Counting cows and coins: Monitoring the economy through port records and trade statistics in the early modern period

Port records detailing taxes and duties paid on imports and exports belong to the first generation or type of quantitative records that we have for medieval and early modern Europe. They emerged long before people actually produced aggregate accounts on trade flows and economic input and output, or national product. This chapter will proceed in three parts. A first section briefly discusses the emergence and types of quantitative sources documenting commercial and trade flows in late medieval and early modern Europe. A second section discusses ways of retrieving and using quantitative sources by means of a case study of an eighteenth-century customs record or ‘port book’ from Scotland in the United Kingdom – a very common type of source in early modern overseas trade. A brief conclusion closes the chapter. This should give us a short glimpse on the possibilities as well as pitfalls working with early modern serial-quantitative documents.