Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Duties
Import and export duties have long been an important source of revenue for the government, even if it
occasionally been exceptions. In Sweden, for example, duty tariffs were introduced in the 1100s, but some
trade routes were duty-free, as the Hanseatic cities of Visby, Lubeck (from 1161) and at times certain
customs locations have been leased to private individuals, e.g. around 1623, 1719, 1726 and 1777 .
In the 1600 - and 1700's Swedish imports were dominated by a few commodities in the majority of cases
used in food production, such as: salt, malt (raw materials for beer), rye, barley and salted herring (figure 7,
8 and chart 7). This suggests that we drank a lot of beer, ate salty food and that our diet was pretty limited. In
addition, these figures show that most of the other products were manufactured within the country. The
export consisted mainly of tar, timber and iron.
Figure 7. Gustav Vasa’s (king in Sweden in
the 1500s) first tax table.
The table was used 1534-1536. For those
who can read Swedish it’s obvious that a lot
of imported goods is missing on the list. All
those who imported non-listed good had to
pay 1 öre for every mark of the goods value
(= about 12,5% in duty). 1536, when the
customs authority was founded, a general
duty tariff of 5% of the goods value was
decided. Besides the comodities salt and
hops. Hops, by the way, was one of the main
imports at the time (and thus negative for the
trading balance) , since we drank a lot of
beer. So the king decided in 1474 that every
farm should grow at least 200 plants of hops.
And there is still today a law about this,
however, it is not in use.
Figure 8. Swedish import 1640
(Tabeller öfver Sveriges import och
export sjöledes åren 1637-1640 och
1645 Ur Rikskansleren Axel
Oxenstiernas skrifter och
befvexling, P. A. Nordstedt & söner,
Stockholm, 1904). The biggest
import item was Spanish salt
67 976.5 barrels, which probably is
about 11 000 tons. Moreover we
imported malt (7 038.5 barrels), rye
(7 295 barrels), herring (12 050
barrels) and cloth, spices, meat, fish,
beverages, and colors’ in various
smaller volumes with odd names
and miscellaneous manufactured
products like gun powder horns. Salt
was, as mentioned, the most
important goods . Despite that we
also have made our own salt through
dry boiling of North sea water.
The reason that it never became a
success story is that it requires more
than 20 m 3 logs for one barrel of
salt.
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