An English factor at stockholm in the 1680's

Some twenty years ago Professor Sven-Erik Åström set out the main features of trade between England and Sweden in the late seventeenth century, showing how the period 1670-1700 saw a marked shift from the situation prevailing earlier in the century, when English exports of cloth to the Baltic largely balanced imports of iron, to one in which Swedish exports of both iron and other goods greatly outweighed imports, thus creating a large and long-standing imbalance of trade that so concerned English merchants and economists throughout the eighteenth century. 1 Åström had of necessity to rely largely on the English port books, the Stockholm weigh-books and other customs material, and the Danish Sound Toll accounts, together with contemporary literary comments, since he was unable to discover any seventeenth-century merchants' accounts either in England or Sweden. Recently, however, a number of volumes have come to light which form a substantially complete series of journals and ledgers, together with some cash accounts and memoranda, kept by a provincial English merchant named William Hodgkinson, who traded with the Baltic and the Netherlands between about 1690 and 1730. 2 This archive appears to be a unique source for the examination in detail at first hand of, the activities of a merchant engaged in the whole range of Baltic trades - iron, tar, flax, timber, hemp and other products - as well as the export of Derbyshire lead both to the Low Countries and the Baltic. A full examination of this material will be the work of some years, but one particular feature of the earliest volume warrants separate treatment.