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XI.
COMMERCE.
The home-trade is in Sweden pretty lively, which greatly depends
on the great difference between the products of the various parts of the
country. The above circumstance also can be ascribed to the fact of
Sweden’s communications being nowadays exceedingly good in the South
of Sweden, and in the North at least considerably better than in earlier
days. Great undertakings are besides continually going on for the
farther improvement of the communications.
The foreign trade, which we have here in the first place and
principally to deal with, has in our country always had to fight against
great difficulties, which are as yet far from removed. Still it ought
to be stated that the knowledge of the nature of these difficulties and
the endeavours to conquer them have in our days awaked to greater
liveliness than has before been the case during a long time.
During the Middle Ages, the commerce of Sweden was remarkably little
developed with one splendid exception, that of Yisby. Already about the middle
of the eleventh century this place commenced to be of importance as a trading
town, and soon it became the center of the mercantile connection between the North,
West, and East of Europe, all the way down to the Orient. This important?
was made possible by the happy situation of Gotland for the communications of
that time and was created through co-operation between Gotlanders and Germans,
from which latter very probably came the initiative. Visby was now during
centuries a rich and powerful republic, of whose importance in the shipping of
that time, one can judge from the fact that the maritime law of Visby was
taken for a pattern even by foreign countries. The magnificent monuments of
architecture which Gotland still partly preserves, bear witness of the high culture
which under the protection of wealth flourished on the island. The grand epoch
of Visby was the twelfth century, but also during the thirteenth it continued to
flourish. The declination is attributed to the new commercial routes that the
crusades opened, farther to the revival of Lübeck, and principally to Russia
being shut off from European culture and commerce by the conquest of the
Mongols — an event extremely disastrous for Sweden as the cultural influence
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