History of the Hanse: Construction and deconstruction

Abstract

This article explores 150 years of historiography of the Hanse, the premodern trade network of mainly Low German merchants and their towns. It focusses on the construction of its infrastructure (the Hanseatic History Association, its source publications and its journal) and on the deconstruction of viewing the history of the Hanse in terms of its rise, greatness and fall. Instead, it looks at three different ways to grasp and understand the Hanse: (1) The dynamics of the so-called “formative” period, (2) The formalization of the Hanse, and (3) Recent critical re-evaluations of the main source editions of the Hanse, and the use of discourse or political communication at the so-called Hanse diets, the meetings of Hanse towns. Finally, the relevance of the Hanse for wider historical debates and its use for present-day purposes is discussed.