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This book explores the impact of urban competition on the institutional foundations of international trade in the Low Countries during the period 1250–1650, with particular emphasis on local and foreign merchant communities in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. The book offers an alternative explanation for institutional change in European commerce that is not predicated upon the existence of strong territorial states or the ability of merchants to create private order solutions. Instead, it argues that the very problem of premodern Europe's political and legal fragmentation also produced its solution in the form of open access or inclusive institutions that made it easier for merchants to deal with violence and other conflicts. This introductory chapter considers the dynamics of institutional change, focusing on the link between state formation and the growth of trade, foreign traders' use of private order solutions to prevent violent assaults or the opportunistic behavior of their agents without the support of sovereign rulers, and urban competition between commercial cities in the Low Countries.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main findings about the ways that urban competition influenced the organization of international trade in the Low Countries. In particular, the book has shown how urban competition gives rise to inclusive institutions that facilitate exchange and help merchants deal with conflicts as well as losses from violent assaults. It has also discussed how Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam supported a variety of institutions for conflict resolution to help merchants address any kind of agency problem. The chapter considers three conditions that enabled Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to transform an extremely heterogeneous institutional framework into a widely shared body of open access institutions: access to domestic and foreign markets, footloose merchants, and urban autonomy. Finally, it examines the implications of the history of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam for current theories of institutional change.

This chapter examines how the competition between neighboring ports led Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to adapt institutional arrangements to the needs of international traders. It considers how Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam were able to overcome the negative effects of urban competition and develop an institutional framework conducive to the growth of trade. It explores what the three commercial cities did to secure a central position in domestic and international trade during the period, focusing on the important role played by the urban magistrates. The chapter shows that the creation of more inclusive commercial regimes allowed Bruges, Antwerp, and particularly Amsterdam to treat all merchants equally by means of a commercial infrastructure that served the merchant community at large.

This chapter examines the various ways in which the merchants of the Low Countries dealt with losses from violent assaults. It shows the importance of urban competition, not only for specific groups like the German Hanse, but also for the merchant community at large that used the cities' increasingly sophisticated commodity and financial markets to share, spread, and transfer the commercial risks created by Europe's political and legal fragmentation. The chapter first considers how collective action was used by merchants to discipline rulers, as exemplified by the boycotts of Bruges, mostly by the German Hanse but sometimes also by English and Spanish traders, between 1270 and 1310. It then explores court proceedings and spreading of risks as a means for merchants to deal with losses and to organize compensation.