Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

German Entrepreneurs and the Industrialization of Milan
shows (see Figure 9.3), two years after its foundation the company’s
shares were in the hands of members of the Mylius family scattered
all over Europe, Milanese noblemen and merchants (Balabio Besana
e Compagni, for instance, was owned by a family doubly related to
the Kramers by marriage), immigrant entrepreneurs such as Seuffer -
held, and foreign firms located in France, Switzerland, and the Ger -
man states. Or again, as in the case of the Dufays, whom Heinrich
Mylius mentions in a letter to Simon Moritz von Bethmann as a family
from Frankfurt that was setting up a competing network between
Germany and England, such feared competition apparently evolved
into a relationship of trust and joint investments. This kind of bond
also existed between the Mylius and the von Bethmann family.
Mylius himself offered shares in his newly founded insurance company
to Simon von Bethmann. ‘Our Insurance Company’ he wrote on
16 November 1825, ‘is soon to start its operations, and I delighted in
the decision of the Board of Directors to make a part of the remaining
shares available to foreign friends at issue price, that is, at the same
cost and under the same conditions as for the founder of the
Company. Your Excellency was surely informed of this issue by Mr
Mirabaud and has already placed the desired orders directly with
him?’ 110 Thus international networks like those of the Kramer, Beth -
mann, Mylius, and Dufay families actively promoted within themselves
the best initiatives in their hubs of reference, creating an international
circulation of capital that heightened profitability and re -
inforced international interrelations.
Insurance was only one of the sectors in which the presence in
Milan of German entrepreneurs and their networks hastened innovation.
Another example of the innovative capacity of international
entrepreneurial networks was the manufacturing of mechanical
equip ment. While the Kramers developed and sold mechanical
devices, 111 and patented new productive processes, Heinrich Mylius
and, after his death, his family were for half a century shareholders
110 Letter of 16 Nov. 1825, quoted in Pavoni (ed.), . . . rispettabilissimo Goethe,
173.
111 On a stove for nurturing silk worms see F. Dossena, ‘Istruzione sull’uso
pratico della stufa per la nascita dei bachi da seta di recente invenzione dei
Sigg. De Kramer’, Giornale agrario lombardo-veneto, 2nd series, 13 (May 1840),
293–5; and on a mechanical device for silk reeling see ‘Modo di trarre la seta
a trama filata’, Il Politecnico, 1st series, 4 (Nov. 1840), 471–2.
287