Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

BRADLEY D. NARANCH
and it was directly relevant to the political and economic concerns of
the modern world. The decline of the ‘savages and half-savages of
the world’ was, in some senses, part of the past history of Andree’s
globalization narrative, while the rise of a new, pan-Asian labour
force was viewed as part of the future of the world economy. The
most primitive of the world’s populations, like the aboriginal peoples
of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, were destined for extinction,
Andree believed. 49 Race relations between white and coloured
residents of a given colony or former colony were, above all, part of
the global present. Outside the United States, Globus reported on the
status of mixed race populations in a variety of colonial settings: the
Dutch East Indies, South America, the Caribbean, and the Cape
Colony of South Africa. 50 Such descriptions of colonial life portray a
world in motion characterized by changing racial configurations and
cultural influences. Racial mixing is a sign of danger, particularly if it
occurs between black and white, but also a secondary effect of the
process of European global expansion.
Along with the writings of scientific popularizers such as Andree,
Hanseatic communities also helped to shape the image and reality of
a racialized global labour force upon whose backs the burdens of
empire and of worldwide economic stability rested. 51 By making
effective use of transnational networks and multi-generational know -
ledge of world markets, they facilitated cross-cultural ex changes
between Germans and the wider world. They supplied the German
public with consumer goods that helped to define middle-class
respectability. 52 In addition to material goods, Hanseatic networks
generated other, less tangible commodities demanded by a modernizing
civil society. As amateur ethnographers and local experts on
foreign lifestyles and market trends, they disseminated an array of
information about the benefits and hazards of overseas expansion. It
was through transnational networks like those connecting the
Hanseatic merchant diaspora that competing viewpoints on the
desirability of compulsory labour, the validity of race as an intellec-
49 Id., ‘Das Erwachen der Südsee’, in Geographische Wanderungen, ii. 318–20.
50 Andree, ‘Die “Malaien” der Kapstadt’, Globus, 3 (1863).
51 Geoff Eley, ‘Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the
Present a Name’, History Workshop Journal, 63 (2007), 154–88, esp. 164–6.
52 Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800
(New York, 2002).
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