Abstract
Since the late sixteenth century, parallel with the growth of West-European ocean shipping, seaborne connections between the North and Baltic seas increased constantly. The rising maritime powers, the Dutch Republic and Great Britain, carried to the Baltic colonial and manufacturing produce in exchange for grain and raw materials, thus connecting the area with their oceanic trades. These commodity flows are amply illuminated by the Sound Toll records. In contrast, evidence of intra-Baltic shipping is fragmentary and imperfect, with many gaps. Such an imbalance of sources implies a drawback: we do not know how dominant the West-European connections actually were in Baltic shipping. Fortunately, there are a few primary records that shed light on intra-Baltic shipping, notably the ship-lists of the port of Cronstadt published by the Russian and German-language journal Sankt Peterburgskije Vedomosti/St. Petersburgische Zeitung from 1744. The port of Cronstadt is particularly interesting as it constitutes the extreme eastern terminus of sea routes from the wider world. No comprehensive data from these ship-lists have hitherto been published. Utilising them, this article analyses the main trends in the development of St. Petersburg's shipping connections within the Baltic Sea as well as with the regions beyond the Danish Sound.
Highlights
Since the late sixteenth century, parallel with the growth of West-European ocean shipping, seaborne connections between the North and Baltic seas increased constantly
The rising maritime powers, the Dutch Republic and, subsequently, Britain, were the key players in this process: in the best part of the seventeenth century, and until the 1790s, they accounted for over a half of all shipping passing through the Danish Sound.[1]
While the Sound Toll Registers make it possible to sketch a reliable overview of seaborne connections between the Baltic world and Western Europe, they do not reveal what happened within the Baltic
Summary
This was typical of British ships, no less than 60–75 per cent of which arrived in ballast, and even among the Dutch the proportion amounted to some 30–45 per cent.[18] And, as these ships represented 70–80 per cent of all Kronstadt shipping, the same applies to the overall figures of shipping passing the Sound In principle, this imbalance reflects the differences between eastward and westward trades: the former often consisted of fairly valuable finished products and so-called colonial goods, which required less cargo space than Russian primary or semi-finished exports. About 45 per cent of these cargoes came from the Baltic area, while almost 40 percent (38.6%) emanated from Prussian and North German ports Cargoes from the latter even exceeded the number of those from the Dutch Republic and Britain, taken together (see Table 4).
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