Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

4
Between Cosmopolitanism and German Colonialism:
Nineteenth-Century Hanseatic Networks in Emerging
Tropical Markets
BRADLEY D. NARANCH
Introduction
They were telegrams that no one would ever wish to receive, even in
an age when such electronic communications were still something of
a novelty. 1 Both messages, bound for Hamburg, were nearly identical
in content and had travelled a long distance to reach their final
destination. They began their trans-Atlantic journey as hand-written
messages originating in the heart of Brazilian sugar country. Upon
arrival in the Bahian city of São Salvador, they were then transcribed
into short telegrams of fewer than twenty words each and dispatched
on separate sailing vessels bound for Lisbon and Bordeaux. This was
a precautionary measure to ensure their swiftest possible delivery to
locations on the Atlantic coast where there were direct telegraph connections
to northern Germany. The first arrived in Lisbon on the
afternoon of 17 April 1863. Two days later, the message finally made
it to Hamburg. The second later reached the French main land at 7
a.m. on 21 April and was wired by 9 a.m. that same morn ing. It was
a costly but effective method of sending the Schramm and the
Jencquel families, two prominent merchant clans who resided in the
Hanseatic port city, the sobering news that their relative, Adolphine,
was dead.
1 Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communications and Empire: Media,
Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007). For accounts that
stress the competitive dynamics of the growth of global communications networks,
see Jill Hills, The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The For -
mative Century (Urbana, Ill., 2002); Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon:
Telecommunications and International Politics 1851–1945 (New York, 1991).
99