Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL and KLAUS WEBER
the Ellermanns built networks that linked Germany’s textile regions
directly with transatlantic markets.
Another type of far-reaching network was established by peddling
merchants from the Alps and south-western Germany. They
were not unlike the French networks investigated by Laurence
Fontaine, also built on kinship and trade in specific items. 65 These
German peddling merchants traded with items which were less
robust than textiles or metalware and required tight vertical integration.
66 They were quite numerous in Cadiz. Half a dozen had come
from the Black Forest area, almost twenty from the Bavarian Ammer
valley and the Gardena valley in the Tyrol, and some more from the
trading city of Lindau, on Lake Constance. The lands around the lake
had produced and exported linen since the medieval period. The
Black Forest, however, became known for its export items only much
later. From the late seventeenth century, a clock industry developed
on the eastern slopes of this poor and remote mountain area. This
rural industry experienced an important boom from 1730, the year
when a certain Franz-Josef Ketterer, from the village of Neukirch,
manufactured a tiny bellows and pipe that imitated the call of the
cuckoo, integrated it into the mechanism of a chronometer, and thus
invented the cuckoo clock. 67
The late seventeenth-century take-off of rural manufacturing in
regions like Bohemia, the Black Forest, and some areas of Westphalia
was enhanced by new methods of marketing. A very specific pattern
had been developed by the Bohemian glass traders. Since about 1680,
they had expanded their established methods of regional peddling
with glassware into more distant regions, and increasingly replaced
their backpacks with handcarts or even horse-driven carriages. Trade
was carried out by a multitude of small companies whose members
65 Laurence Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe (XVe–XIXe siècle) (Paris,
1993); published in English as History of Pedlars in Europe (Cambridge, 1996).
66 Vertical integration here means the concentration of (ideally) all aspects of
manufacturing a product into one firm, from the acquisition of raw materials
and production processes to distribution.
67 Alfred Behr, ‘Warum die Schwaben Tüftler sind’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 12 Mar. 2002, p. 12. On Ketterer (1676–1753) also see Richard Mühe
and Helmut Kahler, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum Furtwangen: Die Geschichte der
Uhr (Munich, 1983), 124. The claim that this was a Swiss invention was boosted
by Graham Greene’s The Third Man, but must be regarded as fiction.
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