England's relationship with the Baltic trading area has remained a generally neglected aspect of English commercial development in the seventeenth century. The spectacular colonial ventures have traditionally attracted more historical attention, although the Baltic trade in this period was more fundamental to the English economy: it supplied precisely those naval commodities, such as flax, hemp, timber, pitch and tar, which facilitated the creation of fleets for the colonial trades. Medieval English trade had been conditioned by a search for markets, and the predominantly agricultural economy of the Polish Commonwealth proved to be an ideal target for cloth exports. By the early seventeenth century, however, this traditional relationship was changing. The growing English fleets demanded steady supplies of naval stores which Poland was increasingly unable to supply, while the Polish economy, weakened by wars and entering a period of decline, could no longer afford the luxury of cloth imports from England.

Whilst much has been written about early modern urban history, the majority of this work has focussed on Western Europe with relatively little available in English on towns and cities in the former communist East. However, in recent years urban scholars have increasingly looked to a much more inclusive picture of Europe that compares and contrasts development across the whole continent. Dealing primarily with Bohemia, Hungary and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this book provides an insight into a number of key issues concerning the economic, social and demographic trends in early modern East-Central European urban history. Taking a supra-national perspective, across a long time span, it examines the effects of migration, Reformation, state building and economic change on the transformation of medieval urban communities into early modern societies. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, particularly the registers of new citizens kept by many towns and cities, a fascinating picture of urban development and social structure is reconstructed that not only tells us much about East-Central Europe, but adds to our knowledge of the whole continent.