The Port of Ostend and the Austrian Netherlands' Transit policy (1713-1789). A Case-study of the Dynamic of Port Hinterlands

Description

In 1715, the Southern Netherlands, which had just been taken over by the Austrian Habsburg, had an obsolete transportation network, like most of Europe. The different cities were connected to each other by unpaved roads, that turned into a quagmire after every rainfall, making it an impossible task to maintain a steady flow of goods between markets. Therefore, the Southern Netherlands' cities mostly relied on river shipping to export their products and to import their necessities.
A quick glance on a map of the Austrian Netherlands shows that all these rivers, and their tributaries, flow northwards straight into the neighbouring Dutch Republic. As such, the Dutch controlled the export and import of the Southern Netherlands. Antwerp's fate in the early modern times, or the so-called 'Closure of the Scheldt' is probably the best known example of this situation. During most of the 17th and 18th century Antwerp remained open to shipping, albeit only Dutch shipping.
This situation was not to the liking of the enlightened and absolutist imperial authorities in Vienna. To halt the Dutch control of the Southern Netherlands' export and import, the central authorities in Brussels launched an immense road building and canal digging program. This new transportation network had to redirect the commercial flows towards Ostend, the only Southern Netherlands' harbour with free access to the North Sea. At the end of the 18th century, the Austrian Netherlands could pride themselves in a paved road network totalling a little over 2800 kilometres (compared with a total of 150 kilometres in the Dutch Republic) and a modern set of maritime canals linking the interior of the country to the coast.
By creating competitive transit duties and free port facilities the Austrian Netherlands transformed the small and rather puny port of Ostend into a modern harbour. Quickly Ostend's hinterland, which only had a local scope before these transformations, was enlarged to encompass the whole of the Austrian Netherlands, but also large parts of Central Germany and North Eastern France. The toll revenues on these new connections can be measured to determine the commercial flows on the Southern Netherlands transportation network. This measurement shows how traffic increased to and from Ostend and how it decreased towards the Dutch harbours.
The scope of this paper is to show the importance of a coherent transportation system linking harbours to their hinterland. It also wants to stress that a harbour's hinterland is not a given geographical area, but a dynamic concept that increases and decreases over time due to the different push and pull factors emitted by the central authorities and other competing harbours.

Period	Jun 2008
Event title	5th International Maritime Economic History Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Greenwich (London), United Kingdom