Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

BRADLEY D. NARANCH
commercial partnerships and that were sustained by continued
migration of Germans to Britain during the nineteenth century. 31
German Cosmopolitans and the Question of Slavery
While commercial partnerships with their British counterparts re -
mained a popular option for many Hanseatic trading houses through -
out the nineteenth century, the decline of the Spanish and Por tu guese
empires, combined with the rapid economic growth of the United
States, created a range of new possible markets in the Americas for
enterprising merchants to explore. Like a growing number of nineteenth-century
Europeans, Adolphine and Ernst Schramm crossed
the Atlantic in search of personal fortune. 32 Unlike the majority of
German travellers bound for the United States, however, they and a
small number of German merchants and migrants chose Brazil as an
attractive alternative, one that the Schramms felt held great potential
as an emerging tropical market. 33 In the 1830s Ernst had worked with
his brother in Pernambuco, Brazil, in the sugar export business. He
returned home at the age of 46 to marry the 32-year-old Adolphine
Jencquel, who, like her husband, came from a well-connected and
worldly merchant family. Following shopping trips in Paris and
London, the newlyweds left Europe in 1858 for the north-eastern
31 Stefan Manz, Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, and John R. Davis (eds.), Migration
and Transfer from Germany to Britain, 1660–1914 (Munich, 2007); John R. Davis,
The Victorians and Germany (Berne, 2007); Panikos Panayi, German Immigrants
in Britain during the Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1995); Ulrike
Kirch berger, ‘Deutsche Naturwissenschaftler im britischen Empire: Die Er for -
schung der aussereuropäischen Welt im Spannungsfeld zwischen deut schem
und britischem Imperialismus’, Historische Zeitschrift, 271 (2000), 621–60.
32 Klaus Bade, Migration in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Oxford,
2003), provides an excellent introduction to this topic. For a global overview,
see Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Mil len -
ium (Durham, NC, 2002).
33 For German migration to North and South America during this period, see
the individual chapters in Klaus Bade (ed.), Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in
Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart (3rd edn., Munich, 1993).
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