The Toll Registers of Aschach (1706-1740): Database and Analysis

The exchange of goods is an essential phenomenon of human culture throughout all epochs. During the long centuries before the railway revolution of the 19th century land routes were mainly in poor condition and ill-suited for the transport of bulk products or heavy goods. Under appropriate spatial and political conditions maritime and inland shipping have been of paramount importance. The technical development corresponded with the progress of state building: in Central Europe, the governmental authorities of the early modern states did not create trade statistics until well into the 18th century. Therefore, historians are facing serious challenges in reconstructing flows of goods and trade cycles, consumption habits e.g. the inclusion of colonial goods like chocolate, coffee or tea in the menu or in identifying the individuals engaged in trade and transport (shippers and merchants). The analysis of toll registers provides the best method to investigate the transport of goods during the early modern period. These books of account of the various customs stations contain the name of the haulier, the carried goods, their proprietors as well as the carried passengers. An outstanding series of such account books are the 194 volumes of the Toll Registers of Aschach (Protokolle der Maut zu Aschach) in Upper Austria covering the period from 1627 to 1775. At the Aschach toll station each vessel shipping up- and downstream the Danube as the most important traffic route in the Upper-German and Austrian area had to pay dues. The information comprised in the toll registers of Aschach enables us to reconstruct the movement of goods between the Austrian Danube region and its neighbouring countries. Included in the transport network of the Danube were major commercial and industrial cities like Ulm, Augsburg or Linz, industrial and agricultural regions like the Upper and Lower Austrian iron district or the Lower Austrian wine growing area as well as Vienna as the preeminent Central European consumption city. Hall in Tyrol connected the Danube region with Italy, whereas Regensburg functioned as gateway for overseas and Eastern European goods. The research project The Danube Trade makes the toll registers of Aschach accessible via an online database for the period from 1706 to 1740. For the first time this outstanding source for Austrian history will be searchable by ships passages, persons, commodities and place names enabling the scientific analysis of the Danube trade for three and a half decades. Whereas, until now historiography mainly focused on theoretical concepts and governmental economic policy, the huge amount of data provided by the toll registers of Aschach enables us to analyze business cycles and the real volume of trade as well as to investigate the players of the Danube trade (merchants and shipmasters).

The aim of the project was to index the account books of the Danube toll in Aschach, Upper Austria, with the help of an online accessible database. In addition, research on pre-modern trade history was presented on the basis of the information contained in the books. In the age before railroads and trucks, waterways were the most important transport routes. Rivers offered a much more economical possibility of transporting goods from one place to another than on the poorly developed country roads. The annual accounts of the Aschach toll station, which have been densely preserved for the period from about 1670 to the mid-1760s, constitute the most important source on the history of freight transport in the Austrian Danube region and the neighbouring countries. They contain detailed information on the ship and raft masters operating on the Danube, on their watercrafts, and on the goods and persons transported on them. The cargo lists of the vessels recorded in the books provide information about the type and volume of the traded goods, important transport hubs, regional traffic as well as the integration of the Danube trade into global economic relations. The dense tradition of the account books makes it possible to determine trade cycles, changes in the consumption behaviour of the population or the introduction of new products into the Central European market. For the period from 1706 to 1740, the database records about 84,500 passages of water vehicles through the Aschach toll station, on which about 364,500 individual cargoes were transported. The role of Hall in Tyrol as a hub for the transport of goods from the Mediterranean to the northern Alpine region is clearly recognizable. Regional trade was characterized by individual industrial regions such as the Nuremberg book production or the Augsburg silverware manufacture, to name just two few examples. Not least for the baroque palace and monastery buildings and for the expansion of the rapidly growing city of Vienna, large quantities of wood, stones and other building materials were transported down the Danube. The hub for world trade was Regensburg, where goods from Northern and Eastern Europe, America and Asia were reloaded onto the Danube and shipped to markets in Linz, Krems and Vienna. Export products from Austria were mainly wine from Lower Austria and iron and steel goods. Accompanying the indexing of the account books, the project team submitted publications on the book and wine trade, on the role of merchants from Vienna, Linz, Regensburg or on Jewish merchants mainly from Moravia and Bohemia in the Danube trade. In addition, structural analyses were conducted on German-Turkish trade and on Bavarian-Austrian trade relations. Further information can be found on the project website https://donauhandel.univie.ac.at/.