This paper analyses the rise of Swedish trade and shipping in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century. It focuses on three factors that shaped Sweden’s role in the area: foreign policy interest, foreign trade policy (mercantilism), and commodity demand and supply. The foreign policy interest is represented by attempts to build an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. An outcome…
This paper, basing its analysis on England’s national customs accounts between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, briefly examines England’s ports as commercial nodes (of which London was the busiest, with Hull, Southampton and Bristol becoming the main regional hubs by the fifteenth century), its shipping (which provided both liner and tramping services and sailed all year round), and…