Abstract: Political economists′ work collecting and collating historical resources in 19th century had filled the gap in trade studies in traditional historians, but their deficiencies of theoretical analysis had been criticized by economists. Then Classical Economics School put forward the “natural endowment theory” to explain the division of labor based on trading behavior, and Neoclassical Economic School led the continuous transformation of trade patterns to “factor accumulation and cost theory”. After discovering the special utility of trade actors′ institution construction, Institutional Economics School tried to reinterpret the trade behavior through the “theories of property right” and “reputation mechanism”. With the rise of new historiography, historians have called in question the construction paradigm of economics,and created the research approaches of “Comparative history” and “the Global history”. However, it′s not easy to realize an effective integration of various disciplinary approaches in the current regional trade research. Maybe it′s the only way to be on the base of historical logic, combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis and maintaining a comprehensive research perspective, we can fully understand the regional civilization under the influence of trade interaction.

Key words: Northern Europe, regional trade, political economics, economics, new historiography