When Nyen became St. Petersburg: Patterns of specialization in Dutch shipping in the eastern Gulf of Finland in the first half of the eighteenth cntury

This article is in the first place an attempt to provide evidence of specialization on the basis of a number of Dutch maritime shipping sources. Related topics such as employment, the question of demand and supply, the characteristics of good streams or the everlasting “homeport of the ship or of the shipmaster”-discussion will not be focused on here, although they can be studied using the same source material. The analysis of the data will be limited to transportation as such and to the way in which it is registered in the sources (i.e. in the form of ship movements). In the first part of the analysis a short explanation of the data is provided, then followed by a descriptive analysis based on the appendices. Finally, some preliminary conclusions will be offered, first of all concerning patterns of specialization, in second place concerning the effects of tsar Peter’s attempt to divert foreign trade to St. Petersburg. Throughout the analysis, it is important to keep in mind that the results presented in this paper are only preliminary and based on the part of the source material that has already been processed.