Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

From Westphalia to the Caribbean
cities and the proto-industrial areas where the fabrics were produced.
A clearly distinct type of network emerged from the early
eighteenth century, with pedlars from specific, highly specialized
German manufacturing regions going to Cadiz to distribute the
sophisticated products of their respective home villages, namely,
glassware, carved wooden artwork, and clocks. The textile merchants
of the first type of network sought social integration into the Spanish
merchant community, while the highly specialized peddling traders
mostly avoided family and business alliances. One reason for this
was the fragility of their commodities, which demanded special skills
from packaging and haulage to ultimate sale to the customer. This
requirement also meant that they developed a far-reaching peddling
trade on the Iberian Peninsula. It seems that the Bohemians developed
the geographically most extended networks, with branches in
places as remote as Lima and Mexico City. The German peddling networks
were remarkably resilient in the face of the financial turbulence
of the period from about 1800 to 1820. Their businesses survived
far into the nineteenth century, while most of the smaller and
medium-sized German merchant houses in Cadiz were either bankrupted
or retreated from Spain during those years.
In contrast to London and Cadiz, Bordeaux attracted few protagonists
from rural areas. This port city was not so much a market for
central European manufactures, but rather exported colonial produce
from the French Antilles and wine from its own hinterland.
Most of the Germans on the Gironde estuary therefore belonged to
the above-mentioned type of well-established merchant families
from Hamburg and lesser trading cities such as Magdeburg, Stettin,
and Strasbourg, where their business partners or family members
organized the distribution of consumer goods such as sugar and coffee.
Some of the most successful Germans were also closely involved
with the plantation economy in the French Caribbean. Bordeaux’s
role as Europe’s major entrepôt for colonial commodities and
Hamburg’s unique position as a place for processing and redistributing
these products in the north were the key reasons why the transactions
of the Germans established there, and hence the spatial
dimensions of their commercial networks, tended to be bilateral,
while those of the Germans in London and Cadiz were multilateral,
linking various cities and regions in Germany and the Atlantic world.
A comparison of the three places examined here demonstrates
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