Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

German Entrepreneurs and the Industrialization of Milan
group of merchants, and the drainage of local resources by Austrian
taxation. In his letters Jagemann reported the usual complaints of
local intellectuals: Lombardy’s wealth, not invested in manufacturing
activities, was spent at leisure by idle noblemen, transferred to
Austria as tax payments, or absorbed by the silk trade. 20
The forceful drive towards economic efficiency and specialization
through trade was not easily diverted. Half a century after Jage -
mann’s observations, nothing had apparently changed. 21 ‘It is common
knowledge’, wrote Eco della Borsa in 1850, Milan’s most important
commercial newspaper, ‘that the wealth of Lombardy expendable
outside the region consists of just two products: silk and
cheese.’ 22 At the time, silk alone accounted for more than 94 per cent
of the region’s exports, generating a seemingly bottomless source of
increasing wealth (see Figure 9.1).
The region’s economic development appeared to be dictated by
its natural endowments, that is, its high yielding agriculture. There
was still no economic rationale, no motivation to build factories, to
mech anize and modernize. Lack of capital and entrepreneurial ability
continued to be the scapegoats usually named by Lombardy’s
intellectuals and economists to explain Milan’s lagging modernization.
23 Carlo Cattaneo, for example, frequently and aggressively
blamed the local elite’s conservative stance for Lombardy’s back-
20 Ibid. 209–10.
21 Sergio Zaninelli, ‘Gli scambi con l’estero nell’economia lombarda dall’età
delle riforme all’Unificazione’, in the collected essays, Storia del commercio
italiano (Rome, 1978), 46–67.
22 Eco della Borsa, 28 Jan. 1850.
23 The perceived lack of entrepreneurs in the Milanese area has found its way
from contemporary chronicles and economic writings into modern economic
history. For the main champion of this view, see Kenneth R. Greenfield,
Economia e liberalismo (Bari, 1940), 130. Recent research has rehabilitated the
reputation of the Milanese economic elite and its innovation and modernity
in the early nineteenth century. See Stefano Angeli, Proprietari, commercianti e
filandieri a Milano nel primo Ottocento (Milan, 1982); Stefano Levati, La nobiltà
del lavoro: Negozianti e banchieri a Milano tra Ancien Règime e Restaurazione
(Milan, 1997); Stefania Licini, ‘Ricchi, Ricchezza e Sviluppo Industriale: La
business community milanese dell’Ottocento’, Annali di Storia dell’Impresa, 10
(1999), 525–57.
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