Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

From Westphalia to the Caribbean
did. 32 Looking at trade from a London perspective presents a somewhat
different picture. German merchants in London maintained
intensive links with the Silesian and Saxon textile areas, partly by
migrating via London to Silesia, partly by settling close relatives in a
Silesian or Saxon town. Henry Voguell of Herford, mentioned above,
was a major importer of Silesian and Saxon linen, and he travelled
frequently between London, Zittau, and other places in Saxony and
Silesia. One of Voguell’s partners and relatives in Lon don was
Christopher Frederick Pritzler, also from Herford. Pritzler later
migrated to Zittau, where he established a textile house. 33 Apart from
Pritzler, Henry Voguell’s most important supplier in Zittau was Carl
Christian Besser. 34
Peter Hasenclever, a merchant from Remscheid, one of the major
towns in the textile and metal manufacturing Duchy of Berg, had
started his merchant career in the house of an uncle in Lisbon. When
the textile trade with the Portuguese colonies began to decline, he
moved to Cadiz and entered a partnership with, among others,
Heinrich Böhl. 35 From Cadiz Hasenclever migrated to London. His
younger brother Francis had meanwhile settled in Hirschberg in
Silesia. 36 Böhl also left Cadiz and settled in Silesia. Both houses, that
of Francis Hasenclever and Böhl & Kaller, became the main suppliers
of Roger Siebel of Elberfeld, who had migrated to London in 1758. A
surviving balance sheet from the partnership between Roger Siebel
of Elberfeld and John Amyand in London reveals that they were
important traders of Silesian and Saxon linen textiles. 37
32 Boldorf, Europäische Leinenregionen im Wandel, 91–2.
33 The National Archive Kew (hereafter TNA), Probate Records (Prob) 11/ 751.
34 Arno Kunze, ‘Der Zittauer Leinengroßhandel’, Zittauer Geschichtsblätter, 6
(1930), 44.
35 On the Böhl family, see also the section below on Cadiz.
36 For Peter Hasenclever see Sylvia Eichelkraut-Naumann and Tania Ün lü -
dag, Peter Hasenclever: Kaufmann und Unternehmer der Aufklärung. Bergische
Un ter nehmergestalten im Umbruch zur Moderne, ed. Karl-Hermann Beeck (Neu-
stadt a.d. Aisch, 1996), 41–120; Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, ‘Commercial Net -
works, Transfer and Innovation: The Migration of German Merchants to Eng -
land, 1660–1800’, in Stefan Manz, Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, and John R. Davis
(eds.), Migration and Transfer from Germany to Britain 1660–1914 (Munich,
2007), 19–35.
37 Herefordshire Record Office, Amyand Records J56/VI/13; in addition to
67