The Hanseatic League
It’s a stretch to think of my grandfathers as being in league with Europe’s Hanseatic cities. They were both people of the land — one a farmer to the core and the other a land reclaimer. But they stem from people who lived close to the Hanseatic sea routes or their connecting waterways, in an arc hugging the Wadden Sea and the Ems River bay along the northern edge of the Netherlands. A map of my ancestors, going back five hundred years, shows an overwhelming concentration in this area.
The city of Groningen has always been the area’s main trading hub, officially joining the far-flung Hanseatic League in the 14th century. Its necessarily cosmopolitan outlook would have stuck to the goods for trade that flowed in and out of the city’s rural catch basin, so it is unwise to assume that town and country folk were simple bumpkins.
The Hanseatic League began developing in the late 12th century, eventually dominating maritime trade from Brugge to London and northern Europe abutting the North Sea and Baltic Sea. At peak it included two hundred settlements across seven countries, speaking various languages, with Middle Low German dominating. The loose association of traders and towns, operating on deliberation and consensus, made arrangements and treaties to serve their mutual interests.
It is this cooperative and forward thinking outlook that I associate with my immediate ancestors. Grandfather Harm van der Laan and his father-in-law Hindrik Beekhuis were not just farmers, they were business men who bought and sold and were keen members of marketing boards. They knew themselves to be trade tributaries into an extensive flow of goods. Grandfather Hinne de Jong supervised land reclamation projects for the Heidemaatschappij, begun as an association with far reaching objectives for agricultural development, which became Arcadis NV, a world leader in its field, now with 30,000 employees.
No doubt, self interest figures strongly in all of this. Members of the Hanseatic League and other associations, and people like my grandparents benefited from the cooperations in trade and development. This can be said about trade around the world. America’s indigenous peoples had extensive trade networks long before Europeans showed up, and their self-interest is clearly a factor in later trade with the settlers.
This combination of self-interested, cooperative trade is sophisticated — I’d say it is the basis for civilization. And I’ll go so far as to call it capitalism, of which the much maligned ‘capitalism’ is but a subset. Any profit or produce left over after subsistence is satisfied becomes capital, available to be pooled, developed and traded under cooperative agreements for mutual benefit.
The Hanseatic League started to wane in the 15th century as states began to exert more and more control. But the stage had been set and trade continued (often in spite of states). Cross-fertilization of cultures has also been achieved by invasion and colonization, but the Hansa way is the better way.