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The Crown’s henchmen or independent elite burghers? The German merchant elite in the Swedish town of Nyen in the late 17th century This article deals with the merchant elite in Nyen, also called Nyenskans, the easternmost Swedish trading town at the far end of the Gulf of Finland. The town was founded in 1642 in the Swedish province Ingria and located in the same place that Saint Petersburg is located today. In the last decades of the 17th century, trade volumes in Nyen greatly increased, mostly because of prosperous transit trade based on naval stores. At the same time, Nyen was a border town with pivotal importance for Swedish military strategy. However, Nyen was destroyed by the Russians in 1703, and the merchants fled. The most powerful burghers were of German or Baltic-German descent. Some had an ethnic background from Sweden and The Netherlands. The town was dominated by roughly 10–20 families, in particular Hueck and Luhr, closely tied by marriage. The elite families had an important position as mediators in the transit trade between the merchant houses in Amsterdam and Lübeck and suppliers of raw materials from north-eastern Europe. They had commercial experience and good transnational networks as well as political power. The elite merchants were active in long-distance trade, but many also served as city councillors. The ability to lend money to other burghers, in turn, resulted in a strong grip on local trade. Still, the elite could not control the town without considering the Crown. During the final decades of the 17th century, the central government tightened its grip on the town for military and strategic reasons. Control was looser than in the core areas of Sweden, but stricter than in other towns in the Eastern Baltic provinces. Though state-ruled to a degree, Nyen can also be characterised as a privatized monopoly town and network town. |
