State Capacity and Business Practices in Early Modern Maritime Commerce

This panel explores the ways in which state and fiscal capacity interact, support, inhibit, and/or inform business practices in maritime commerce in the early modern Atlantic and Baltic arenas. While each paper explores separate case studies, all explore the fundamental question of how does state capacity influence everyday business practices and mechanisms of merchant networks throughout the Atlantic Ocean and Baltic Sea? Does state capacity support or inhibit commercial relations? Alternatively, what happens when state capacity is not sufficient to support commercial transactions (e.g., specie or currency availability)? How do merchants respond to efforts by the state to control or limit their access to certain markets, such as mercantilist policies meant to keep trade within one’s empire? Do state policies such as tariffs and revenue collection inform the actual mechanics of trade? In effect, the question becomes “to smuggle or not to smuggle?” The early modern economy is an ideal period of time to examine as it is a transitionary period where both technology and political developments tend to dominate the attention of historians. Rather, this panel seeks to understand better the delicate balance of state policies and healthy commercial activity and how this intricate dance influenced the development of state capacity into the late 19th century, when the first ‘modern’ states began to appear.