Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MONIKA POETTINGER
a consequence of this second kind of activity, production processes
were introduced to different countries and production factors were
moved. Adam Smith observed simply: ‘Such manufactures, therefore,
are the offspring of foreign commerce’; ‘they have been introduced
. . . by the violent operation, if one may say so, of the stocks of
particular merchants and undertakers, who established them in imitation
of some foreign manufactures of the same kind.’ 3 In the reality
of nineteenth-century Europe, such ‘violent operation’ implied delicate
factor movements and the nurturing of local human capital: a
difficult process confronted with many barriers. It was the cosmopolitanism
of merchants, their ability to act internationally and to
organize the production of goods wherever they considered it profitable,
that enabled the spread of industrialization. Their role was at
times misjudged or even condemned by contemporaries.
The history of merchant houses, mostly private banks, in Conti -
nental Europe during the century of industrialization has undergone
a profound reassessment, 4 but we cannot yet give an unequivocal
answer as to the role of merchants and their networks in the process
of industrial dissemination and the managing of entrepreneurial
migrations. 5 Entrepreneurial migrations have mostly been studied as
vehicles for technological transfer, 6 while their originating motiva-
3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(London, 1852), 165–6.
4 See Stanley Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking (London, 2006); and
Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres
1780–2006 (Cambridge, 2006). For Frankfurt see Udo Heyn, Private Banking
and Industrialization (New York, 1981). For Italy see Luciano Segreto, ‘I
banchieri privati e l’industrializzazione italiana’, Imprese e Storia, 24 (2001),
273–306; and Giandomenico Piluso, L’arte dei banchieri (Milan, 1999). An
exhaustive bibliography of earlier works may be found in Sidney Pollard,
‘Industrialization and the European Economy’, Economic History Review,
26/4 (1973), 644–5.
5 The literature on the role of merchants in pre-industrial economies is im -
mense. For a bibliography of merchants’ guides, textbooks, and treatises see
e.g. the volumes edited by Jochen Hoock and Pierre Jeannin (eds.), Ars
Mercatoria: Handbücher und Traktate für den Gebrauch des Kaufmanns,
1470–1820. Eine analytische Bibliographie, 3 vols. (Paderborn, 1991–2001).
6 See Paul Mathias, ‘Skill and the Diffusion of Innovations from Britain in the
Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25 (1975),
250