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Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry. ... O, wot een gulden Neeringh en voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh; hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft en winnende st/'n brood God dank en eere gheeft.'T HOSE were the words of Joost van den Vondel, the greatest Dutch poet of the seventeenth century, in adulation of the "royal herring." As he suggested, the herring was an important commodity in the international trading network of the Dutch Republic. The herring fishery was a transforming industry, a trafiek. Netherlanders caught the fish at sea, treated them using imported salt, and packed them in casks of imported wood. They exported the final product. Herring played an integral part in the "mother trade," the shipping of corn and forest products from Baltic ports to the west coast of France and Iberia to be exchanged for salt, wine, and other goods which in turn were brought back to the Netherlands. Those goods were shipped on to the Baltic in their original form or in some processed form or, in the case of some of the salt, transformed by combination with herring. It was that and related exchanges that made the Dutch Republic unquestionably the leading trading state per person in seventeenth-century Europe. Though it is true that Dutch herring exports were only possible because of the existence of the trading network, the quantity offish sent overseas was not a function of the quantity of any

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