8 WAR IN WESTERN EUROPE UNTIL 1560

Opportunities for state formation and trade

Geographically, Europe’s Atlantic coast and the British Isles may in the year 1500 seem to have been destined to become the centre of a new maritime economic order. Situated between the Baltic and the Mediterranean and conveniently placed at the end of the new trade routes between Europe and Africa, Asia and America, it was an area with a rapidly growing population and an economy favoured by cheap maritime communications. It was hardly a wonder that entrepôts for global and interregional trade, large shipowning centres and dynamic capitalism developed in this region.

The opportunities for formation and expansion of economic centres were unusually favourable. The economic development was not spreading from just one centre to various parts of the Atlantic seaboard. On the contrary, it gained momentum at several places during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: in Lisbon and Seville; on the eastern side of the Biscayan coast of Castile; in Brittany, Normandy and the Netherlands; in London and Hamburg.

The growth of maritime trade was a late medieval phenomenon throughout Western and Northern Europe which preceded the expansion of European influence overseas. However, by the early seventeenth century dynamic development and economic power had been concentrated in a small area in the southern North Sea. Holland, Zeeland and later southern England became the centres of the dynamic Atlantic economy, France took part in the development on a more limited scale, while the Iberian powers dramatically declined from their favourable position as pioneers in trans-oceanic trade.

The new centre was ahead of the rest of Western Europe (and the Mediterranean) in prosperity, technology and a wide array of skills connected with maritime trade, shipping and finance. One of these skills was the ability to use violence at sea. In Chapters 8 to 10 two main lines of development will be followed. One of these is warfare at sea as a part of the power struggle between the states. These struggles had often little to do with maritime trade but trade was affected by them. The other line of development is the increasing concentration of economic power and dynamic capitalism in a small area in the southern North Sea. Why was the originally broad development of several Atlantic and North Sea regions transformed into a situation where most regions stagnated or declined while one region achieved supremacy?

It is of course not possible to provide any definite answer, but the question is one of the most challenging problems in the role of conflict at sea for the transformation of early modern Europe. Political, naval and economic aspects are intertwined but traditionally they have been treated separately. Which institutions, organisations and interest aggregations grew and which stagnated when Western European conflict at sea spread from Europe (Chapter 8) to the Atlantic (Chapter 9) and finally became global (Chapter 10)? Around 1500, the Atlantic nations in Western Europe shared the same maritime and military technology, they had many political institutions in common, and they were involved in an increasingly dynamic maritime trade with each other, with the Mediterranean and with the Baltic. Fishing had also become a major maritime enterprise in this region.

Wool, textiles, salt, wine, fish, grain and other kinds of food, metals and manufactured products, naval stores, spices and luxuries were exchanged in a network of West European trade. The fifteenth-century development of maritime technology (three-masted ships, carvel hulls, etc.) had made it easier, safer and cheaper to transport goods in the nautically demanding Atlantic/North Sea region. Reduced transaction costs increased the possibility for international and inter-regional trade to fulfil its basic task of promoting economic growth by allowing different regions to specialise in production for which they had comparative advantages and providing all regions with the cheapest and best products available on the market. Up to the 1560s there are no signs that any region in Western Europe (or any other part of Europe) was negatively affected by this development.1