ABSTRACT
This chapter is a brief description of the decline of the German Hanse as an economic, political and naval organisation as well as of maritime aspects of Danish and Swedish state formation. It also gives a violence–control orientated explanation of the rise of the Dutch trade hegemony in the Baltic. It describes how the new Nordic naval forces were used for territorial state building but also as instruments for selling protection where the increasingly centralised Nordic monarchies were able to enforce a practical joint monopoly of violence at sea in the Baltic. Denmark–Norway and Sweden became effective rulers of their own territories (thus making piracy impossible) and used their warships to discourage various Baltic interest groups from interfering with trade. The main loser was the city of Lübeck which lost its old position as middleman between the Baltic and Western Europe. The most obvious winners were the Dutch who could send large numbers of cheap and unarmed merchantmen to the Baltic without interference from competitors. But most towns around the Baltic as well as the territorial states also benefited from lowered transport costs and increased competition between merchants from the Baltic and Western Europe. 1
