the first hand they might sell as good cheap as the strangers can do.” That is, the London retailers are made poor by the actions of avaricious English merchants, whose policy is to accumulate money for personal wealth. Hymock continues his accusation that “this bill is thrust into the House by the home engrossers of policy that their beggaring of our retailers might be imputed to strangers’ retailing.”[75] According to Hymock, the anti-foreign contingent scapegoated the Steelyard merchants to divert attention from the economically destructive acts of the anti-foreign contingent themselves. This argument should ring familiar to any twenty-first century reader, who may be familiar with nationalist parties across Europe and the U.S. who place blame for economic hardship on immigrants and foreigners while lobbying the government to completely de-regulate corporate profit-seeking at home. If it wasn’t the Hanse merchants of the Steelyard corrupting the economic welfare of the London community, according to Hymock, how did the English merchant community then rob London business of its vitality? This paper will now examine this complex issue—one which the Merchant Adventurers themselves corroborated, despite their own anti-Steelyard proclivities.

Hymock argues against Fuller’s and Moore’s claims that the Steelyard merchants were responsible for money flowing out of the English market. Fuller and Moore had claimed that the Kontor community sold their goods at a high profit and then took English coin back to Germany, thereby drawing currency out of England and relatively weakening the English position in the developing school of mercantilist thought. But, Hymock states,

The strangers are not they that transport our coin but it is our own merchant: for it is to be seen in all the Low Countries where her Majesty utters much treasure, there is not so much English coin to be had as in the Hanse towns where the merchants trade. Known of his own experience that in a Hanse town a contract of £20,000 hath been made with an English merchant and agreed to be all paid in English angels. So it is the merchant English and not the stranger that vents our coin.[76]

Brenner illustrates that it became common practice in the second half of the 16th century for English merchants to take their money abroad, as Hymock decries here. Under Elizabeth, English merchants became obsessed with imports—that is, the merchants learned to go “directly to the sources of supply.”[77] Meanwhile, Germany was becoming a supply market of secondary interest compared to goods markets across Asia. Strikingly, then, the English merchants who wanted to see the Hanse out of the Steelyard held two rather irreconcilable views. Firstly, these merchants claimed that the Steelyard merchants sucked currency out of the English home market and thus weakened the bullion supply of the English people and ‘beggared’ the English ‘multitudes. Secondly, they became obsessed with expansion into new supply markets, from which they imported huge quantities of rare and luxury goods and hemorrhaged the very bullion they argued was necessary to maintain quality of life for the ‘multitudes.’ This should prove the difficulty of assigning the economic trends of the time to any one particular definition, such as ‘mercantilism.’ However, the fact that the Steelyard merchants still lost this argument also shows that at this point, they were simply out of their league in fighting for their rights in a foreign land where English merchants’ contradictory policies could be forgiven or supported by a biased English government that tended to support its own agent (at worst, a ‘known evil’) over foreign merchants (an ‘unknown evil’).

            This paper will now return to the 1585 Hanseatic Commission Statement against English taxes on Hanse imports for one final and curious argument. The Commission concluded its statement with the following claim:

Without doubt your lordships realise how important it is to England, in the matter of customs and otherwise . . . that wool should be distributed at a reasonable price. Now since your exorbitant exactions have been made, throughout the whole of Germany and in many of the Hanse Towns, where years ago cloth used to be made of English wool, many of the citizens have made trial of the wools of Pomerania, Prussia, Mecklenburg and Hesse, and have found that from them cloths of no less value than the cloths commonly called “sorting cloths” can be made. They can sell a yard of this cloth, finished in the English method in length and breadth, for three thalers; thus the English cloths, being burdened with these intolerable duties, are beginning to be thought less of.[78]

The Commission claimed that higher tariffs on Hanse imports would simply result in Germans pursuing their own supply of goods that the Hanse had historically brought from England. This argument may indeed strike the reader as quite weighty, given the unrivaled importance of cloth exports to the late-medieval English economy. Indeed, the Steelyard existed primarily to facilitate the export of English cloth, and the English government had long granted the Kontor community commercial privileges in order to maximize that export. However, as Brenner shows, cloth finally began to decline in importance in the final years of the 16th century—not because these exports declined (Brenner argues that they are actually “notable for their constancy”[79]) but rather because in this period, other markets began to grow. By the end of the Elizabethan era, cloth was no longer a hot-button issue in the English economy—Persian and Chinese silks and South/Southeast Asian spices had taken over the consciousness of the English commercial class.

            Thus, when in the late 1590s disputes once again broke out between the Hanse (this time backed by the Holy Roman Emperor) and the Merchant Adventurers over mutually unfair treatment, Queen Elizabeth determined that the Hanse merchants in England no longer provided enough service to the English political economy to warrant their presence. In 1598, the Queen issued a statement to the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs of London, putting an end to the issue once and for all:

We… have thought fit to command all in our realm appertaining to the said Hanse Towns and especially such as reside in London either in the house called the Stillyard or any other place do forbear to use any manner of traffic et. The Mayor and Sheriffs to repair to Stillyard to give knowledge of this command, and to take possession of the same on the 28th instant, it to remain in our custody until we understand of any of the favourable course taken by the Emperor for restitution of our subjects to their lawful trade, etc.[80]

England had moved on—Europe had moved on—from the anachronistic organization that was the Hanse. A diplomatic feud with the Holy Roman Emperor was the perfect casus belli for this commercial war that saw the Steelyard finally removed as the doorway between the Hanse and the English political economy. After the Steelyard banishment of 1598, the Hanseatic League began a rapid decline in prominence; it is no coincidence that historiography of the Hanse never extends into the 17th century, because little of economic or political import occurred in Hanseatic history after 1598. In Philippe Dollinger’s words, the “outrage” of the 1598 banishment “caused a great stir in Germany, but in reality, as in the case of the Peterhof [the Novgorod Kontor] a century before, the closing of the Steelyard only confirmed officially the irreparable decline of Hanseatic trade in England. It was simply a form of reprisal, and in 1606 the Steelyard was returned to its owners. But it was too late to save the Kontor.”[81] Although some individual Hansa towns maintained commercial prosperity through the 17th century, the final death knell for the Hanse as an organization had already been rung.[82]

Conclusion

            At the beginning of the 1500s, it can reasonably be argued that the Hanseatic League was still the premier commercial organization in northern Europe. And beyond its loosely organized structure of towns and Kontor, Hanse trade routes also made up the predominant trade system of northern Europe in the late-medieval era. Hanseatic merchants had their hands on every market across the North and Baltic Seas, from the furs trade in Russia and the amber supply in the lands of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, to the fisheries of Bergen and perhaps most importantly, the cloth export markets in England. Although the Hanse was a German organization and only German towns were allowed to be members of the League, what made Hanseatic commerce great until the end of the 1500s was its transregional character; the Hanse was not the Hanse without its merchants docking in London, Bruges, Antwerp, and other such non-German trade centers. Even though the League had lost its monopoly in Novgorod and began experiencing heady competition from English and Low Countries merchants, it still continued to control a great deal of northern European trade.

            But by the dawn of the 1600s, the scene had changed. This paper has shown and analyzed the downward trend of Hanseatic commercial power in London—their last great market outside of Germany—across the second half of the 16th century, and the rise of competitors to the Hanse in England. When the Steelyard merchants lost their time-honored trade privileges in the English cloth market in the 1550s, they lost competitive advantage in one of the oldest and most foundational Hanse businesses. Beginning in the 1550s, English merchants such as members of the Merchant Adventurers influenced and directed English state trade policy away from the status quo of the Steelyard trade and toward state-sponsored merchant companies that, by the 17th century, would completely control English transregional commerce. New ideas were emerging in London about the philosophy and practicalities of commerce, and these were mutually constitutive with English anti-foreignism directed toward the Hanse.

This can be seen at the local level, in parliamentary debates in which London merchants argued the Steelyard community parasitized the economy of London and deprived the London “family” of its rightful profits. As this paper discussed, the Steelyard community intentionally set itself apart from the socioeconomic space of London proper—a practice which had long given the Kontor merchants an advantage against the relatively disorganized community of English merchants. But this very separation gave London elites a casus belli against them when Londoners began taking on the project to bring commercial power back into the hands of those who were truly Londoners, or truly ‘English.’ This can also be seen in the grand scheme of northern European economies. In the second half of the 16th century, English elites began conceiving more intentionally of commerce as a pseudo-national interest of the English state, and calling for a concerted political economy in which state and merchant interests became more coterminous. In this new environment, many argued that foreigners like the Hanse did not deserve privileges in English home markets, because this countered English interests—and Hanse merchants certainly did not deserve greater privileges in the English market than London merchants themselves, who argued that they could not compete with the Steelyard community.

The English Merchant Adventurers, the most powerful English trade company throughout the 16th century, took a major role in this outward push against the Hanse in the Steelyard. The Merchant Adventurers led a two-fold attack on the old ways of English commerce by pushing against the influence of foreign merchants in England and also expanding their own networks and markets into the world outside England, including across the Hanseatic space of the North and Baltic Seas and even reaching Russia. The Merchant Adventurers gained a new competitive advantage: that of collaboration with the state. Members of the Adventurers gained roles in local and state government in the Tudor dynasty, and thus decreased state regulations of their affairs while also securing state sponsorship and legal support for both their efforts to disenfranchise the Hanse in London and to enfranchise themselves in overseas markets. The Hanseatic outsiders simply could not compete, as they had little legal power as a matter of organizational philosophy: the Hanse had long kept their affairs removed from the legal jurisdiction of their homeland, the Holy Roman Empire.

Certainly, the Holy Roman Emperor did try to step in when he sensed that the Hanse was in dire straits by the end of the 16th century. In 1579, Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg issued a statement against the treatment of the Hanse in England and northern Europe:

We learn that whereas the Hanse Towns have long enjoyed certain privileges in respect of the export of cloth from England… nevertheless certain malicious and envious citizens of London calling themselves adventurers have gone about to alter the ancient trade of the Hanse Towns, and have so contrived that the English councillors have cut off the privileges of the towns and hindered the free export of cloth, by putting on intolerably high tolls.[83]

And certainly, even as late as the 1580s, the Hanse merchants including those in the Steelyard still held a significant control of trade, but this had fallen meteorically since the beginning of the century and continued to do so. Even though the Hanse desperately tried to hang on to their markets in England and across northern Europe, at this point, analysis shows that it was likely too late. The world was changing quickly, toward political economies and state-sponsored expansion that would soon leave the old Hanseatic network of the North and Baltic Seas a mere backwater to the global commerce empires of the English and Dutch East India Companies. By the time Queen Elizabeth banished the Steelyard merchants from their London Kontor in 1598, the Steelyard was no longer the center of commerce that had made it a crucial node in the Hanseatic system that once ruled the markets and trade routes of northern Europe.

Bibliography

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Butler, John, ed. Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 14, 1579-1580. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904. 359-371. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol14/pp359-371.

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Lomas, Sophie Crawford, ed. Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 19, August 1584-August 1585. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916. 693-699. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol19/pp693-699.

“Steelyard Certificates.” In Jenks, Stuart. “The London Steelyard’s Certifications of Membership 1463-1474 and the European Distribution Revolution,” in eds. Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. 61.

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Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. London: Verso, 2003.

Droysen, Gustav. Allgemeiner Historicher Handatlas. Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1886.

Dollinger, Philippe. The German Hansa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970.

Ewert, Ulf Christian, and Stephan Selzer. Institutions of Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organization. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang AG, 2016. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znwj4.1.

Harreld, Donald J. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Lilienfeld, Aidan. “Baltic Frontiers.” Columbia Journal of History Online 1 (Spring 2022). https://columbiahistoryjournal.com/baltic-fronties.

Lloyd, T. H. England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611: A Study of Their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

North, Michael. The Baltic: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Stern, Philip J., and Carl Wennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Wernham, R.B. Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485-1588. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966.

Wilson, Peter. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna, and Stuart Jenks, eds. The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.

Appendix: Acknowledgements

The eighteen months since I first conceived of this project have been the longest and most eventful of my life. Since November 2020, I have lived in four major cities (and one small town on the north shore of Massachusetts) across two continents, worked four different jobs, had two history articles published (both on medieval Baltic history, one cited in this paper), made friends from all over the world, and—as far as I know—I have miraculously avoided catching COVID in the meantime. It is amazing to me how consistent this project remained in its focus. But this project would’ve never even begun rolling were it not for the inspiration of my Columbia history heroes Professor Martha Howell, Professor Gray Tuttle (technically in the EALAC department), and current PhD student Sally Greenland.

Sally met with me, also in November of 2020, to encourage me to pursue my interests in pre-17^th-century history. Sally has an academic free spirit that I can only aspire to: study what you actually care about, and everything else will fall in line. It is thanks to her encouragement and counsel that I was able to hold onto my goals, and that I am now presenting this project here.

Professor Howell told me about the Steelyard in a Zoom conversation in November of 2020, and suggested I look at it as a way of bridging my interests in German Baltic history with more recent English history. Professor Howell was also my first contact at Columbia in late 2019, before I even applied to the program I am now about to graduate. Her words of encouragement then are part of the reason I joined this program in the first place.

I stumbled into Professor Tuttle’s class “Local History in Tibet” in winter semester of 2021 coming from a reasonable background in modern East Asian history but having no idea what to expect from the class and its approach to history. As it turns out, our discussions in that class inspired my passion for history even through the heaviest and most difficult months of the pandemic winter. Hearing everyone’s local history stories and passions—and having Professor Tuttle’s encouragement to do my final as a multimedia project on medieval Baltic history (which eventually became my article published at the Columbia Journal of History) carried my spirit as a history student. It is thanks to this class that I experimented with a local history approach in my dissertation. But beyond the dissertation, I cannot express in words my gratitude both to professor Tuttle, and also to my friends in that class (particularly Haocong and Uudam).

I would also like to thank my friends Xintong (CU/LSE ’23) and Lukas (LSE ’22) for their energetic support of my academic passions. I’ve only known each of them for less than a year, but I know they are both lifelong friends. To each of them: let’s attend classical music concerts in the future, and let’s continue to support each other in our future PhDs or anything else we decide to do.

See you all soon, and talk to you sooner.

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[1] T. H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611: A Study of Their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.

[2] Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 62.

[3] T.H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 21.

[4] Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, 341.

[5] Gustav Droysen, Allgemeiner Historicher Handatlas (Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1886), Plate 28. This map should not be taken as a perfect representation of the Steelyard’s geography, but can be used to get a general idea of its layout.

[6] T. H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 294.

[7] Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016), 97.

[8] The Wends were a pagan people who lived in the lands north of the Elbe River in modern-day Germany.

[9] Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, 62.

[10] Aidan Lilienfeld, “Baltic Frontiers” Columbia Journal of History Online 1 (2022), https://columbiahistoryjournal.com/baltic-fronties.

[11] Dollinger, The German Hansa, xvii.

[12] Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 206.

[13] Dollinger, The German Hansa, 330.

[14] Walter Mignolo, “Local Histories/Global Designs” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: William Collins Sons, 1992).

[15] Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the 16th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 68.

[16] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge: HUP, 2015).

[17] Mike Burkhardt, “Kontor and Outposts,” in Ed. Donald J. Harreld, A Companion to the Hanseatic League (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

[18] The other three Kontor were in Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod.

[19] Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer, Institutions of Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organization (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang AG, 2016).

[20] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (London: Verso, 2003); and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the 16th Century.

[21] Robert A. Denemark and Kenneth P. Thomas, “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate,” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1988): 47-65.

[22] This term was coined after Dollinger wrote. 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.

[23] Lloyd, England and the German Hanse.

[24] Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 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 economic entity, but its core still lay within the Empire and thus the Emperor could be technically called the highest authority in the diplomatic space of the League.

[25] Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,” 128.

[26] Burkhardt, 128.

[27] Ewert and Selzer, Institutions of Hanseatic Trade, 80.

[28] Ewert and Selzer, 80.

[29] Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,” 145.

[30] Burkhardt, 129.

[31] Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks, eds., The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 153.

[32] Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,” 147.

[33] Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, eds., The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 158.

[34] Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, eds., The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 158.

[35] Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,”147-150.

[36] And those who died in the Steelyard would have likely died without family at their bedsides, as no women or children were allowed in the Kontor.

[37] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing,” in Ian W. Archer and F. Douglas Price, eds., English Historical Documents 1558–1603 (London: Routledge, 2011) 215, https://www.routledge.com/English-Historical-Documents-15581603/Archer-Price/p/book/9780415350976.

[38] Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. II, 62-64.

[39] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing,” in Archer and Price, eds., English Historical Documents 1558–1603, 215.

[40] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing,” 215.

[41] Henry S. Turner, “Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” in eds. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153.

[42] Turner, “Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” 154-155.

[43] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing,” 215.

[44] Turner, “Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” 155.

[45] Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,” 150.

[46] “Steelyard Certificates” in Stuart Jenks, “The London Steelyard’s Certifications of Membership 1463-1474 and the European Distribution Revolution,” in eds. Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 61.

[47] Jenks, “The London Steelyard’s Certifications of Membership 1463-1474 and the European Distribution Revolution,” 61.

[48] Jenks, “The London Steelyard’s Certifications,” 61.

[49] Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, “Hansards and the ‘Other’. Perceptions and Strategies in Late Medieval Bergen,” in eds. Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 157.

[50] Wubs-Mrozewicz, “Hansard and the ‘Other’,” 158.

[51] Wubs-Mrozewicz, 159; and Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts, 146.”

[52] Wubs-Mrozewicz, 158.

[53] The UK National Archives’ historical inflation converter calculates £5 in the 1590 as equaling £858.24 in 2017.

“Currency converter: 1270–2017,” The National Archives, The UK National Archives, November 28 2018, Accessed March 15 2022, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result.

[54] Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 293-294.

[55] Lloyd, 294.

[56] Lloyd, 294.

[57] Lloyd, 294.

[58] Lloyd, 294.

[59] Lloyd, 294.

[60] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 7.

[61] Brenner, 7.

[62] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 8.

[63] Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 66.

[64] Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 66.

[65] Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 306.

[66] Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 67. Richard Hakluyt was an English geographer and a prominent proponent of English overseas exploration and colonialism.

[67] “Addenda: Miscellaneous 1585,” in Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 19, August 1584-August 1585, ed. Sophie Crawford Lomas (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916), 693-699. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol19/pp693-699.

[68] “Addenda: Miscellaneous 1585,” ed. Lomas.

[69] R.B. Wernham, Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485-1588 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 64.

[70] “Addenda: Miscellaneous 1585,” ed. Lomas.

[71] Lilienfeld, “Baltic Frontiers.”

[72] Turner, “Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” 153.

[73] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 3.

[74] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 3.

[75] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing.”

[76] “Debate in Parliament over aliens retailing.”

[77] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 11.

[78] “Addenda: Miscellaneous 1585,” ed. Lomas.

[79] Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 8.

[80] “1597-8: The Queen to the Lord Mayor and sheriffs of London,” Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Elizabeth, 1598-1601, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1869), 38-45. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/domestic/edw-eliz/1598-1601/pp38-45.

[81] Dollinger, The German Hansa, 343.

[82] Dollinger, The German Hansa, 353.

[83] “Elizabeth: July 1580, 21-31,” in Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 14, 1579-1580, ed. Arthur John Butler (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 359-371. British History Online, accessed April 15, 2022, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol14/pp359-371.