From Veere to Gdansk: Scottish Trading Communities in Northern Europe
Resource type
Lecture
Creator (person)
Groundwater, Anna
Date published
March 27, 2025
Abstract
In 1558 George Gordon the Lord Conservator for the Scottish Community in Veere in the Netherlands described the arrival of 17 Scottish ships in one trading fleet from Scotland. By 1600 ten percent of Veere’s population of 4000 were Scottish, with a Scottish kirk and special judicial and trading privileges. It was a similar situation in Gdansk where the traces of Scottish settlement remain in the gravestones of their churches and in street names. It is thought over 20.000 Scotsmen were living in Poland in the early 17th Century of whom Robert Porteous writer of Krosno was a prominent and successful example.
Dr Anna Groundwater, Principal Curator of Renaissance and Early Modern History at the National Museums of Scotland will explore East Coast Scotland’s intimate and profitable mercantile networks and communities in northern Europe pre-1700.
Editor
Groundwater, Anna
Event title
From Veere to Gdansk: Scottish trading communities in northern Europe
Publisher
The Royal Company of Merchants of the City of Edinburgh
Rights statement
In Copyright