IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 208

For more than three centuries the trade of northern Europe was shaped by an organisation that had no capital, no constitution and no army. The Hanseatic League began as an association of German merchants who travelled to buy and sell in foreign ports and who banded together for protection on dangerous roads and seas. The name comes from Middle Low German, in which a hanse meant a band or company of merchants. Only later did it describe the shifting alliance of towns that historians call the League.

The League's centre was Lübeck, founded in the 1140s on a small river flowing into the Baltic and rebuilt from 1159 by Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony. Its advantage was geographical. Lübeck sat near the neck of the Jutland peninsula, so goods could reach Hamburg on the North Sea by a land journey of barely a hundred kilometres instead of the long and exposed voyage around Denmark. In 1241 the two towns agreed to cooperate in protecting traders on this route, an arrangement often treated as the first expression of the League.

From the Baltic came the bulky goods that western Europe could not produce for itself: grain, timber, pitch and tar for shipbuilding, flax and hemp for rope and canvas, and furs from the forests of the east. In return the towns shipped salt, which was essential for preserving fish and meat, and cloth woven in Flanders and England. The herring grounds off the coast of Scania, at the entrance to the Baltic, drew fishermen from many countries each autumn, and the market that grew up there became one of the great meeting points of northern trade.

Wherever their trade was valuable, the merchants established permanent bases. Four were of particular importance: the Peterhof at Novgorod in north-western Russia; Bryggen, the wharf at Bergen in Norway; a quarter of Bruges in Flanders; and the Steelyard in London. These were not colonies but walled compounds, granted privileges by local rulers in exchange for customs revenue and loans and governed by strict internal rules. Each had its own warehouses and its own regulations.

Life in the kontore, as these posts were called, was tightly controlled. The merchants were mostly young men who lived in communal halls, and at Bergen they were forbidden to marry local women or to trade privately on their own account. Such rules kept profits inside the community and preserved the solidarity on which the system depended.

What held the towns together was interest rather than law. Representatives met from time to time in a general assembly, the Hansetag, which usually convened at Lübeck, but there was no permanent bureaucracy, no standing army and no fixed treasury. Decisions bound only those towns that agreed to them, and some towns ignored assemblies altogether. Common expenses, such as the cost of negotiating privileges or of fitting out warships, were met by contributions assessed in proportion to the trade of each town.

The League's greatest weapon was not force but the blockade. When its position was threatened, the towns could refuse to supply a kingdom with salt, grain or fish, and few rulers could withstand the pressure for long. In the 1360s the towns went to war with Denmark, whose king had attacked their privileges, and in 1370 the treaty of Stralsund gave them extensive rights in Danish markets and a say in the choice of the Danish king.

Relations with England were more difficult. The London kontor exported English cloth to the Baltic and supplied the English fleet with naval stores, and for long periods its members enjoyed privileges that English merchants resented. After a series of clashes in the 1460s and 1470s, a settlement in 1474 restored and extended those privileges, but the resentment remained, and in 1598 Elizabeth I ordered the Steelyard to be closed.

Long before that closure, the foundations of the League's commerce had begun to shift. The herring changed their migration, appearing in ever greater numbers in the North Sea rather than in the Sound, and the market at Scania dwindled. Dutch shippers, sailing cheaper vessels with smaller crews, took over the carriage of grain from the Baltic and of salt and herring in the other direction. Stronger royal governments in Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Russia, meanwhile, made the towns' privileges harder to defend.

The Thirty Years' War, which ravaged Germany from 1618 to 1648, damaged many Hanseatic towns and disrupted their trade routes. The last general assembly met at Lübeck in 1669, and although nobody dissolved the League, it never met again. Its material legacy survives in the brick Gothic churches, town halls and warehouses of dozens of northern cities, and the words 'Hanseatic city' still appear in the official names of Hamburg and Bremen. Historians now describe the League less as an organisation than as a network: fluid, practical and held together by commercial self-interest.

Until quite recently, the history of human migration was written from three kinds of evidence: the objects people left behind, the languages their descendants spoke and the rare comments of ancient writers. Since 2010 a fourth source has become central. Ancient DNA, recovered from bones, teeth and occasionally the soil of caves, now allows geneticists to compare individuals who lived thousands of years apart and to say where their ancestors came from. Sequencing has become far cheaper, and the number of ancient individuals studied has grown rapidly. The Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 for work that made this field possible.

DNA is a fragile molecule. After an organism dies, enzymes and microbes begin breaking it into short fragments, and chemical processes slowly damage what remains; warmth and moisture accelerate both. The best-preserved material therefore comes from cold, dry and stable places: permafrost, deep cave deposits and the contents of sealed tombs. Even there, most of what is recovered belongs not to the human being but to the bacteria and fungi that colonised the body after death. One useful discovery of the past decade was that the dense bone surrounding the inner ear yields far more human DNA than the long bones traditionally sampled, and much of the best material now comes from that small, unglamorous part of the skull.

Contamination is the persistent enemy. A single fingerprint, a speck of dust from a museum shelf or a drop of sweat can supply more DNA than the specimen itself, so samples are handled under conditions closer to those of a surgical theatre than an excavation. Laboratories are sealed and cleaned, researchers wear full-body suits, masks and gloves, and every result is checked for the tell-tale signs of modern genetic material. Contamination has occasionally forced teams to abandon results, and it remains the reason why claims in this field are treated cautiously until they have been repeated.

The first great achievement of the field was the reading of genomes from our closest relatives. A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, and in the same year a finger bone from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia revealed a previously unknown group, the Denisovans. These genomes also showed that different human populations did not simply replace one another. People whose ancestry lies outside Africa carry a small proportion of Neanderthal DNA, and populations in parts of Oceania carry DNA from Denisovans. Comparison with living people suggests that the interbreeding happened shortly after modern humans left Africa.

The second achievement has been to settle a long-running argument about how cultures spread. Archaeologists can see a new style of pottery or burial appear across a region, but they cannot tell from the objects alone whether the people themselves moved or whether an idea was adopted. Geneticists sometimes call this the 'pots versus people' problem, and it is at heart a question about migration. In several cases ancient DNA has come down firmly on the side of movement. The best-known example concerns the steppe north of the Black Sea, from which, about five thousand years ago, a large number of people moved westwards into central Europe. Their arrival coincides closely with the spread of Corded Ware pottery and burial rites.

The early Middle Ages in Britain have been examined in similar detail. Studies of cemeteries in eastern England have found that in some places a large majority of the people buried had most of their ancestry in continental Europe, while a few kilometres away the proportion was much smaller. The individuals buried with objects of continental style were often those whose genomes most resembled continental populations, which suggests that grave goods and genes travelled together. In western parts of Britain the genetic signal of immigration is weaker, which fits the archaeological picture of a settlement that varied greatly from region to region. The overall picture is one of movement, intermarriage and gradual mixing rather than the replacement of one population by another.

Genetics, however, cannot answer every historical question. A genome does not record which language a person spoke, which god they worshipped or which side they took in a war. Genes and culture can move independently: a pottery style may spread through trade and marriage with no significant migration, and a movement of people may leave little trace in the objects they used. A change in burial practice, in particular, may reflect a change of belief rather than a change of population. Nor does ancient DNA map neatly onto the categories of modern politics; the populations of the distant past were not nations, and ancestry is not identity.

The discipline has limits that its practitioners are the first to acknowledge. Because DNA decays quickly in hot and humid conditions, the ancient genomes published so far come overwhelmingly from Europe and a few other temperate regions, and the deeper history of much of Africa and southern Asia remains largely undocumented from this source. Samples are also biased towards the kinds of burial that preserve bone. Taking material destroys part of the specimen, and research on human remains raises questions of consent that genetics alone cannot settle. Many researchers now work with descendant communities before sampling, and DNA recovered from cave sediment rather than from bones offers one way of studying a site without destroying anything at all.

In June 2020 a crowd in Bristol pulled down a bronze statue of Edward Colston, a merchant whose fortune owed much to the slave trade, and rolled it into the harbour. The event was dramatic but not unique. Cities across the United States had already removed or relocated monuments to Confederate leaders, and after 1989 statues of communist officials came down across eastern Europe. Each case provokes the same quarrel. Is a society that takes a monument down learning from its history, or trying to forget it? The quarrel is an old one, but it has grown louder as confidence about who deserves a plinth has weakened.

The first argument for removal is that a public monument is not a record of the past but a statement about whom the present honours. Nobody mistakes a bronze figure on a plinth outside a town hall for a work of history; it is a claim about who deserves admiration. It also matters when the monument was put up. Many of the Confederate monuments now at the centre of disputes were not erected in the years after the civil war at all, but decades later, by people who were making a point about racial hierarchy at the time. A statue can therefore tell us less about the person it depicts than about the generation that paid for it.

A second argument concerns space. A statue in a public square occupies ground that belongs to everybody, and the people who walk past it every day are not a captive audience in a lecture theatre. Where the figure commemorated is associated with their ancestors' suffering, the monument is not a neutral ornament but a daily reminder of who was thought to matter. In a shared space, the question is not only what a monument says about the past but what it continues to say to those who live beside it.

The objection to removal is equally serious. Monuments are documents of a kind: they record what an earlier generation chose to commemorate, and destroying them destroys evidence. Museums exist precisely to keep objects that a later age finds troubling, and nobody proposes melting down their contents. If every figure who held opinions we now find repellent had to come down, the squares of Europe would be bare, since the past is not a list of the virtuous. There is a further worry: a society that removes uncomfortable monuments may come to believe that it has dealt with the history they represent, when in fact it has merely removed a reminder of it.

Hence the compromise that many institutions have adopted, and which some governments have written into policy: retain and explain. The monument stays, but a label, an adjacent panel or a new work of art tells the visitor what the person did and why the monument was erected. Budapest's Memento Park, opened in the early 1990s, goes further, gathering removed statues of the communist period in one place and presenting them with explanatory text. There the visitor meets the objects as evidence rather than as objects of respect, and the effect is instructive rather than celebratory. The objection is that a label can be read in a second and ignored for a lifetime, and that explanation may become an excuse for leaving an insult in place.

Both sides, it seems to me, are describing different objects. A plinth in a square confers honour; a plinth in a gallery confers interest, and with it the explanation the object needs. The sensible question to ask about any contested monument is therefore not what the person did, which is a matter for historians, but what the monument is doing now. A figure that was placed where it stands in order to assert the inferiority of a group, and that has since been rejected by the community around it, has no good claim to remain. A figure that records a genuine achievement, however imperfect the achiever, has a stronger one.

This suggests decisions taken case by case rather than a general rule. Relocation is usually a better answer than destruction, partly because it preserves the object and partly because a museum can supply the context that a street corner cannot. Destruction is defensible where a monument was created to intimidate and where the community has plainly turned against it. Where a community has clearly rejected a monument, leaving it in place cannot be justified either, and slow official procedures can become a way of doing nothing at all.

The claim that removal erases history would be convincing if the statues stood in museums. Most do not. Moving a monument into a gallery, with an honest account of why it was put up and why it came down, teaches more than leaving it to be walked past unread. Handled that way, the record remains intact and the square is no longer asked to admire what it has rejected. What I do not accept is wholesale clearance, the removal of every figure whose opinions we now regret; that really would be an attempt to tidy the past. The aim should be a more honest public landscape, not an empty one.