Studying the First Modern Economy with the Sound Toll Accounts

The first part of the title above describes the final analysis we want to perform in this study. Here we will mainly present a more initial discussion about our data sources and in particular the data from the Sound Toll Accounts as digitalized by researchers in the Netherlands and made online available for researchers for free.<br/>These data are very rich and complete in that they in principle offer information about each ship that sailed through Øresund in the time span of the Sound Toll (1429 – 1857). Originally in la Cour &amp; Feilberg (2000), we presented a study based on the Sound Toll accounts but with a different focus. Back then, we used the summary tables of Bang and Korst (1922-1930) based on the original books of the accounts. In the present study we want to change our main source to the digitalized version mentioned above. At the present stage we are still preparing, cleaning and comparing the online data with our old Bang and Korst data. Hence our paper here is mainly on our opportunities and challenges in this data preparatory phase, although we also want to sketch the ideas we have for further research.