THE SOUND TOLL REGISTERS, 1497-1857

on 35 mm microfilm

in cooperation with the State Archives Filming Centre, Viborg, Denmark

Background

The Sound (Øresund in Danish) is the long narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden that forms the passage from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea. For centuries it has been one of the busiest waterways in the world. Tolls were exacted there going back to approximately 1429.

Baltic trade routes and the Sound

From 1497 until it was abolished in 1857 the details of the Sound Toll levied by the Kingdom of Denmark, which actually consisted of several different types of charges, were recorded in registers by Danish customs officials at the Customs House near the fortress of Kronborg that dominated the strait at Elsinore (below).

Kronborg castle on the Sound at Elsinore

(courtesy of Nationaal Archief Nederland,

B-40-36- 3, inv. no. 674, detail)

Most of these registers are still extant and form a remarkable series running to more than 700 volumes occupying 58 meters on the shelves of Denmark's National Archives in Copenhagen. A series of such length and detail is found nowhere else in the world and is of incomparable importance for the history of trade and shipping and more generally for the economic history of western, northern and eastern Europe.

Maritime nations and towns

Ships from many nations and trading cities made more than a million and a half passages through the Sound from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century, leaving information on their cargoes in the Toll records. They included of course the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, England and France, the Netherlands (Amsterdam and many others), the German towns of the North Sea (Bremen) and so-called “Wendish” ports of the Baltic coast (Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund). Farther east were the ports of Stettin and Danzig (now Szczecin and Gdansk in Poland), Königsberg (the Russian enclave Kaliningrad), Riga, Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia), Narva, and last but not least St. Petersburg after its construction as a window on the west by the Czar starting in 1703.

Flow of goods

Going from west to east, the main goods carried were salt; wine from France, Iberia and the Rhineland; herring; fabrics; skins and hides; and, increasing in importance in the eighteenth century, “colonial goods”, tropical products from the European colonies in the new world and Africa. Carried from east to west were vast quantities of grain from the plains of Poland and Prussia, especially rye and, growing in importance with time, wheat; wood from the forests of Sweden and Finland, iron and copper from Sweden, flax and hemp, and (linen) fabrics.

Rise and fall

From the sixteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century the Dutch were the leading maritime nation and their trade in bulk commodities with the Baltic, known as the “mother trade”, was fundamental to the prosperity of the country, surpassing the more exotic and well-known spice trade with the East Indies. Later other nations, in particular Great Britain, surpassed the Dutch and in the nineteenth century the growing commercial power of the United States was signaled by the arrival of the first American ships in the Sound records. It was to be the Americans who sounded the death-knell of the Toll, exerting diplomatic pressure to have it abolished, which finally occurred in 1857 after a history spanning some 360 years.

Interest for research and reasons for micropublishing originals

The Sound Toll records have attracted the interest of historians since the late nineteenth century. Much work has been done to extract statistical information from them and publish it in tabular form, such as in the renowned seven-volume series of Nina Bang and Knud Korst, Tabeller over Skibsfart og Varetransport gennem Øresund...., which itself took nearly half a century to realize (1906-1953) and stops in 1783, almost seven and a half decades before the Toll registers end.

While such resources form an invaluable tool for scholarship, their principal object, as Nina Bang herself stated in her preface to the first volume in 1906, was to provide statistics on trade. For that reason she left aside all the other material presented in the toll registers, including above all “the very rich materials” on the history of the Toll itself. Furthermore, while she was able to furnish information on the ships on a yearly basis; her tables on goods transported were based on ten-year intervals. Writing in the preface to his continuation of Bang’s work in 1930, Knud Korst opined: “it goes without saying that historians may pose questions to which the figures of the Toll published in print will provide no answer; questions that might only be answered by returning to the original texts themselves” [emphasis added]. The registers thus remain indispensable for research on a great many questions, such as

• the organization and collection of the toll itself
• analysis at the micro-level of individual ships and skippers
• carrying capacity of the different mercantile fleets
• rates, revenues and yields of the various taxes
• the composition and ownership of cargoes
• relations between nations and regions
• the different currencies in circulation
• forms of notation and administration
• sailing patterns and many others

It therefore remains essential to return to the original registers, but as Korst also foresaw, the publication in print (or for that matter, unforeseeable for him, in electronic format) of the entire body of original materials is simply not attainable.

Now available on microfilm

For this reason, Moran Micropublications is pleased to announce the availability on microfilm of the original toll records from 1497 to 1857 made possible by the cooperation of the State Archives Filming Centre, Viborg, Denmark.

Sources and acknowledgments

Nina E. Bang and Knud Korst, Tabeller over skibsfart og varetransport gennem Øresund, 1497-1660. 3 vols. Copenhagen/Leipzig 1906-1933.

Nina E. Bang and Knud Korst, Tabeller over skibsfart og varetransport gennem Øresund, 1661-1783 og gennem Storebaelt 1701-1748. 4 vols. Copen­hagen/Leipzig 1930-1953.

Ole Degn, “Tariff rates, revenues and form of accounts of the Sound Toll 1497-1857”. Unpublished paper.

W.S. Unger, “Trade through the Sound in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. Economic History Review, 2nd series, XII (2) 1959, 206-221.

Illustrations: Kronborg castle on the Sound at Elsinore

(courtesy of Nationaal Archief Nederland, B-40-36- 3, inv. no. 674, detail of a copper engraving by Gerard van Keulen).

Baltic trade routes and the Sound, detail of a map adapted from The Times Atlas of World History, all rights reserved.