Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL and KLAUS WEBER
transported ideas and values which contributed to integrating the
dispersed areas into an empire. 24
The Nine Years War had already contributed to a certain shortage
of enterprising merchants with capital. Foreign merchants began to
fill the gap which British merchants had left. There was not only a
lack of numbers, but native merchants also turned their capital to
more profitable investments. 25 Foreign merchants, among them a
grow ing number of Germans, migrated to London to replace them.
They contributed to turning the capital into an emporium of worldwide
trade by re-exporting the surplus of colonial goods which the
British Isles could not consume to the European Continent. The old
German states, Russia, and other parts of south-eastern Europe were
a profitable market for colonial wares because these countries did not
have any overseas colonies to supply them directly with sugar, coffee,
and other tropical produce. These countries also delivered a variety
of commodities such as linen textiles, timber, and naval stores
which Britain on its own could not produce in the quantities required
to supply the needs of its colonial residents, its navy, and emerging
modern industries.
When did the migration and settlement of German merchants in
London begin? Since the late Middle Ages, London’s commercial
elite had already been international. In the seventeenth century,
London’s immigrant elite was largely made up of Dutch and Hugue -
not merchants, while there were few Germans. Only in the eight -
eenth century did Germans become the largest immigrant group of
the Christian faith. After Elizabeth I closed the Steelyard, no more
than a handful of German merchants remained in the capital. From
the last years of the Commonwealth the number of German merchants
began to increase. Although merchants from the Hanseatic
cities of Bremen and Hamburg constituted a majority among Lon -
don’s eighteenth-century Germans, there were as many from the textile
areas of the north-western parts of the Holy Roman Empire as
from Hamburg alone (see Table 3.1).
Several factors influenced people to leave the country of their
birth. Perhaps more important than Germany’s slow recovery from
the economic impact of the Thirty Years War was the disruption of
24 David Hancock, Citizens of the World (Cambridge, 1995).
25 Jones, War and Economy, 257–8.
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