Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Hanseatic Networks in Tropical Markets
Brazilian state of Sergipe, where they soon built a modest but comfortable
home in Maroim. 34
Life in a remote tropical location was not without risk, but it was
precisely such family-based enterprises upon which the reputation of
Hamburg as a continental European emporium for globally traded
commodities such as sugar depended. Acquiring personal experience
in the rapidly changing world marketplace was an important
rite of passage for many Hanseatic mercantile elites. Aided by
Britain’s embrace of free trade, Hamburg’s merchants and sailors
extended their city’s commercial networks further and wider than
ever before. Latin America, with its expanding economic ties to
Europe and North America and its relatively open trading conditions,
offered an ideal base of operations for the Schramms and other
Hanseatic merchants.
Hamburg’s commercial ties with Latin America predated the
arrival of the Schramms by several generations. 35 By the 1850s, however,
Brazil had become the centre of a controversy in Germany over
its suitability as a place for emigrants to relocate where they could
maintain their ethnic identities more effectively than in North
America. 36 Concerns that German farmers were being exploited as
cheap sources of replacement labour for African slaves led Prussian
authorities to ban Brazilian migration agents in 1859, casting a dark
shadow over private plans to establish German settlement colonies. 37
34 For background on Brazilian slavery in Bahia, see B. J. Barickman, A Bahian
Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Reconcavo, 1780–1860
(Stanford, Calif., 1998); Stuart B. Schwarz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of
Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1830 (Cambridge, 1986); Kit Sims Taylor, Sugar
and the Underdevelopment of Northeast Brazil, 1500–1970 (Gainesville, Fla.,
1978); Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco: Modernization
without Change (Berkeley, 1974).
35 Albrecht von Gleich, ‘Die Hansestädte und Lateinamerika’, in Plagemann
(ed.), Übersee, 22–5; Prüser, Die Handelsverträge der Hansestädte; Minnemann
(ed.), Handels- und Schiffahrtsvertrag.
36 Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism, 75–100; Mack Walker, Germany and the Emi -
gration 1816–1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 120–1; Walther L. Bernecker and
Thomas Fischer, ‘Deutsche in Lateinamerika’, in Bade (ed.), Deutsche im
Ausland, 197–214.
37 Frederick C. Luebke, Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Im -
migration (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 93–109. For a broader account of German settle -
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