Re-Run: The First Common Market?
Bruges. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
My Own True Love and I leave next week for Belgium and my thoughts are turning toward Waterloo, Flanders Field, and the Hanseatic League.* Especially the Hanseatic League.
I’m fascinated by traveling merchants, from the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury goods from China and India to the Muslim peddlers who sold dry goods and notions to farm wives in the upper Midwest in the nineteenth century.** Part of it’s the romance of the thing: desert caravans, clipper ships and gypsy-style wagons. Part of it is the hardheaded economics of who bought what from where.
In many ways, the Hanseatic League can be seen as Europe’s first attempt at a Common Market. In the twelfth century, the European economic world was expanding. Increased agricultural productivity allowed more people to work at something other than farming, creating surplus goods for sale and a need for raw materials. (This is the same thing that made the Crusades possible. Cool, huh? The way different bits of history link together like that?) At the same time, the Teutonic Knights, a fighting monastic order interested in conversion and conquest (or possibly conquest and conversion), invaded the Slavic lands to the east. They established a network of fortified bases along the Baltic Sea that became new towns with markets where foreign goods could be bought and sold.
Being a merchant was dangerous work. By land, you had to worry about armed brigands and raiding militias. By sea, you were in danger from storms as well as pirates and their legally sanctioned cousins, privateers. Merchants from the newly formed cities of the Baltic began to join together into informal associations (hansas) to make long-distance trading safer.
They soon learned that working together not only brought greater safety at sea, it also made it easier to negotiate in the foreign towns with which they traded. (Collective bargaining, anyone?) Loose associations grew into merchant companies and guilds. By the end of the thirteenth century, Hanseatic merchants had built a trading network that stretched from Bergen (Norway) in the north, to Novgorod (Russia) in the East, and London (you know this one, right?) and Bruges (modern Belgium!!) in the west.
Hanseatic merchants were intermediaries between the workshops of Western Europe and the forests of Eastern Europe. They brought salt from the mines at Kiel to the herring fisheries of the Baltic. They exchanged cloth from Flanders, wool from England, and metalwork from Westphalia for furs, timber, wax, grain, and amber from Russia. They traded in salted fish from Scandia, wine from the Rhineland, copper and iron ore from Sweden and beer from north Germany, once Hamburg brewers figured out that adding hops would stabilize their product for transportation.
The Hanseatic League dominated northern Europe until the mid-sixteenth century, when they were elbowed aside by England and the Netherlands, whose merchants had larger, more seaworthy ships and a free-trade philosophy that made them welcome in foreign markets.
Bruges and Antwerp, here we come!
*Not to mention chocolates, waffles, beer and pommes frites.
** Yes, you read that right. Muslim peddlers in rural Iowa in the 1890s. A story for another day.
Re-Run: Word With A Past: Kidnap
I’m dipping into the archives again, because I’m in over my head here at the Margins. (So much so that I didn’t even celebrate the blog’s 3 year anniversary on May 11. Hmmmm….) We move on June 2 and to say we are not yet ready is an understatement. Too much to do, not enough hands to do it.
And speaking of labor shortages…
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage.
The colonies had originally attracted Britain’s surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as indentured servants. A few were physically coerced onto ships sailing west.
In 1640s and 1650s, the population base in Britain took a hit. More than eleven per cent of the population died in the English Civil War. (In World War I, Britain’s second most devastating war, the loss was only three percent.) With so many young men killed, the birth rate went down. Consequently, wages went up. Plenty of people must have asked themselves, “Why leave civilization for the colonies?”
With voluntary immigration down, involuntary immigration became more important. The inmates of Britain’s prisons were given a chance at a new life–whether they wanted it or not. Grown men were “Barbadosed”–the seventeenth century equivalent of being shanghaied (another word with a past, now that I think about it).
Worst of all, children were snatched from their parents and sent to the colonies as indentured servants. As a result, a new word entered English:
Kidnap. .vt. To steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or laborers for the American plantations.
History on Display: Railroaders
What with one thing and another,* My Own True Love and I haven’t made it to many museums in the last few months. Last week we made an exception. The current exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society Chicago History Museum looked too good to miss. Some of our favorite things– history, art, and railroads–together in one place. In fact, Railroaders: Jack Delano’s Homefront Photography exceeded our expectations.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Jack Delano was a photographer with the Farm Security Administration–the same government agency that hired Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to document poverty in rural America. He took pictures of coal miners in Pennsylvania, African Americans in Georgia, and small farmers in New England. His work as a whole was marked by an awareness in the dignity of working people and a fascination with the idea of diversity.
In 1942, Delano received an assignment from the newly-formed Office of War Information to take pictures that would tell the story of railroad workers as a critical element of the American war effort: soldiers of the homefront. Over the course of four months in 1942-1943, he took more than 3000 photographs of America’s railroad workers, two-thirds of them in Chicago, the heart of the nation’s rail industry. The work he produced went far beyond its purpose of morale-building propaganda. At their best, Delano’s photographs combine the moral authority of Evans and Lange’s best work with lighting reminiscent of Rembrandt or the impressionist. (One photograph in particular made me think of Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare.)
The Chicago History Museum has done an excellent job of using works of art to explore a historical moment–appropriate since Delano never forgot that the point of his work was to tell a story. His photographs are combined with brief biographies of the workers who portraits he took, explanations of how the war changed their work, railroad artifacts, and a montage of propaganda film clips, collectively titled “Railroaders for Victory”.** They also include a few interactive exhibits and make an unusual plea for the visitor to take pictures and share them on social media:
(I couldn’t resist. Obviously My Own True Love was meant to be a railroad man.)
Railroaders runs through August 10. If you’re going to be in or around Chicago, it’s worth taking the time to see–especially if you’re interested in photography, railroads, or World War II. If a visit to the exhibit isn’t in the cards, you can still see Delano’s photographs. Since his work was produced for a government agency, you can find his photographs on the Library of Congress website.*** Even easier, check out the Delano page on the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive.
*The polar vortex, a bad case of bronchitis, a bad case of home renovation
**While I was watching the clips, the man next to me gave a sad smile and said “It’s too bad we can’t mobilize our forces the same way to solve a peacetime problem, like poverty or pollution.” Something to think about.
***The search function is unwieldy, but there’s gold in there if you’re willing to take the time.