Historians have long been interested in the study of the most vibrant Northern European port cities of the early modern period, and the merchant communities that conducted their business from there. The latest historiographic trends have focused not only on their commercial successes, or the political-institutional status that defined them ...
(Show more)Historians have long been interested in the study of the most vibrant Northern European port cities of the early modern period, and the merchant communities that conducted their business from there. The latest historiographic trends have focused not only on their commercial successes, or the political-institutional status that defined them as merchant republics, but also on the social practices, perceptions and interactions that made these cities multinational spaces par excellence.
However, even the most cutting edge contributions delve on a few usual suspects, usually the port cities which occupied a pivotal position in the world system of the time. The trio Antwerp, Amsterdam and Hamburg provide a case in point. Consequently, a plethora of more peripheral and ultimately less impactful cases are overlooked. In this paper we will focus on the less familiar 17th-century Danish overseas commercial centre, Glückstadt.
The foundation of Glückstad was a personal political project of the Danish king Christian IV, who wanted to create a trading emporia from where Denmark could more actively participate in overseas commerce. The political relevance of this city for the Danish overseas designs was made clear when Danish Atlantic joint-stock company was named after the city (The Glückstadt Company). Through the concession of jurisdictional and diplomatic privileges, Christian IV sought to attract members of the leading trading diasporas of the day to Glückstadt, such as the Portuguese Sephardic nation, as well as seasoned and wealthy German and Dutch merchants. The king hoped that their capital, contacts and know-how in overseas trade could be used to increase the wealth and grandeur of Denmark.
With this paper we seek to unveil the settlement dynamics of merchant communities and trading diasporas in this node of international trade and global exchanges. We are particularly eager to consider two dimensions:
1) The reasons that lead the political power to sponsor the creation of this space and how its upbringing was reshaped by the agents who settled and did business there.
2) The tensions that stirred up from the coexistence of the Danish crown, the local governance institutions and the foreign trading communities that settled there.
Glückstadt, albeit arguably less prominent than other port cities, provides historians with an alternative narrative for the rise and fall of the “merchant republics”. This emporia was envisioned and built by the Danish crown, only to be reshaped by the cross-cultural interactions of its inhabitants and trading nations. Glückstadt represents the attempts of what is usually perceived to be a semi-periphery of the World System (Denmark) to increase its share of the overseas-trade wealth alongside the leading European commercial powers of its time.
(Show less)