Michael Limberger

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of History

This chapter analyses the financial relationship between the city of Antwerp and its princes during the fifteenth century. City and ruler were connected by financial ties of taxation and credit relations, which in turn involved the granting of privileges and financial autonomy to city. At the same time, there were regular power struggles between th...

The city of Antwerp played a crucial role in the history of the Habsburg Empire of Charles V as a distribution center of long-distance trade, where colonial products, such as sugar, spices and precious metals were exchanged against textiles and a broad variety of luxury commodities. At the same time it was of great importance as a financial center,...

After the Golden Age of Antwerp in the 16th century, the separation of the Low Countries and the so-called Closure of the Scheldt, Antwerp’s port activity stagnated during more than two centuries. The changing geo-political situation after the French Revolution and the effects of the Industrial Revolution started a second boom of the port in the ni...

In 1644, the English agronomist Richard Weston travelled to Flanders, where he visited Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp. He paid particular attention to the type of husbandry in Flanders and Brabant, which impressed him with its very high productivity.In this paper I want to investigate this question by looking at land improvement through the introduction...

Introduction Ports were the main nodes in the network that framed the Atlantic world since the XVIth century. They were the focus of commercial life, maritime activities and financial life. These activities created specific social dynamics, which characterized port cities. In this conference, we are going to deal with the broad topic of social rel...

Biographies have become very popular during the last years. They score very high in the rankings of best-selling non-fiction books. This includes also biographies on early modern personalities. Most historical biographies do however not raise many methodological or even theoretical questions. This lack of reflection on methodology and seems charact...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous winter scenes depict rural or semi-urban scenes, with townsmen and villagers in close interaction. They were created in the intersection of urban and rural social environments. Many of his patrons came from the urban commercial and financial elite, but were closely related to the countryside for various reasons. Th...

This chapter analyzes the use of perpetual annuities in the duchy of Brabant. Data concerning the seigneurie of Kruikenburg near Brussels for the period between 1405 and 1553 are compared to existing case studies concerning other parts of Brabant. The study shows that the land and credit markets were already well established around 1400 in all part...

Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce. The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250 -1650 (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2013, 312 pp., isbn 978 0 691 16820 3).

In the 14th and 15th centuries Antwerp was a port of considerable dimensions and commercial importance. The Brabant fairs of Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp were a major meeting point for merchants from the Low Countries, the Rhineland and England from the fourteenth century onwards. This article gives a short synthesis of the existing literature on the...

This is a synthesis in Catalan of the history of the late medieval origins of Antwerp as a commercial and financial center. It shows the commercial and political factors leading to the rise of Antwerp as a commercial and financial metropolis, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The article is part of a special issue of the review...

In this chapter public annuity-sales in Antwerp during the period between the 16th and 18th century are analyzed from the ambiguous perspective of the urban ruling elite. On the one hand they had the interest of the city in mind, on the other hand they cared about their personal profit. Hence there is a close correlation between the financial situa...

This a survey of recent research on the history of Antwerp carried out at the history departments of Flemish universities (UA, UGent, KUL, and VUB).

During the sixteenth century Antwerp was the major commercial and financial centre of the North Sea area. Due to its favorable location, the city was a staple market for colonial goods and commodities from the Low Countries as well as a major money market. However, the international character of the Antwerp market made it dependent of the developme...

Lodovico Guicciardini's Descrittione di tutti I Paesi Bassi (1567) is one of the most detailed and best documented contemporary descriptions of the Low Countries. As such its account has become an integrative part of the historical narrative on the the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. Although being a description of the whole of the Low Coun...

The land where pepper grows. The first contacts between the Southern Low Countries with India. In the middle ages and early modern period, India was a far and exotic land for Europeans. Only afterthe discovery of the route around Cape the Good Hope contacts became more intensive. Also peoplefrom the Southern Low Countries travelled to India on boar...

Indebted cities were a widespread phenomenon during the Ancien Régime. However, some found ways to innovate the management of their municipal debt, whilst others fell prey to over-indebtedness or default. In this article we have left the success stories aside and focused on the latter. Using early modern Antwerp as a case study, we have disentangle...

Proper title: Conclusion: making a living in rurual societies in the North Sea area, 500-2000 This chapter deals with the central question in the book: "Rural Economy and Society in Northwestern Europe, 500-2000. Volume: Making a living. Family, income and labour" What happened to family forms in the rural societies around the coasts of the North...

Fiscal relations between states and cities in early modern Europe is a major concern for economic and financial historians. It is often argued that taxes levied on cities by states were draconian and disastrous for economic growth. This study calls for a more nuanced understanding of taxation by focusing on a broad range of urban fiscal systems to...

The period between 1250 and 1500 was decisive for modern world history. For the first time a worldwide commercial system arose, which included large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. On the other the Mongol expansion and the Black Death affected large parts of the Old World. China started with a maritime expansion but later gave up this policy. In...

This article discusses the development of urban autonomy and the consequences for the process of state-formation in the Low Countries, which was characterized by a paradox between the logic of capital accumulation as opposed to that of state power. The Low Countries were to a certain degree the successor of the Italian city-states in the rising cap...

Rezension v.: Fleig Frank, Alison: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Cambridge/Mass., London: Harvard UP 2005, 343 pp.

This article discusses the urban autonomy of Antwerp and Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the perspective of the model on Capital and coercion in European statemaking by Charles Tilly. The urban accounts of 1550-2545 and 2665-1680 are analysed to measure the impact of 'coercion’ (statemaking) on thefinancial autonomy of the tow...

This article discusses the urban autonomy of Antwerp and Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the perspective of the model on capital and coercion in European statemaking by Charles Tilly. The urban accounts of 1530-1545 and 1665-1680 are analysed to measure the impact of 'coercion' (statemaking) on the financial autonomy of the to...

Review of the meeting XXXVa Settimana di Studi, Istituto Internazionale F. Datini, Prato, 5.-9. Mai 2003

Kommentar zum Aufsatz v. Amália Kerekes: "Kolonialismusdebatte in Ungarn und Fredric Jamesons Theorie über die nationalen Allegorien der Dritten Welt"