In the first place, down to the end of the twelfth century, the number of towns properly so-called was relatively small. Only those places that were favored by a privileged geographical situation attracted the merchants in sufficient number to enable them to maintain a commercial movement of real importance. After that the attraction which these centres of business exerted upon their environs was much greater than is ordinarily imagined. All the secondary localities were subject to their influence. The merchants dwelling in these last, too few to act by themselves, affiliated themselves to the hanse or gild of the principal town. The Flemish hanse, which we have already instanced, proves this fully, by showing us the merchants of Dixmude, Damme, Oudenbourg, Ardenbourg, etc., seeking admission into the hanse of Bruges.
In the second place, at the period we have now reached the towns devoted themselves far more to commerce than to industry. Few could be cited that appear thus early as manufacturing centres. The concentration of artisans within their walls is still incomplete. If their merchants export, along with the products of the soil, such as wine and grain, a quantity of manufactured products, such, for example, as cloth, it is more than probable that these were for the most part made in the country.
Admit these two statements, and the nature of early commerce is explained without difficulty. They account in fact both for the freedom of the merchants and for that character of wholesale exporters which they exhibit so clearly and which prevents our placing them in the category in which the theory of urban economy claims to confine them. Contrary to the general belief, it appears then that before the thirteenth century we find a period of free capitalistic expansion. No doubt the capitalism of that time is a collective capitalism: groups, not isolated individuals, are its instruments. No doubt too it contents itself with very simple operations. The commercial expeditions upon which its activity especially centres itself demand, for their successful conduct, an endurance, a physical strength, which the more advanced stages of economic evolution will not require. But they demand nothing more. Without the ability to plan and combine they would remain sterile. And so we can see that, from the beginning, what we find at the basis of capitalism is intelligence, that same intelligence which Georg Hansen has so well shown, long ago, to be the efficient cause of the emergence of the bourgeoisie.[15]