Danube Trade 2. 0

Donauhandel 2.0, led by Peter Rauscher, is a cooperation project with the Institute of Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna. The ACDH-CH is the national research partner responsible for the technical implementation.

The exchange of goods is an essential feature of human culture in all eras. In the long centuries before the technical revolution of the railroad, land connections were predominantly in poor condition and particularly unsuitable for the transportation of bulk goods and heavy cargo. Where the natural and political conditions made it possible, sea and inland waterways therefore played a prominent role. The technical development corresponded to that of the state: The early modern territories of Central Europe knew no statistical recording of economic data until well into the 18th century. Reconstructing the flow of goods and trade cycles, consumer habits, such as the integration of colonial goods like chocolate, coffee or tea into the diet, or identifying the carriers of trade and transportation (shipmasters and merchants) therefore pose great challenges for historians. So-called toll registers (toll logs) offer the best access to research into freight transport. In such account books of the numerous toll stations in the pre-modern era, which were nothing more than customs stations, the carriers, the goods they transported, their owners and also the passengers carried were recorded. The records of the toll at Aschach in Upper Austria form an outstanding series of such account books, of which 194 volumes have been preserved for the period from 1627 to 1775. In Aschach, vehicles traveling on the Danube, the most important transport route in southern Germany and Austria, had to pay tolls. The information contained in the toll records can therefore be used to reconstruct the movement of goods between the Austrian Danube countries and the neighboring regions. Connected to the transportation network of the Danube and its tributaries were important trading and commercial cities such as Ulm, Augsburg and Linz, industrial and agricultural regions such as the Upper and Lower Austrian iron districts or the Lower Austrian wine-growing regions, as well as the all-important consumer city of Vienna. The Danube region was connected to Italy via Hall in Tyrol, while goods from overseas and Eastern Europe were handled in Regensburg in particular. 

The Danube Trade project makes the Aschach toll records from 1706 to 1740 accessible via a freely accessible online database. This means that this unique source for Austria can be searched for the first time for the ship movements, persons, goods and places recorded in it and scientifically analyzed for a period of three and a half decades. The extensive data material from Aschach allows a differentiated analysis of economic cycles, the real volume of trade and the people involved in trade and transportation.  

The ACDH-CH is responsible for the human- and machine-readable processing of the data collected in the project and for its long-term archiving.