Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Hanseatic Networks in Tropical Markets
West Africa. The Bremen-based North German Missionary Society,
in conjunction with the Swiss Basel Missionary Society, had made
attempts in the late 1840s to set up a religious outpost in the interior
of the Volta River watershed. 75
In search of less expensive transportation and shipping arrangements
than they could negotiate with a British steamship line, the
society entered into a business partnership with F. M. Vietor & Sons,
who had family ties with the North German mission, to provision
their African stations. 76 In exchange, the firm established its own
trading post in Keta, using African clerks who had been educated by
the missionary schools. Beginning with the dispatch of a company
ship, the Dahomey, in 1859, the coordination between missionaries
and merchants proved to be successful in allowing both groups to
expand their presence to other locations in the region, although persistent
personal disputes between the two groups led to the eventual
separation of mission stations and trading posts in 1868.
Because of the continuing ties between Bremen firms and religious
missions, however, company agents were instructed not to sell
alcohol, tobacco, or firearms, all of which were highly profitable commodities
for European and African traders in the region. Germanmade
spirits, such as rum, gin, and brandy, were staples of
Hamburg’s West African trade, and they made up almost two-thirds
of the city’s exports to the region by 1884. 77 Like Hamburg merchants,
Bremen traders operated successfully in areas of West Africa
that were nominally free of European colonial rule. This quest for
tax-free trading environments, where neither local rulers nor
European colonial officials would levy high rents, bribes, or customs
costs on Hanseatic commercial transactions, led companies to expand
their trading networks from established market centres to more
peripheral trading zones between competing spheres of interest.
75 Arthur J. Knoll, Togo under Imperial Germany 1884–1914 (Stanford, Calif.,
1978), 15–16; id., ‘Die Nordeutsche Missionsgesellschaft in Togo 1890–1914’,
in Klaus J. Bade (ed.), Imperialismus und Kolonialmission: Kaiserliches Deutsch -
land und koloniales Imperium (2nd edn., Wiesbaden, 1984), 165–88.
76 Hartmut Müller, ‘Bremen und Westafrika: Wirtschafts- und Handels be zie -
hungen im Zeitalter des Früh- und Hochkolonialismus 1841–1914, Teil I’,
Jahrbuch der Wittheit zu Bremen, 15 (1971), 55–9.
77 Ibid. 76–7.
125