Cities of Commerce, Cities of Constraints. International Trade, Government Institutions and the Law of Commerce in Later Medieval Bruges and the Burgundian State

Dumolyn, Jan; Lambert, Bart

doi:10.18352/tseg.171

Cities of Commerce, Cities of Constraints. International Trade, Government Institutions and the Law of Commerce in Later Medieval Bruges and the Burgundian State

Dumolyn, Jan; Lambert, Bart

Authors

Jan Dumolyn

Bart Lambert

Abstract

This article argues that, to do justice to the institutional context of international trade in the later medieval Low Countries, a legal-historical study is necessary. Instead of considering commercial exchange from the perspective of mono-causal explanatory frameworks that assume the primacy of either the state or the city, all institutions that had an impact on the transaction costs of merchants’ activities should be studied in their own right. The pattern that thus emerges for the Low Countries between 1250 and 1500 is one in which arrangements concerning international trade were characterized by a strong complementarity of the central and the local level, rather than an antithesis between benevolent cities and predatory states.

Citation

Dumolyn, J., & Lambert, B. (2014). Cities of Commerce, Cities of Constraints. International Trade, Government Institutions and the Law of Commerce in Later Medieval Bruges and the Burgundian State. The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 11(4), 89-102. https://doi.org/10.18352/tseg.171

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Dec 15, 2014
Publication Date	Dec 15, 2014
Deposit Date	Mar 18, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Mar 27, 2015
Journal	Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis
Print ISSN	1572-1701
Electronic ISSN	2468-9068
Publisher	openjournals.nl
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	11
Issue	4
Pages	89-102
DOI	https://doi.org/10.18352/tseg.171