The Hanseatic League: Europe’s First Free Trade Zone

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1:25Granger, for the ones who get it done.

1:32To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:46Now, how are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. If you can hear me kind of chuckling, it's because John is accusing me of deep, deep paranoia as I get older. And that is true. That is true. Just because they're all out to get you, John, doesn't mean you're paranoid or the other way around. How are you, Ed? I'm good. I am good. I was just saying to you, I'm a little bit sore and stiff after playing Paddle. It's my new thing. It's fantastic. If I were to write

2:13David McWilliams: The Pope's Children now, I would have a chapter on Paddle. Right? Because it is, it seems to have been, even in the last month, I have heard loads about paddle. Yeah. Owl fellas, people slightly past their prime playing paddle. It's like... It's slow tennis. It's like tennis for slow learners, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is a bit. Yeah, it's like a cross between tennis and squash. I never played squash in my life. And probably a little hint, a little flavor of table tennis in there as well. But it's great crack. Tommy took it up in Spain. It was huge because it's a Spanish sport. And that's where it started.

2:54And he got really into it. And he came back like an evangelist, a paddle evangelist. And is it replacing like cycling amongst your mates now? Because I know your mates were kind of baboon-like colours of a Sunday morning as they were trussed up in their slightly auto-erotic plastic and latent numbers. Have they got a paddle uniform? Well, I think you need to be overweight to play it. That's what I'm seeing.

3:24That means all our mates qualify. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's fantastic. Where are you today, Mark? Where are you today? Do you know where I am, John? Do you know where I just have been? I'm going to tell you. I have just been in the centre of Vilnius

3:39David McWilliams: because I'm giving a speech here. I gave a speech here last night. Centre of Vilnius this morning at an Orthodox cathedral, which is unusual because it's a Catholic city. Right. And in this Orthodox cathedral, I love Orthodox cathedrals, right? Because they're incredibly dark, right? they're usually windowless they're very very dark the furniture is very very dark the iconography is incredibly dark it's kind of dark mahogany and just candles lit by candles exactly so it's very calming and if you're sort of a highly strong creature like myself it's nice to go into these calm places for a while you know as you know it's a sort of contemplative if you play paddle and I go into orthodox cathedrals you know but I can tell you I was sitting there And I was reading a little piece of history from this particular cathedral, kind of monastery cathedrals crossover, a monastery church mashup, John.

4:33David McWilliams: And in this cathedral, a man was baptized. And this man was the great grandfather of Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin, for Russophiles, is regarded as the soul of Russia. the man who spoke for Russia. Incredibly romantic, a Byronic sort of figure. And people would say, if you want to understand the Slavic mind, you need to read Pushkin. There's a great poem that I read years ago called I Used to Love You, which I think the Saw Doctors took on as well. I was going to say. Maybe not quite with the same Pushkin-esque sort of angle. This is an homage to Pushkin. I used to love her. I used to love her once.

5:20This podcast is an homage to the Sordospears and to Pushkin. But it's going to...

5:31David McWilliams: Russian John. Russian. Russian in a Dunleary accent. So there I was, anyway, in the cathedral. Exactly. And I saw that Pushkin's great grandfather was baptized here. But the fascinating thing about Pushkin, who's meant to be proto-Slavic, etc., is that his great-grandfather was black. He was African. Really? So Pushkin is what they called in America an octoroon, which was an expression for somebody who's one-eighth African descent. Right. Okay, now, of course, this was a big deal in the pre-Civil War America, okay, because of the racism and whatever. right but so take that so pushkin's great-grandfather had been remember we we ended the last podcast about the idea of the russians being christian and having this battle against the muslims yeah russian against the ottoman empire so when the ottomans were trying to curry favor with peter the great because he was scaring the jesus out of them right they gave him the sultan gave peter the great slaves to mollify him.

6:38David McWilliams: And one of the slaves, and of course, because the Ottomans and the Arab countries in general had al-fresco slavery to the very, very end of the 19th and into the 20th century, right? Which is something that we kind of forget that slavery was very, very much common in the Arab world, in the Muslim world. So Pushkin's great-grandfather was a man born in Cameroon who was given as a slave to Peter the Great, who Peter the Great realized, this guy's really clever, this guy's really cool, this guy's got loads going on. And he became a general in Peter the Great's army. And he conquered Lithuania. So he was an African general in the Russian army of Peter the Great, and he was Pushkin's great-grandfather, making Pushkin one-eighth African.

7:31And given that there's so much sort of anti-black racism in the Slavic world, it's a bit of a two fingers to them that their greatest poet was actually a man of African blood. This is clearly a story that's not widely known or told. It's not widely known or told, but Pushkin himself used to acknowledge it. Okay. Because that gave him this sense of being an outsider, being slightly romantic, all that sort of stuff. But so I was sitting there, John,

7:57David McWilliams: in the cathedral, thinking about the podcast The podcast today we're going to do is about the forerunner of the European Union, which is called the Hanseatic League, and how the Hanseatic League has been acknowledged by the Council of Europe as being the foundational, political, and social edifice that the European Union is constructed on. And why it's also relevant now to us is in a world of tariffs, the Hanseatic League was the first real effort to create a free trading zone between independent city states, exactly like the European Union. And it was driven by the idea that free trade, unlike Mr.

8:41David McWilliams: Trump, when he thinks about this, free trade is the route for prosperity. So it's going to be economic history, but with a little sort of contemporary spin on it, which is that even the people here in the 11th century understood comparative advantage as designed by David Ricardo, who was the head bottle washer and thinker about free trade, who was also the only Jewish MP ever in Ireland under British rule and was the MP for Port Arlington. Now, these are bizarre things, okay? So we go from David Ricardo to Pushkin to all sorts of things. So that's where we're going to go, John. And again, it's a little bit of economic history, a little bit of economic history to digest when you're not playing paddle.

9:28Right. Okay. So let's start at the beginning. So take me back. Take me back. Economic history. So imagine you're looking at a map of Europe,

9:40David McWilliams: basically going from Ireland all the way across to Moscow now. And all the way down through the Black Sea, down to Constantinople, to Istanbul, and all the way across to Portugal, and all the way north to Stockholm. Just so it's a proper map of Europe. And draw four quadrants, right? Just a line down the middle and a line vertically down the middle and horizontally, right? There were four quadrants in European economic history in around 1200, 1100 AD. Okay. On the bottom left hand was the Iberian Peninsula, which was the caliphate, which was a Muslim caliphate, which had been taken over by the Muslims in the 8th century and was a flourishing Muslim caliphate.

10:31David McWilliams: And that's basically Iberia, Portugal, Spain, et cetera, all the way as far as the north of the Pyrenees. Then across, you have the Byzantine Empire. Okay, so the Byzantine Empire is around Turkey, Greece, and then further out into Anatolia. Then the northwest is the Holy Roman Empire, which is basically France, what is now West Germany, and moving towards Britain and Ireland, although Britain and Ireland were never part of the Holy Roman Empire, but they're part of that world. And then you have on the other side, so basically from around Poland, all the way northeast, which is now where I am, the Baltics, Lithuania.

11:12David McWilliams: That was called the Varangian lands. And these were full of tribes, full of a variety of different tribes who were all pagan. And they were actually quite wealthy because they were trading furs in particular and timber. Everybody needed timber to build. Varangian, where does that word come from? It comes from, it's the general name for the tribes that were here. They were called the Varangian lands, and the Varangians were the original, they were basically Vikings who settled around a place called Kievskaya Rus, which is Kiev Rus, which is Kiev. So they're the original beginnings of Russians, but predated by Ukrainians, and of course they debate over who came first, etc., etc.

11:56David McWilliams: It was definitely Ukrainians came first, and then there was, they were Kiev Rus, who were Vikings, and then they spread north and they mixed with Slavs and they mixed with pagan tribes and all that sort of stuff. So this is the area that these guys were. And in around 1100, the biggest technological discovery that changed the world was the emergence of, the discovery of, or the innovation in, the metal plow. So the metal plow, we used Roman plows before that that were made of wood. And the problem with wood is it can't actually plow the damp land of northwestern and northeastern Europe because the wood breaks.

12:34David McWilliams: So without the plough, you have very, very low agricultural yields. And without agricultural yields being high, you have always intermittent famines. So the population was consistently, from the end of the Roman Empire all the way up to about 1100, was consistently undermined by famine. Then in around 1100, you get the emergence of the metal plough. the metal plough allows the damp soil of northwestern and northeastern Europe to be ploughed. Suddenly you get stability, John, of agriculture. Yeah. And when you get stability of agriculture, you get an explosion in the population. Yeah. And it was more productive as well, I presume.

13:17Highly productive. And also they realized that in this very heavy clay,

13:22David McWilliams: which is all around the Baltic and all around the Atlantic, and our neck of the woods, basically, is full of nutrients. So if you could dry it out, in effect, you could actually produce enormous amounts of cereals and wheat. And producing enormous amounts of cereals and wheat gives you enormous populations. So you get this population boom in and around the Baltic, northern Germany, Ireland, Britain, southern tips of Scandinavia, top of Poland, all around the Baltic. And of course, Ukraine being the kind of breadbasket of Europe. Of the world. Ukraine and Argentina, if you ask, I think people who know about agriculture, they say that they're the two most productive soils in the world.

14:04The Argentinian soil and the soil that is now present in Ukraine. So you get this massive

14:11David McWilliams: population explosion. With massive population explosions, you tend to get changes in the way people begin to see themselves, number one. But number two is the economy takes off. Because more people, more food, more production, all that sort of stuff. And so what did that economy look like then? So because of the population boom, you get people migrating to cities for the first time. Yeah. And because people are migrating to the cities, the Germans around this area, so this is Germans feature long and large in this history. The Germans had this expression in the medieval called Stadtluftmacht frei.

14:46David McWilliams: Okay. And that means, Stadtluft means the air in the city, because the Stadt is the city, max fry makes you free and what that was an expression was the fact that as the feudal system began to break down and as people moved to the cities there was something going on the cities which made people free and they were ideas of artisans being independent ideas you can make a bit of money yourself okay this is one of the themes in my book which is that money has created freedom by making people sovereign, by making people a little bit more independent, and by allowing people at a certain stage, if they made enough money, to give the two fingers to not only the overlord, but also to the church.

15:29David McWilliams: So in cities, medieval cities, you begin the process of independence. And those cities, of course, were all on the sea. Why on the sea? Because sea travel is much easier than land travel. Particularly now, you can even see it here in Lithuania, it's still, the whole place is covered with forests. It's covered with birch. You'd love it. Birch forests for as long as you can see. Yeah, yeah. But of course, the problem with forests is they're very impenetrable. Yeah. But what they do produce is they produce timber. So you have an extraordinary trading infrastructure begins to emerge in the Baltics.

16:06David McWilliams: And the infrastructure is around herring, salted herring. Salt has to be brought up. Yeah, they love that. Yeah, yeah. But the salt isn't natural to them. has to be brought from hot countries. Because either they've salt mines or you've salt flats. And you can't have salt flats when you've no sun. Yes. It's the sun that actually dries out the salt. So they had to start trading with somebody. But isn't there big salt mines in Poland? There are salt mines, but as well as salt mines, you have to trade as well. So they have their own salt, but you also have to trade with people from warm countries.

16:36Or warmer places to get extra salt,

16:38David McWilliams: to salt the herring, which is the only protein that humans can keep before the fridges over a long period of time. Then, of course, you have timber is a massive, massive export, but the main one is furs. You forget that Russia, and this part of it, was full of wild animals, and pelts were extremely sought after in places where they needed, obviously, in cold winters, you need pelts. And, of course, what you get is you get migration of people into the cities, cities become overcrowded, you get artisans, And also you get the first evidence in around the 11th century of paganism disappearing from the Varangian lands.

17:18David McWilliams: So if you look at that quadrant as well, in Iberia, they were religiously Muslim. In the Roman Empire, they were religiously Roman Christian, i.e. Roman Catholic. In the Byzantines, they were Orthodox Christians. The Varangians were pagans. This was the holdout of paganism, right? And these people believed in the gods of the forest and the sea. And of course, the Scandinavians believed in Odin and Thor. Exactly. The question is, why did they abandon? This is the interesting thing. Why did they abandon Thor and Odin? I mean, these were pretty serious gods. They were. Yeah. Why did they abandon their pagan gods for Christian gods?

18:00David McWilliams: What was going on? And I have a theory in the book, John. Oh, yeah. which is the idea that what we see is a coincidence of money and coins emerging in this part of the world and Christianity emerging a couple of decades, only a couple of decades afterwards. So is there a coincidence between money, coins, and these people embracing Christianity? And I believe there is. Go on, explain that. I love this. So the Byzantines were the people who managed to keep producing coins and money, silver, copper and gold money, all through the end of the Roman Empire. And what the Byzantines did was they centralized power using money.

18:46David McWilliams: So the coin would have the picture of God on one side and the king on the other. So for the Byzantine kings, the coin wasn't just a medium of exchange. it was a reinforcing brand of who was powerful. So Byzantine kings had this great, great roost that said, you know what, we're related to God, right? This was the greatest thing. And through God, we derive our power. Yeah, the blue blood. We will reinforce that power through the coin in your pocket. So every day you see a picture of me, the king, and God on the far side, which is exactly what the, you know, the Queen of England apparently is the head of the Anglican church still.

19:30But it's the same idea, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:32David McWilliams: So if you could centralize your power through coinage, what you could do is you could have this brilliant triumvirate of power. The worldly power, the heavenly power, and the kingly power. Okay, you could have them all together. So if you look at the way in which these people embraced coinage, there was an explosion in mints in this part of the world in the 11th century. And the mint means that you're taking copper, silver, and stamping it with something centralized. And you also see that these people adopted Christianity at the same time. And I think it is because the Christianity impulse must have come from the Byzantines, because they were the last real Christians.

20:17David McWilliams: and the Byzantines had their coins and the local pagan bigwigs here, the lads who were saying, we're subservient to Odin and Thor and the god of things. Ah, fuck this, man. Imagine we had a direct line to God. Yes, yeah. And we adopt this Byzantine thing. They said, yeah, but you've got to change your god then because you can't have a direct line to Thor because he's bigger than you. You say, okay, well, why don't we adopt this Jesus dude? Right. And this Jesus dude will give us worldly and spiritual power. And if we combine that with financial power in our coins, Bob's your uncle, we've got all three power nexuses under us.

20:54See, that's amazing because I suppose that was spurred on by trade between the Byzantines and the Varangians. But also, it wouldn't have been a huge leap for the Varangians to kind of drop Thor and Odin and all the rest because the Greek gods and the Roman gods kind of mirrored the Viking gods. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And again, as I argue in the book,

21:22David McWilliams: at the core of this, or possibly at the core, is the emergence of money as the centralizing force in urbanized society. So we get to a situation where you have city-states from Bruges, London, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Lübeck, Hamburg, Danzig, Riga, Stockholm, all wanting to trade with each other. But trade is unbelievably dangerous at the time. Why is it dangerous? Because the place is full of pirates. It's full of bandits. It's full of people who basically wants to rob your stuff. Like being a merchant was a very dangerous thing to be in the old days because you're the ones that has to depend on bringing gold and silver to people to pay for the timber and the furs and the salt and the herring and all that sort of stuff, as well as the coinage, right?

22:15David McWilliams: Of course, that's incredibly dangerous. So what you need is an infrastructure of people you can trade with who are going to support each other. And you probably need an army who's going to support, or at least a navy that's going to actually go side by side with the merchant ships to protect. So what you see in the 12th century is the emergence of this thing called the Hanseatic League. And Hanse is a very strange German word. So yeah, nobody ever thinks of the word like Lufthansa. Oh yeah. German airline, right? Hanse comes from the word, German word for a band or company. And it's the old German word for a company, right?

22:53Or a group of individuals, which is why Lufthansa basically is the company of the air. And even if you look at German number plates, John. I know this is a very strange diversion. We're going to start playing spotting now in a second. When I was a kid, I was always very interested in the patterns of number plates, John. I know it's very, very, very, very nerdy, but there you go. We've got no focus on this. When I was a kid, remember we used to go on football trips and everyone was talking about Franz Beckenbauer and I was like, look at it, look at it, look at it, look at it, look at it, look at it, look at the number plates.

23:25Anyway, in German number plates. The lonely kid. I know, the lonely kid dreaming away on his own. In number plates, John, in German number plates, what you notice is a very, very Germanic thing, right? Is the bigger the city, the fewer the letters. Oh, go on. Right? So big cities, so small cities in Germany will have three letters in the number plates, right?

23:48David McWilliams: But big cities will only have one. So Berlin has a B. Yeah. But smaller cities will have WRS, WOB, or whatever the city is, right? The reason is the Germans are so precise that they know there's going to be more cars in the bigger cities. So they give them less letters. So the whole thing looks perfect. So the design does. OK, so there's more numbers and less letters. More numbers and less letters. So all big cities have one letter except for Hamburg, which has two. Okay, Mark, so let's talk about that and also its legacy with regards to the modern EU after a bit of this.

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25:55So, Mark, we're talking about the Hanseatic League, which is, as you just described, a series of cities that basically surround the Baltic Sea and parts of the North Sea. So this was an agreement between all these trading cities. How did that agreement come about? The first thing you realize is they're all Lutheran.

26:19David McWilliams: Now, this is unusual. They're all German Lutheran cities. Tallinn, Riga, where I was the other day. And when I was in Riga, I was walking around. And what you find, with the exception of Bruges, where I went to college many years ago. Yeah, you did your master's there. Which is a Hanseatic city as well. They're all Protestant. Now, why was this? It was because the Hanse were basically German traders. They come from German traders. They came from a willingness or an urge to trade with the people of Gotland. Gotland may sound a bit strange to you, right? Gotland is an island in the middle of the Baltic, off the south coast of Sweden.

27:05David McWilliams: Right. And for Irish people, Gotland should put the fear of God into us. Why? Because Gotland was a slave trading outpost when Dublin was a slave trading Viking outpost. Yeah. And the reason that Irish DNA has been found in the Caspian region, which is very far away, you're talking as far away as the north of Iran, John, was that Irish slaves were taken by the Vikings from Dublin around the top of Scotland into the coast of Denmark, down through the Baltic, and the slave trading outpost was Gotland. And they were then sold downriver, isn't this amazing, down the Dniper, and down those huge Russian rivers and Ukrainian rivers, all the way to the Caspian and the Black Sea.

27:55Why?

27:55David McWilliams: Because the Ottomans and the Muslims loved blue-eyed slave girls. who were basically sent into harems in the Muslim world, in the Ottoman world, which is kind of mad. And that's why Irish DNA is found down there. Because what they wanted was, believe it or not, the only place in the world wanted Redsers, John. I would have been great there. Nobody else wants this, right? But they wanted red-haired, blue-eyed girls in the main and young boys to be slaves. Well, do you know what, Mark? Just a little aside, and this might surprise you, There was more people in slavery now than there was back then.

28:35I'll give you a figure. Really? Yeah. In 2021, an estimated 50 million people were living in situations of modern slavery. Now, probably most of that was in forced labor. But then, you know, things like forced marriages and all that kind of stuff is included in that. But about 30 million of those were in forced labor. Well, let's do a podcast on that. We should, absolutely. And there's about 6 million in sex trafficking, which is essentially what you're talking about as well. Well, this is exactly what it was. So the people of Gotland were traders in everything, including human beings.

29:17David McWilliams: And they were trading with the people from northern Germany, from places like Lübeck, now Hamburg. And those northern German cities were the function of the population boom that we spoke about with the arrival of the Plough. So you start to get these artisan-based towns. And of course, the top of the apex of the artisan towns was the merchant. So these were gilded towns, towns that were based on having merchant councils running the place rather than kings. So they were beginning the process, which the Italians had also started in Florence, of the trading city-state. And all around the Baltic, you had these trading city-states set up largely by German traders, which is why Riga and Tallinn are now very Lutheran.

30:05David McWilliams: And when you go to those cities, it feels Lutheran. And again, the great thing about architecture, John, is architecture is evidence. I've always said that. You know, when you don't have written records, although they did have written records, what you have when you're walking around in architecture, architecture tells you about these people and their aspirations. So, for example, one thing you notice when you're up here is incredibly sandy shorelines on the Baltic, right? Huge, huge beaches. And that these days suggests summer tourism, right? But in the old days, having sand was a big problem because it means you didn't have any rocks.

30:41And if you didn't have any rocks, you couldn't build without figuring out bricks. So what you have is really amazing brickwork all the way from, this is the sort of architectural legacy of these people, right?

30:53David McWilliams: It's that Lubeck, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bruges, Danzig, or Gdansk now in Poland, Riga, Tallinn, all these cities had very exotic brickwork. Not because they were great artisans, but they had no rocks to build with. Most of the things you put rocks in, you put clay in the middle, a sort of plasterboard, and away you go. If you have no rocks, you just create bricks. So that's why the Lutheran cities look different. Not because they were Lutherans, they just didn't have any, they were just too much sand. Right, right, right. So it was a loose trading arrangement. So basically the people from Lubeck and the people from Riga, the merchants, would say, look, we have a free trade agreement with you.

31:32Your guys can trade freely with our guys. We will actually set up banking systems which will allow you to have letters of credit so you don't have to bring the gold and silver in the ship across the Baltics where you'd be vulnerable to pirates from all over the place. We'll create a banking system, a banking network.

31:49David McWilliams: And then, of course, as they got rich, they started to do what rich people always do, lend money to others. So they created this sort of banking infrastructure, this trading infrastructure. They had free trade. They had free movement of people. They had free movement of merchants. As long as you were within the league. The league was very, very loose. It wasn't like a political entity. But they used to have these things called diets. and the diet was where they'd meet once a year, once every two years, and hammer out the rules of the game. Right. Just like the WTO type of thing. Exactly. Exactly.

32:25Stuff that Donnie Trump doesn't like, okay? That's really good. And the interesting thing about Donnie Trump is given that Donnie Trump's real name is Trumpf, the German name, chances are he was related to some of these people back the way somewhere, right? So can I ask you, so the Hanseatic League, Was that just the coastal towns? Just the coastal towns. Right. Just the coastal towns. Obviously, with that kind of wealth that they were generating and stuff, there would have been an issue of security and defense. Exactly. So they created mercenary armies. Because the towns themselves didn't have enough people.

33:03So they'd go out into the countryside and recruit loads and loads of young fellas

33:06David McWilliams: and turn them into and drill them into not so much an army, but a navy. So these were the first naval powers of which the Swedes were by far and away the most dexterous. The Swedes around Stockholm had extraordinary naval powers. So Gothenburg, Stockholm, those sort of cities. But all these people had merchant navies. But because they had arrangements with themselves, they only needed to defend themselves against people who are not in the league. And that's why the League expanded, because it was better to be in the League than not, which is the basis for the European Union, right? Right, yes.

33:46David McWilliams: If you think about it, it's better to be in the European Union than not in the European Union. Because if you're in the gang, you adopt the laws, the customs, the trading arrangement of the European Union, but that in a way insulates you from the rest of the world. And that is why the European Union regards the Hanseatic League as the forerunner of the Union itself, which was willingly participating in a mutually beneficial organization, which is what the EU claims it is and tends to be. It's incredibly forward thinking for the 12th century you said it started in. Yeah. So the Hanseatic League started in the 12th century and continued all the way up to the 17th century.

34:30What happened in the 17th century that it all fell apart? For 500 years.

34:35David McWilliams: So just to go back, it all fell apart because obviously the major conflict between the League and the land-based king powers, right? Land-based powers. Ironically, the Hanseatic League facilitated the growth of an aristocracy, a land-based aristocracy, because they lent to them. So kings were always going bust because they were fighting wars. And the key to the Hanseatic League was not to fight wars with anybody because you created, you brought your enemy into the league, right? And you said, look, what's the point in us having a scrap? Why don't you join us? Here's the rules. We'll trade together.

35:16Yeah, why have enemies when you can have friends, yeah. Exactly. So this was the great idea. But, of course, what they did was because they were making so much money trading,

35:25David McWilliams: they had to use that money somewhere. And in time, the money outgrew the cities themselves. So they had to lend to all sorts of big kings, like the French kings, the Prussian kings, the Russian czars, all these people. And in so doing, ironically, they made those land-based powers much, much stronger. So over time, of course, you've got this friction between the land-based powers and the maritime powers. And gradually, one by one, the maritime powers were subsumed into the land-based powers. So basically, they remained, even though they remained part of this Hansa tradition, they became like, for example, Riga would have become part of eventually the Russian Empire.

36:12Yeah.

36:13David McWilliams: After the Latvians got beaten and subdued by the Russians. the Poles would have taken over Danzig certain German what they call principalities little small, because Germany I remember we were talking about was a patchwork of different principalities, the Dutch in Amsterdam would have taken over the Dutch republics would have taken over Amsterdam of course London which was a Hanseatic centre became part of of course England which it always was with a little parallel gig going on so gradually what you found was there has always been this battle in economic history between city-states and nation-states.

36:51David McWilliams: City-states tend typically to be peaceful because they understand they don't have the economic and population demographic power to expand. So they tend typically to go into alliances. And then nation-states, of course, because they're defined by being a nation, and a nation by definition is a very exclusive racial idea, they tend to find city-states annoying because city-states tend to be cosmopolitan because city-states take in traders from all sorts. And even though there were Lutherans, you had all sorts of areas where people who are not Lutheran could stay in their own little areas. Funnily enough, not much has changed over the years.

37:34No, exactly so. That's battle between cities and urban rural areas, cities and nations. You're absolutely right.

37:41David McWilliams: So, you know, nation states have always been in conflict with city states throughout history. And city states have been tended to be economically dynamic, accepting of foreigners, cosmopolitan and non-racially exclusive. Nation states, by their very definition, are not accepting of foreigners. They are tend to be typically non-dynamic. They're usually agricultural, or they were in the old days. They don't necessarily embrace trade. They don't embrace tolerance or cosmopolitanism, which comes back to the reason the Germans had this expression, Stadlof Mach Frey, that the air in the city makes you free.

38:21David McWilliams: And amazingly, when you look at the Hanseatic League, it was the forerunner of almost every world type of organization that is based on multilateralism. Yeah. And we will probably conclude, John, that the legacy of the Hanseatic lead was multilateralism between states that were sovereign, but were willingly involved in an arrangement that was mutually beneficial vis-a-vis unilateralism, which is the Donald Trump worldview, which is we're going to rip up all these agreements. We're going to be strong. We're going to be powerful. we're going to take over Greenland we're going to knock you guys in the head and might is right and the lesson from history is the struggle of the Hanseatic League vis-a-vis the kings of Europe believe it or not John it's playing out right now as we read our newspapers watch the telly or go online every single day

39:33We'll be right back.

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