Managing Markets: Commercial Institutions in the Principalities of the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries Compared

Addressing a fundamental gap in the historiography, this project
offers the first large-scale comparative study of the role of institutions
in international trade during the later Middle ages and the early
modern period. It focuses on the Low Countries, an area which,
throughout this period, was heavily commercialised and attracted
merchants and goods from all corners of Europe and the then-known
world. Two PhD students will compare the organisation of longdistance
trade in six principalities and their main trading cities,
covering both the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries and periods of
economic ascendancy and decline. The project bridges the divide
between present-day Belgium and the Netherlands and between
what is known in traditional historiography as the core and the more
peripheral regions of the Burgundian and Habsburg Low Countries. It
further advances existing scholarship by looking explicitly for
collaboration and coordination, rather than opposition, between
central governments, urban authorities and others involved in the
organisation of trade and by also considering the wider, noninstitutional
context of market development. The result will be a
greatly enhanced understanding of what made international trade tick
in one of the most commercially dynamic areas of fifteenth and
sixteenth-century Europe.