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Distributed for Museum Tusculanum Press

The Sound Toll at Elsinore

Politics, Shipping and the Collection of Duties 1429–1857

Øresund, or the Sound—the body of water separating Denmark from Sweden—has always been strategically important. Between 1429 and 1857, the Danish king levied a toll on ships traveling through the Sound. The logs that Denmark kept of those tolls are a unique piece of European history and are included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. This book uses those logs to detail the toll’s administration and history, discussing diplomatic crises, smuggling, and the threat of North American attack that hastened the toll’s demise.

600 pages | 110 color plates, 35 halftones, 10 maps, 5 diagrams, 80 tables | 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 | © 2018

History: General History


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Table of Contents

Preface
 
Introduction
 
‘The right usual waterway’
The Sound Toll in the fifteenth century
Jens E. Olesen
 
The charter of the Sound Toll
Mikael Venge
 
The administration of the Sound Toll
Claus Rafner
 
The Sound Toll House at Elsinore
Lars Bjorn Madsen
 
Tariff rates, revenues and forms of accounts in the Sound Toll, 1497–1857
Ole Degn
 
The diplomatic resolution of the Sound conflicts between the Habsburg, Netherlands, Denmark and the German Hanse, 1510–32
Hanno Brand
 
Mother Sigbrit and the Sound Toll
Mikael Venge
 
The Sound passage
Comparing sixteenth-century tolls and customs as sources for northern shipping
John D. Fudge
 
The European merchant fleets passing the Sound in 1640
Ole Degn
 
‘God alone knows why they still paid up, after we no longer controlled the Sound’
The Sound Toll and the Peace of Roskilde, 1658
Leon Jespersen
 
The Sound Toll tables and the Sound Toll books
The hjemsted discussion in a West Frisian perspective
Piet Boon
 
Business information through the Sound
Finnish merchants and Danish brokerage firms at Elsinore and Copenhagen, c. 1750–1900
Jari Ojala
 
Fraudulent declarations
The Sound Toll in the eighteenth century
Jan Kanstrup
 
The American-Danish Sound Toll controversy
Kalevi Ahonen
 
The Dutch Sound Toll registers
Philip Kelsall
 
The records of the Sound Toll administration, 1497–1858
Erik Gøbel
 
Bibliography
The authors
Glossary
Index of personal names
Index of place names

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