Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

From Westphalia to the Caribbean
were linked by familial ties and were, at the same time, involved in
manufacturing. They controlled the entire chain from production to
packaging, haulage, and sale. By 1700, sales expeditions had reached
places as far to the east as St Petersburg and Moscow (1688), and
London and Cadiz (1691) to the west. In the decades that followed,
Bohemians established permanent trading posts all over Europe: in
Trieste, Ancona, Naples, Palermo, and Milan; in Amsterdam (before
1730), Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht; in Porto (1730) and
Lisbon; and in at least seventeen places in Spain, most prominently
in Cadiz (1720s), Bilbao (before 1733), and Madrid. Northern Europe
was covered by trading houses in Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Riga;
the Ottoman Empire by houses in Istanbul and Smyrna. Despite the
tight Spanish restrictions on foreign trade with its colonies, branches
were opened in Lima (1784) and Mexico City (1787). From most of
these posts abroad, the pedlars covered vast areas, thus offering their
products even in remote villages. In Cadiz alone, some fifty
Bohemian merchants had established themselves in the period from
1720 to 1830 (not counting clerks and apprentices). A number of the
families connected with the seventeenth-century glass trade
remained in business into the nineteenth century: Kreybich, Preysler,
Piltz, Palme, and Grosmann, to name but a few. 68
According to contemporary observers, the discipline which
Bohemian trading houses imposed on their members, and their celibate
lifestyle, meant that they resembled convents more than commercial
enterprises. A case study of the branches in Cadiz and Bilbao
confirms that company contracts specifically prohibited employees
from mixing with the host society, marrying partners from abroad,
and even socializing with non-Bohemian merchants. Working days
were to start and finish with prayers. 69 Even though their Catholic
68 Ludwig Schlesinger, ‘Reisebeschreibung eines deutschböhmischen Glas -
schneiders’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen,
8 (1870), 220–35, at 222–6; Edmund Schebek, Böhmens Glasindustrie und Glas -
handel: Quellen zu ihrer Geschichte (Prague, 1878; repr. Frankfurt am Main,
1969), 62–3, 88–91, 138; Otto Quelle, ‘Die Faktoreien der sudetendeutschen
Glashändler in Spanien und Portugal’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, 11 (1937–
8), 387–91, at 388.
69 Arthur Salz, Geschichte der Böhmischen Industrie in der Neuzeit (Munich,
1913), 253; Schebek, Böhmens Glasindustrie, p. lxii. A company contract dated
1782 has been preserved at the Archivo Foral, Bilbao, Sección Municipal,
Fondo Corregimiento, sign. 1549/014.
81