Back to the Future: What can we Learn about Future Thinking from Late Medieval and Early Modern Merchant Correspondences from the Low Countries

This presentation was given on 27/2/2026 at the Low Countries Seminar, hosted by the Institute for Historical Research, London. Did people in the past think about their futures as we do today? This presentation presents (some of) the results of the “Back to the Future” research programme (ERC, 2020-2025), which studies future expectations and actions in Europe between c. 1400 and c. 1830. Building on the “temporal turn” and the more recent “future turn” in historiography, it questions Reinhart Koselleck’s influential narrative of a shift from a cyclical, apocalyptic medieval future to an open, malleable modern one. That narrative rests on canonical texts and elite authors, so the project turns instead to merchant letters, a source that is abundant, long-running, and shows both thinking and doing. Using the late sixteenth-century correspondence of Cunertorf, Snel & Janssen, the talk demonstrates a methodology combining close annotation with distant reading. Merchant letters prove a strongly future-oriented genre: nearly half of their content refers to the future. The analysis covers future horizons, modality, markers of futurity, and perceived control. Case studies on the death of King Sebastian of Portugal, the Dutch Revolt, and career decisions show how merchants turned uncertainty into commercial strategy. The presentation concludes with the project’s wider European comparison. This presentation is the result of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 851053).