Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MONIKA POETTINGER
English Wares and French Rule
The productivity equilibrium in the European printing sector was
short lived. Within a few decades the competition from England,
triggered by the invention of roller printing in the last decade of the
eight eenth century, would overwhelm all Continental manufacturers,
as they were well aware. ‘This mode of printing would, in time,
put all the others out of work, and the benefit would remain with
those who could make them [toiles peintes] cheaper and in less time’, 50
stated Oberkampf, one of the biggest French cotton printers at the
beginning of the 1790s. In fact, English wares became so cheap that
India’s comparative advantage was reversed, and they replaced linen
and colonial goods as the most profitable trade for European merchants.
51 In the wake of this change, Frankfurt merchant houses shifted
their attention to England and the best markets for its calicoes by
weaving new international webs of subsidiaries and correspondents
that included the new production locations in Manchester and Leeds,
and the most important selling markets in Europe and abroad.
In Milan, cheaper English cotton pieces, directly competing with
Adam Kramer’s products, were imported by another German merchant–entrepreneur,
Heinrich Mylius. A generation before Heinrich,
the Mylius family had already built an international commercial network
for German linen products with one of its most important hubs
in London. Thus it was perfectly positioned to gain from the new cotton
trade. Given new entrepreneurial opportunities, international
family networks used sons and younger family members to extend
their webs into prospective markets. If this option was precluded,
international networks resorted to affiliation by marriage, a practice
that ensured the durable and faithful commitment of young partners
through ties strong enough to offset the distances and information
gaps suffered by these ventures. The international network of the
Mylius family, for example, was fostered by affiliation with many
promising young partners, the most remarkable being Isaac
Aldebert, Carl Cornelius Souchay, and Martin Schunk. 52 This was
50 Stanley D. Chapman and Serge Chassagne, European Textile Printers in the
Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf (London, 1981), 140–1.
51 Ibid. 89.
52 On the history of the Souchays and their connections with the Schunk and
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