Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Hanseatic Networks in Tropical Markets
in protecting their local autonomy while pursuing low-cost techniques
for global expansion into desirable commodities markets.
While they never attained the magnitude of the trans-Atlantic trade,
such initiatives were clear signals of the expanded commercial
opportunities that German businessmen in the second half of the
nineteenth century enjoyed, whether the location was a Brazilian
sugar plantation, a South Seas island, a Hong Kong tea exchange, or
a Liberian trading post.
By 1866, before Hamburg’s overseas consulates were absorbed
into the North German Confederation, the city maintained a global
network of 279 consular outposts, including sixty-nine in European
colonies and sixty-six in states outside Europe. 29 Unable to compete
head-to-head with better capitalized Western European firms that
enjoyed state subsidies and gunboat diplomacy, small, family-run
firms thrived in regional and niche markets around the world.
Hanseatic traders and commercial sailing ships operated throughout
Latin America, in India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, and
in the Spanish and Dutch colonies in the Pacific. Increasingly, some
merchants with commercial networks in South America began
branching out into high-risk emerging tropical markets in the Pacific
and along the West African coast, locations which would play major
roles in the creation of Germany’s colonial empire several decades
later. 30
A third reason for the success of the Hanseatic cosmopolitan
model was that it relied heavily on British imperial infrastructure
and liberal trade policies to expand globally at relatively low cost.
The British Empire, with its extensive network of coaling stations,
colonies, commodities markets, communications hubs, and overseas
outposts, offered an ideal business platform upon which Hanseatic
firms could operate. Hamburg firms, in particular, took advantage of
the phasing out of British mercantile laws in order to access markets
in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. By working within a British imperial
order, they drew upon existing patterns of Anglo-German cultural
exchange that resulted in a wide variety of political, scientific, and
29 Washausen, Hamburg und die Kolonialpolitk, 54.
30 Dirk Bauendamm, Wagnis Westafrika: 150 Jahre C. Woermann. Die Geschichte
eines Hamburger Handelshauses, 1837–1987 (Hamburg, 1987); Renate Hücking
and Ekkehard Launer, Aus Menschen Neger machen: Wie sich das Handelshaus
Woermann in Afrika entwickelt hat (Hamburg, 1986).
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