The University of Groningen and Tresoar, the Frisian Historical and Literary Centre at Leeuwarden are building an electronic database for the Sound Toll Registers (STR), dubbed Sound Toll Registers online, short: STRO. They carry out this project in close co-operation with Rigsarkivet, the Danish State Archive in Copenhagen which keeps the more than 700 original, handwritten volumes of the STR. The data input is outsourced to Breed, the Social Workplace at Nijmegen. The database is freely accessible by everybody via the internet: www.soundtoll.nl.

The STR are one of the main sources for the economic and maritime history of Europe. They are the records of the toll the king of Denmark levied on the passage of ships through the Sound, the strait between Denmark and Sweden linking the North Sea and the Baltic. They have been preserved for about 300 of the 360 years from 1497 till 1857 and include a practically uninterrupted series from 1574 to 1857. The STR contain information on about 1.8 million passages.

This conference was financially supported by the Arenberg Foundation and the Samenwerkende Maritieme Fondsen.

University of Groningen, the Netherlands, 25-26 October 2012

Overview of the programme

Thursday 25 October 2012

chair: Jan Willem Veluwenkamp (Groningen)

• Michael Serruys, (Enghien, Belgium) Welcome on behalf of the Arenberg Foundation
• Siem van de Woude (Leeuwarden, The Netherlands) STR-online: harvest in full swing
• Werner Scheltjens (Groningen, The Netherlands) Papenburg in the Duchy of Arenberg 1803-1810: the first virtual community?
• Magnus Andersson (Gothenburg, Sweden) Ship movements as a measure of trade – a comparison of Sound toll register (STR) and additional Custom account from Gothenburg 1760−1765
• Jelle Jan Koopmans (Groningen, The Netherlands) Kingma Makkum: A shipmasters company in the early modern period
• Katerina Galani (Corfu, Greece) From the Sound Toll to the Mediterranean Seas: Ships, trade and maritime businesses before and after the Napoleonic Wars
• Riika Alvik (Helsinki, Finland) Dutch merchant ships in the Gulf of Finland: Case studies "St. Michel" and "Vrouw Maria”
• Jari Ojala (Jyvaskyla, Finland) Assessing the Reliability of the Sound Toll Accounts: Comparing the Data to other Sources

Friday 26 October 2012

Chair: George Welling (Groningen)

• Simone Steenbeek (Groningen, The Netherlands) Frisian shipmaster communities and the Dutch market for maritime transport, 1600-1800. The cases of Harlingen and Woudsend
• Magnus Ressel (Bochum, Duitsland) The impact of the partitions of Poland upon the trade structure from and to the Baltic ports (1772-1806)
• Hanno Brand (Leeuwarden, The Netherlands) Frisian skippers as carriers of colonial commodities (ca. 1720-1780)
• Maarten Draper and Jerem van Duijl (Groningen, The Netherlands) The decline of the participation of Dutch Wadden Islands shipmasters in Baltic shipping 1740-1790
• Jeroen van der Vliet (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Watching the ships sail in. Linking shipping data from Amsterdam and the Baltic revisited