BALTIC AND NORTH SEAS

BALTIC AND NORTH SEAS. Many of the coasts of the North and Baltic Seas are inhospitable and make for hard traveling. It was not easy to travel along the mountainous shores of the Norwegian fjords or the Scottish firths, or to cross the marshes that in places lay close to the German, Dutch, and English coasts. Early modern roads were often unpaved, and in bad weather or in the wrong season might be impassible. In places, however, natural waterways made the hinterlands easily accessible. This was the case, for instance, in the Dutch delta, which contributed to the strong position of the Dutch in trade. To these natural waterways, manmade canals were added, like the system of trekvaarten that linked Dutch towns in the coastal provinces from the 1630s or the system of canals that opened up the center of Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century roads had much improved. Nevertheless, for the whole early modern period long-distance transport of people and goods over sea was generally much cheaper than over land. The waters of the North Sea and the Baltic thus acted not only as a natural border between states and a naval battleground for their conflicts, but also as a high road that connected the shores. Fishing, trade, labor migration, travel, pilgrimage, and warfare were among the reasons to cross the waters and to make contact with the inhabitants of other shores.

FISHING AS A CULTURE

Some fishing was a part-time occupation of farmers, but in other cases fishing was a specialized occupation. The coasts of the North and Baltic Seas were dotted with fishing villages. As fishing was governed by other economic laws than farming, fishing villages often lived with their back to the shore, facing the sea. Fishermen were drawn across the waters by fish such as herring, which live in huge shoals and had to be followed by fishing boats to ensure a good catch. Not only the fathers and sons who actually went fishing, but also their wives and sisters who repaired nets, sold fish, and ran the households without the men who were at sea, were attuned to a rhythm of life that differed from that farther ashore. If bad weather drove fishermen to strange shores, they would immediately understand the culture of a "strange" fishing village, and probably find themselves more at home there than in a farming village in their own region.

If fishermen would have recognized each other's way of living, this does not mean that all fished in the same way. Technical innovations that were perfected in the course of the sixteenth century made Dutch salt herring a very competitive product throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The large Dutch fishing ships called buizen followed the herring out in the open sea, caught large quantities, and treated and salted the catch at sea, which enabled the boats to stay out for weeks on end. In the early sixteenth century, fishermen from all along the coast of the Wadden Sea in northern Germany and Denmark caught herring for the North Sea island of Helgoland. Fishermen met on the fishing grounds, and there was some migration of fishermen from the south to Scandinavia, which may have led to cultural exchanges.

By 1562, when the Danish Sound Toll Registers supply us with information, the Dutch were the main importers of salt herring into the Baltic. In the 1570s and 1580s Norwegian fishermen from the coast of Bohuslen (in present-day Sweden, facing the Skagerrak) took over, only to be ousted from the Baltic market in the 1590s again by the Dutch—the most probable reason being that the fish had moved so far away from the coast that only the larger Dutch vessels could reach them. Dutch export of salt fish into the Baltic grew until the peak of Dutch fishing was reached around 1630. After that, decline set in, more rapidly after the beginning of the eighteenth century. Norwegian, British, and Scottish herring fishing grew in the second half of the seventeenth century. After 1700, Scottish herring drove Dutch herring out of the Baltic. Norwegian herring fishing boomed in 1740–1760.

NORTH SEA AND BALTIC CULTURAL UNITY

In all but the most urbanized coastal regions, by far the largest portion of the population was involved in subsistence farming and usually had cultural or economic contacts only within a quite small and well-circumscribed space, for instance a market town and its hinterland. Exchange between these regions took place through the middlemen who had dealings farther away: local elites who traveled for reasons of education, politics, or warfare, but also traders, sailors, and fishermen, as far as they fished on the open sea.

These smaller regions differed only gradually one from the next. In culture, dialect, and ways of living, one would notice change only gradually when traveling from one place to another. Traders going along the coasts from one of these small regions to another could easily communicate. Most of the languages spoken around the North Sea and southern and eastern Baltic are closely related. According to tradition, Frisians (from the Netherlands province of Friesland and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea) could speak their mother language with the local population in eastern England and in Norway. It is clear that Danish, Dutch, English, and German were considered separate languages long before the early modern period. For official contacts interpreters were needed. But even if people differentiated between these languages, it does not follow that their boundaries were clear. Before the establishment of national standard languages and their implantation through state education, a national press, radio, and television in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the regional diversity of language was great. The dialects along the North Sea and Baltic coasts changed gradually from the one to the other and did not respect territorial borders, which in some places and times were fluctuating anyway. The same holds true for other cultural practices.

What would develop into national languages in this continuum of dialects depended on political developments. Eventually the dialects of regions that were dominant culturally or otherwise became the national languages. This development could be supported by national policy, for instance through the translation of the Bible. The translation in Dutch offers a good example. For the Statenvertaling, the translation of the Bible in Dutch financed by the States General and published in 1637, a committee was formed that represented the leading dialects within the Netherlands. It discussed not only theological context, but also the linguistic choices to be made, and thus contributed to the formation of a standard Dutch language. If the young Dutch Republic had comprised other regions, other choices would have been made and another standard language would have developed. If the Dutch Republic had extended farther along the North Sea, use could have been made of the translation of the New Testament made by the West-Fleming Jan Utenhoven in Emden (in Lower Saxony, Germany) in 1553–1556. He designed a language that could have been understood from Flanders to the Baltic Sea. As Utenhoven's Bible translation shows, the variety of dialects on the eastern shores of the North Sea was bridgeable. There was more distance between English and the languages of the eastern shores of the North Sea than between those languages, but the dialects of English spoken along the North Sea coasts, especially north of King's Lynn, had more in common with other North Sea languages than did standard English, which is a southern dialect. English was harder to grasp for the inhabitants of the eastern North Sea shores than their dialects were mutually, but it was taught and learned. Along the southern shore of the Baltic the lingua franca was Low German, which was much closer to Dutch than is High German.

ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF THE NORTH SEA AND BALTIC

During the early modern period the most important centers of world trade bordered on the North Sea: Antwerp during much of the sixteenth century, Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These cities traded with the whole known world, but in each of the three cases their position was partly based on nearby trade, within the North Sea area. This was especially true for Amsterdam.

The position of Amsterdam was based in the first place on the Baltic grain trade. This was partly paid for with bullion, but the Dutch actively sought return cargo. By 1630 Amsterdam had become the entrepôt for the whole of Europe, not only in grain, but also in wood, tar, and iron. The know-how developed in the bulk trade with the Baltic enabled the Dutch to transport goods cheaply elsewhere. The English resented the large part the Dutch took in trade with the ports on their eastern shore. By the Acts of Navigation (1651, 1660, 1662, 1663, 1670, 1673) they tried to shield English trade from Dutch competition. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain had become the dominant trading nation along the North Sea, and London had developed into the third consecutive center of world capitalism to be located on the North Sea. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English turned away increasingly from the Baltic and North Sea markets to new opportunities in the Mediterranean and their colonies, especially across the Atlantic. However, reexports to northwestern Europe remained very important to British trade to the end of the eighteenth century. Throughout the early modern period, much of British and Dutch trade was with faraway markets. Goods like spices, coffee, tea, or calicos introduced new cultural practices in the North Sea area. With the relevant goods, these practices were first introduced in Amsterdam or London, then transported to other ports within the region and ultimately from the coasts inland. By the eighteenth century Hamburg developed into an important competitor of Amsterdam on the European mainland, receiving much British trade.

Not only the great centers but also the smaller towns on the North Sea profited from this trade. The town of Mandal in southern Norway, for instance, around 1700 had regular trade contacts with all North Sea coasts and the southern Baltic. Norway provided wood for shipbuilding and other construction work in England and Holland. Wood was essential to buildings, even buildings in stone. The Norwegian bishop Jens Bircherod is said to have remarked after the London fire of 1666 that many Norwegians had warmed themselves at this fire. In the soggy Dutch soils wooden piles were needed to support buildings made of stone and brick; 13,659 wooden piles were needed, for example, to support the new Amsterdam city hall in 1655. The Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) wrote that if one turned Amsterdam upside down, one would discover a subterranean Norwegian forest.

Denmark exported grain and cattle to Holland and the north German cities. Denmark and Norway exported fish to the Baltic coasts, as did the Dutch. The fish trade carried the salt trade in its wake, which in its turn was followed by the trade in Mediterranean products. The Scottish lowlands and the Shetlands depended on imports from England, Holland, and Scandinavia for many primary products. In exchange, the Shetlands exported fish to Bremen and Hamburg. Lowland Scotland exported grain to Norway and Rotterdam, coal (as did northern England) and salt to the whole of northern Europe, and coarse textiles, fish, and cattle. Even contacts between two not very developed areas such as Scotland and Denmark were extensive, although they were relatively unimportant in the system as a whole. The Baltic exported not only grain, but also Swedish iron and naval stores. Tar, pitch, flax (for linen canvas), and hemp (for rope) were essential to wooden sailing ships. The Baltic produced all of these, and access to its trade was therefore of strategic importance to the great maritime powers.

URBANIZATION AND CULTURE

The importance of trade in this system had several consequences. Perhaps the most prominent structural characteristic of the North Sea/Baltic area is urbanization, especially on its southern shores. The Hansa with its civic culture had extended over the North Sea and Baltic coasts. In succession the southern Netherlands, the northern Netherlands and—after 1800—England became the most urbanized areas of Europe.

Reading and writing were strongly stimulated by trade and thus flourished in trading cities. Therefore the North Sea shores saw the early spread of reading and writing. Literacy in Flanders, Holland, and England was already relatively high by 1500, before the printing press or the Reformation could have much influence. The percentage of literate women was also much higher in the northwest than in other parts of Europe.

For the early modern period, these literate town dwellers had a relatively rationalistic and individualistic outlook on life. Holland, with its wet soil, was forced to import bread grain from elsewhere and to specialize in commercial agriculture and other commercial ventures, which were integrated in a world market already before 1500. At this early date, an important number of rural and urban households in Holland were already dependent on wage labor. The provision of bread grain from northern Germany and Poland led to less dependence on local harvests and thus to less insecurity about survival. Trade risks were averted by sharing ships and by developing commercial insurance. This supported a world view that learned to calculate risks. Borrowing against future income became another field that seemed to consist of calculable risks. In some cases financial techniques were borrowed at least to some extent by one North Sea state from the others. In this climate of relatively calculable risks, of increased security and rationality, the belief in witchcraft dwindled. Science prospered.

Protestant culture. Protestantism is an obvious characteristic of the North Sea/Baltic basin, as all coastal areas adopted it. The North Sea and Baltic coasts had already had a religious character of their own in the Middle Ages. In northwest France, on the British Isles, in the Netherlands (with the exception of the southern rim), in northern Germany, and in Scandinavia penance had become a private matter. Public expressions of guilt and penance had grown less important. Carnival had never taken root there. The merchants who carried the center of commercial capitalism from Antwerp to Amsterdam in 1585 were Protestants fleeing religious persecution. Arminian thinking traveled from the Dutch Republic to England. Puritans carried Reformed Pietist thinking in the opposite direction in the 1630s. These religious movements spread along trade routes over England, Scotland, and the Dutch Republic. From the North Sea basin they spread to other areas, both inside and outside Europe, but it is clear that their innovative center lay in English Puritan thought, and to a somewhat lesser extent in Dutch Reformed Pietism.

Migration and cultural exchange. Exchange between the North Sea and Baltic shores was also mediated by migration flows. In the period between 1600 and 1775 the core region of the Dutch Republic, the coastal province of Holland, attracted more than two million immigrants. The majority of these were from the continental coastal regions of the North Sea, especially before 1720. In the case of the Norwegian sailors and servant girls who migrated to the Dutch Republic, we know that they took back home cultural impulses from Holland, to the point of being considered "dutchified." The largest flow of Norwegian youths went to Holland in the years 1680–1725. In peacetime, the Dutch Republic needed some 33,000 men to man its fleets in 1610, and between 44,000 and 50,000 men between 1630 and 1770. From the end of the seventeenth century the English fleets required more men than the Dutch: 55,000 sailors in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, 70,000 by the middle of the eighteenth century, and 95,000 at the end of it. However, England could recruit these from a much larger population, as could other rival maritime powers. On a per capita basis, the Dutch required ten times as many sailors as France, and five times as many as England or Spain. Therefore, the Dutch had to rely on international recruitment to man their fleets. This created the largest international labor market northwest Europe had ever seen.

Diffusion of Dutch navigational knowledge.

Crews recruited for the Dutch fleet outside the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century came mainly from other North Sea and Baltic coasts. This led to a diffusion of nautical knowledge. Dutch teachers and manuals in Dutch were very influential along the German, Scandinavian, and Baltic coasts. Their influence lasted well into the eighteenth, and even into the nineteenth century. Navigation was taught in Dutch in Hamburg from 1749, and in Mecklenburg and Emden from the 1780s. Many a mid-eighteenth century Scandinavian or German sea captain kept his log in Dutch. They certainly brought other Dutch customs home, too. However, by the second half of the eighteenth century Dutch trade had lost its lead, the Dutch fleet was shrinking, and the Dutch labor market had lost its magnetic force.

STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS

We already noticed the strategic importance of Baltic naval stores in the age of sail. As long as the Dutch could, they tried to prevent Denmark and Sweden from becoming so powerful that they could close the Sound and hinder Dutch trade with the Baltic. In 1644 and 1645 the Dutch navy escorted Dutch merchantmen through the Sound, preventing the Danish King Christian IV (ruled 1588–1648) from collecting the Sound tolls, and in 1658 it prevented Charles X Gustav of Sweden (ruled 1654–1660) from becoming dominant on both shores of the Sound.

In the seventeenth century the states around the North Sea and the Baltic led the so-called military revolution, with larger professional armies and large permanent, specialized, and therefore expensive fleets. The Dutch Republic, which could raise an army or fleet by borrowing against future tax revenue, is a prime example of a capital-intensive manner of state building. Even if England was slightly more coercive and Denmark and Sweden even more so in their ways of collecting the necessary revenues, none of these states developed a full-blown case of military-bureaucratic absolutism like that of Prussia or France in the eighteenth century. In all four of these countries certain civil rights survived the military revolution. The Dutch bourgeois town regents class and the British Parliament maintained control over taxes and state finances, keeping interest rates low and enabling their respective states to borrow in times of war.

Money was needed for the ever larger armies and fleets that warfare required. England and the Dutch Republic fought three major wars on the North Sea in the seventeenth century and another in the eighteenth. The English claim to sovereignty over these seas lay at the bottom of the conflict. The Acts of Navigation of 1651 helped cause the first of these wars (1652–1654). In it the British employed larger andmoreheavily armedships thanever before.These ships, fighting in line, managed to dominate the Dutch fleet, which still consisted partly of armed merchantmen. Already during the war the Dutch States General decided to build bigger and more heavily armed men-of-war. The second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) showed that the Dutch had learned their lesson. Employing the same tactics that had brought the British success in the previous war, the Dutch managed to hold their own in the Four Day Battle in 1666, and successfully attacked the British fleet on the Medway River in 1667. The third war (1672–1674) brought no clear gain to either of the two maritime nations. With hindsight it is easy to see that Britain would have become the dominant trade and naval power even without these wars. Its size and geographical position would have prevailed anyway. But the Anglo-Dutch Wars were important because they fundamentally changed naval warfare, making it much more expensive. One of the first victims of this development was the Dutch Republic, which after 1714 could no longer afford to take part in any major war.

See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars ; Baltic Nations ; Commerce and Markets ; Communication and Transportation ; Denmark ; Dutch Republic ; Dutch War (1672–1678) ;England ; Hansa ; Mobility, Geographic ; Navigation Acts ; Poland, Partitions of ; Poland to 1569 ; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795 ; Russia ; Serfdom in East Central Europe ; Shipping ; Sweden .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kirby, David. The Baltic World, 1772–1993: Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London and New York, 1995.

——. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London and New York, 1990.

Kirby, David, and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen. The Baltic and the North Seas. London and New York, 2000.

Macinnes, Allan I., Thomas Riis, and Frederik Pedersen, eds. Ships, Guns, and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c. 1350–c. 1700. East Linton, Scotland, 2000.

North, Michael. From the North Sea to the Baltic: Essays in Commercial, Monetary, and Agrarian History, 1500–1800. Aldershot, U.K., 1996.

O'Brien, Patrick, Derek Keene, Marjolein 't Hart, and Herman van der Wee, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.

Roding, Juliette, and Lex Heerma van Voss, eds. The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800). Hilversum, Netherlands, 1996.

Royen, Paul van, Jaap Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds. "Those Emblems of Hell"? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870. St. John's, Newfoundland, 1997.

Lex Heerma van Voss