The economic advantages that the Hanseatic League sought to provide for its members were manifold: among other things, a reduction in transaction costs in trade was important. This was also discussed at Hanseatic conventions. Transaction costs could be minimised by standardising weights and measures, by standardising production norms in trade or through quality controls. With such interventions to standardise and regulate the basic conditions of trade, the business costs of individual merchants could be reduced, as they no longer had to inspect the goods themselves.[1] Legal certainty or harmonisation and the standardisation of currencies also fell within the wider scope of these Hanseatic efforts.

The workshop will examine the standardisation efforts of the Hanseatic League using the example of the beer trade. In the late Middle Ages, beer was one of the most important export products in northern Germany. Bremen, Hamburg, Wismar and Lübeck in particular stood out as beer-exporting cities, but the brewing operations of inland Hanseatic cities such as Brunswick are also known. Numerous municipal sources offer an insight into the local regulations on brewing in various cities, while customs lists and account books provide clues as to the extent of exports. Beer brewing and the beer trade have been studied and described in detail by various researchers (including Unger, Blanckenburg, Stefke), but there is as yet no overview of the Hanseatic League's efforts to standardise this area of trade.

Similar to Workshop 1, the relationships between the city, the region and the Hanseatic League are also at the centre of this topic. Which attempts at standardisation can be identified locally in the cities, which were discussed across cities at regional city conventions, and which issues did the Hanseatic League intervene in supra-regionally at Hanseatic conventions? We hope that the discourse between urban, regional and "Hanseatic" sources can provide new impulses to the question of the role of the Hanseatic League in standardisation efforts.

The workshop

The standardisation efforts in Hanseatic trade have clearly moved into the focus of research in recent years with an increased research focus on the economic functions of the Hanseatic League (Jahnke, Selzer, Huang etc.). The beer trade lends itself to an exemplary study of regulatory endeavours, as it has been relatively well researched and the initial situation in different brewing cities was relatively different. There are also sufficient sources that offer an insight into the brewing regulations of various cities.

At the workshop, we would like to address the following questions:

1. what efforts were made to regulate and standardise beer production at city, regional and "Hanseatic" level?

2. did the impetus for standardisation efforts come from the local city level and only later spread to the Hanseatic framework, or was it conversely the Hanseatic Days that passed on such measures to the cities?

3. what influence did the sales markets have on standardisation at the places of production?

4. were the standardisation efforts always aimed at minimising transaction costs in local or long-distance trade, or were other goals, e.g. the elimination of inner-city competition in the local bar, also decisive for such efforts? How can different motivations be separated from each other?