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Holland's Baltic trade flourished as never before, and skilled immigrants helped revive local industries. But prosperity raised a political issue: should Holland trade with provinces loyal to Spain? The more Holland's leaders pushed for free trade, the more confederates in the Union of Utrecht saw them as selling out the cause to boost profits. Meanwhile, Holland upheld the public supremacy of the Reformed religion. Yet Reformed religion embraced two theologies. One, based in Geneva, required a church free of state control; the other, based in Zurich, sanctioned governance of the Church by magistrates. Most Holland clergy preferred the former view, while magistrates favored the latter. Thus several towns had major conflicts over appointment of preachers; at the provincial level, each side ignored the other's pronouncements on church governance.

Was Holland a mere collection of towns? Or was it a body politic? Clearly it was both. Towns were divided not just by local rivalries but by repeated clashes over the inland waterway: while cities tied to decaying industries (Leiden, Gouda) clung to the traditional route, those profiting from the growth of maritime trade (Amsterdam, Rotterdam) incessantly cut new channels. Yet outside forces pushed the towns to make common cause. Holland's vital Baltic trade was threatened by the Hanseatic League (Lübeck), supported by the populous county of Flanders. Attacks from the duchy of Guelders, a French ally, gave all of Holland a common foe. Finally, the government's anti‐heresy campaign, setting aside cherished legal privileges, roused universal opposition, as if all the provinces made up a single country. As iconoclast rioters moved from town to town and province to province (1566), the government faced its worst crisis.

This book explains the formation of the Dutch world entrepôt at the end of the sixteenth century, and its subsequent development, in rather different terms from those of Fernand Braudel and others who place the main emphasis on Dutch bulk freightage. The book argues that the post-1590 ascendancy of the Dutch entrepôt over the mechanisms of world trade cannot be explained in terms of anything that happened in the Baltic, or in terms of Dutch Baltic bulk freightage, and that it is also an error to see the Dutch world entrepôt as declining after 1650. In place of this rise-and-fall rhythm linked to the ups and downs of the Baltic grain trade, the book notes a more complex pattern, a sequence of seven phases, commencing with the breakthrough to world primacy during what it termed Phase One and ending with the disintegration of the seventeenth-century Dutch trading system termed Phase Seven.

This chapter explores the survival of traditional shipping despite the emergence of revolutionary changes in the shipping world during the late nineteenth century. It examines the reasons for the persistence of tradition in sailing vessels and assesses the old-fashioned and, arguably, inefficient transportation system. The chapter also details the technical developments of the twentieth century and notes the ways they drastically affected the old logistic model. It concludes with a discussion of the eventual decline of Baltic and coastal ships under sail.

This chapter examines the development of Dundee into a major east coast port with direct trading links with the Baltic and North America. It identifies the harbour as a key point of growth and a symbol of the town's developing civic identity. The building of a monumental dockside archway in 1849, funded by public subscription and designed by a competition-winning Glasgow architect, confirmed the harbour's status as the ‘gateway’ to the town. The harbour was also the location for some of the town's finest buildings and the focus of many of the street improvements undertaken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.