Markets and their Agents

Markets and the agents who shaped and created them are the subject of the 6th annual conference of the research group on premodern economic history. Markets feature prominently in recent research. Discussions cover the questions, for example, how a market can be grasp as a place, an event or a mechanism of exchange, or whether premodern economies have just hosted markets or if some of them can even be regarded as market economies. The conference in Basel will now turn to the agents who forged and connected markets. Exchange was done between persons and with the help of persons: Artisans, retailers and poor people tried to better their living conditions by engaging on the market, merchants interconnected different markets, urban personnel (such as brokers, men working at the public scales, or the town council as a whole) regulated and facilitated exchange. By focusing on economic practices and the agents who performed them, the conference aims at analyzing the specific characteristics of premodern markets, the reasons why people became active on the market and the institutions which formed exchange processes and were in turn shaped by them. Please register until 11th June 2018: ulla.kypta@unibas.ch Programm Thursday, 21st June 2018 14:00-14:15 ULLA KYPTA (Basel) welcoming remarks Everyone’s a market actor? 14:15-15:00 FRANZISKA QUAAS (Hamburg): Towards a Different Type of Market Exchange in the Early Middle Ages. The Sacrum Commercium and its Agents 15:00-15:30 coffee break Public institutions 15:30-16:15 EVA TREIN NIELSEN (Copenhagen): Facilitating Trade in Scandinavia in the 12-14th Centuries – Mutual Trust created through Control and Regulations to the Benefit of All 16:15-17:00 FRANZISKA NEUMANN (Rostock): Hybrid Bureaucracy. The Mining Administration as Market Agent in the 16th Century 17:00-17:30 coffee break Merchants 17:30-18:15 MARIA CIEŚLA (Warsaw): Jewish Merchants and their Partners in Grand Duchy of Lithuania Key note lecture 18:30-20:00 OSCAR GELDERBLOM (Utrecht): Private Initiative – Public Benefit: The Rise of Amsterdam’s Financial Market in the Seventeenth Century Friday, 22nd June 2018 Brokers between buyers and sellers 08:30-09:15 MICHAEL ROTHMANN (Hannover): Gatekeepers of economic networks: Brokers in medieval textile markets 09:15-09:45 coffee break 09:45-10:30 MARCO TOMASZEWSKI (Freiburg/ Breisgau): Merchants, Brokers, 'Peasants' and the Market for Raw Linen in Early Modern St. Gall Brokers between different markets 10:30-11:15 KLEMENS KAPS (Vienna): Agency and market power of a mediator between internal and international markets: The Greppi Marliani Company as commercial connector between the Habsburg dominions and Spanish colonial markets in the second half of the 18th century 11:15-11:45 coffee break 11:45-12:30 HEINRICH LANG (Bamberg): Secondary Markets for Profit from Bankruptcy: The Loans to the French Crown and the Florentine Bankers as Agents of Markets in the 16th century 12:30-13:00 MARIA ALEKSANDROVA (Moscow): concluding remarks