Alison Frank Imperial Trieste: Local Culture and Global Commerce ...

Alison Frank 

Imperial Trieste: Local Culture and Global Commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean 

Annenberg Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, 3 April 2008 

This paper is in DRAFT form. 

Please do not cite or circulate beyond participants in the Annenberg Colloquium! 

On April 27 th , 1907, James Joyce gave a lecture hosted by the Università Popolare, or 

“People’s University” in Trieste. 1 The lecture was entitled “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” 

and Joyce delivered it in Italian, a language in which he was fluent. Whether he knew it or not, 

however, Joyce was not really delivering a lecture on Ireland. Or, to be more precise, his 

audience was not listening to a lecture on Ireland. Instead, what they thought they heard was a 

lecture on Trieste, on Italy, and on the impending moral victory of irredentism. 

That there was no regular university in Trieste was a source of continual friction between 

young Italian-speakers in the city and the imperial government in Vienna – for Trieste, which is 

now the northeasternmost coastal city in Italy, was a Habsburg port from the 14 th century until 

1918. 2 The People’s University, which hosted Joyce’s lecture, had been founded in December 

1899 by a group of irredentists including the Italian nationalist historian Attilio Tamaro. In 

Tamaro’s own words, their goal was to “stir things up, to make Trieste’s problems known, to 

feed continuously anti-Austrian feelings.” 3 Tamaro believed firmly that Austria was intent on 

altering Trieste’s fundamentally Italian character. To do this, Tamaro alleged, the imperial 

authorities “deliberately dumped Slavs on Italian soil with a view to denationalizing it.” Nothing 

1 The Università Popolare was more akin to an adult education center than a research university. It hosted concerts, 

lectures, and weekly lessons that were open to the public. 

2 Habsburg control was briefly interrupted in 1797, 1805-1806, and, most significantly, from 1809 to 1813, when it became part 

of Napoleon’s “Illyric Kingdom.” 

3 Cary, quoting Tamaro, p. 98. James Joyce arrived in Trieste in 1904, at the young age of 22, and left, reluctantly, 

in 1920, aged 38. While there, he earned his keep by offering English lessons, through Berlitz or privately. On the 

side, he wrote Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles and completed a large portion of 

Ulysses. But he was also a self-appointed informal consul of Ireland in Europe, and from Trieste, and through his 

lectures, sought to “give voice to Irish feelings, thoughts and aspirations, and explain Ireland to the world.” 

McCourt, 115. By comparing England’s relationship with Ireland to Austria’s with Hungary or Trieste – both of 

which enjoyed a degree of home rule that Irish nationalists could only dream of – Joyce was not blindly supporting 

Irish nationalism, but rather attempting to “place Irish nationalism in a European context.” McCourt, 121.

Frank, Imperial Trieste 2/38 

threatened to destroy “the civil and national character of the city,” Tamaro argued, more than the 

presence of what he called “scheming and lawless Germans, Illyrians, Greeks, and Jews.” 4 

Nothing could save Trieste, he concluded, but the strengthening of Italian nationalist sentiment. 

With this goal in mind, Tamaro asked the financially-strapped Joyce, his private English tutor, to 

deliver a lecture on Joyce’s native Ireland. When, on that April evening 100 years ago, Joyce 

explained that Ireland insisted “on developing its own culture as ‘the demand of a very old nation 

to renew under new forms the glories of a past civilization,’” 5 his audience recognized this 

statement as an allegorical allusion to the resurrection of a new Kingdom of Italy that would 

inherit all the glories of ancient Rome – a resurrection that had begun with the creation of the 

new Italian nation-state in 1861, but that would not be complete, in the minds of Italian 

irredentists, until Trieste and Southern Tyrol, or Trentino, had been ‘redeemed.’ When Joyce 

announced that “when a victorious country tyrannizes over another, it cannot logically take it 

amiss if the other reacts,” and then, later, that “revolution is not made from human breath,” his 

audience rose to its feet with thunderous applause. 6 

The sentiments that moved Joyce’s audience to their feet are those that have made Trieste 

famous, and embodied in this anecdote are elements of all three of those parts of Trieste’s history 

that have earned it the most popular and scholarly attention. First, Trieste was a small literary 

center, home to Joyce from 1904 to 1920, but also to Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto 

Saba. Second, it was one of two focal points of Italian irredentist attention at the turn of the 

twentieth century (the other being Trentino/Alto Adige/Southern Tyrol). 7 

Third, its rightful 

4 Quotation from Tamaro, L’Adriatico – Golfo d’Italia: L’italianità di Trieste (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1915), 148. 

5 Cary, with quotation from Joyce, p. 98. 

6 James Joyce, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages,” in James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 116 and 126. Translated from the Italian by Conor Deane. 

7 For an original approach to understanding the so-called language frontier in Trentino/Alto Adige/Southern Tyrol, 

see Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).


designation as either an Italian or Slovenian city became a matter of international dispute – 

briefly following the First World War, and then with more ferocity after the Second World War. 8 

Trieste was actually an independent state, or Free Territory, governed by American and British 

military contingents from 1945 to 1954. 

Trieste’s story, then, offers exactly the kind of transnational history at which Central 

Europeanists excel. It has all of our key ingredients: fractured empires, so-called ethnic mixing, 

the rise of nationalism and socialism, boundary disputes – and their pernicious byproducts, 

antisemitism, war, and ethnic cleansing. Not surprisingly, historians of central Europe have 

become very adept at confronting nationalism head-on. Over the past few decades, scholars with 

a wide range of geographic specializations, including historians, sociologists, and political 

scientists, have exposed the ways in which communities are imagined, national identities are 

constructed, and traditions are invented. This marked a major shift in the way central European 

history was written. Rather than focusing on timeless, primordial struggles between different 

nations locked in bloodthirsty conflicts over resources, language rights, soil, and the very 

existence of their respective communities, a series of studies in the 1980s and 1990s traced the 

creation of Czechs and Germans out of Budweisers, and Poles and Ukrainians out of peasants. 9 

8 For the history of this later period, see: Glenda Sluga, The problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border: 

difference, identity and sovereignty in twentieth-century Europe (Albany: State University of New York, 2001); 

Bogdan C. Novak, Trieste 1941-1954: The Ethnic, Political, and Ideological Struggle (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 1970); Jean Baptiste Duroselle, Le Conflît de Trieste, 1943-1954 (Brussels: Éditions de L’Institut de 

Sociologie de L’Université Libre de Bruxelles [1966]); R. Rabel, Between East and West: Trieste, the United States 

and the Cold War, 1941-1954 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988); Giampaolo Valdevit, La questione di Trieste 

1941-1954: politica internazionale e contesto locale (Milan: F. Angeli, 1986); Giampaolo Valdevit, Trieste: storia 

di una periferia insicura ([Milano]: B. Mondadori, 2004); Diego De Castro, Il problema di Trieste: genesi e sviluppi 

della questione giuliana in relazione agli avvenimenti internazionali (Bologna: Capelli, 1952). 

9 While a comprehensive listing of this revisionist literature is impossible, some of the most notable works include: 

Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 2002); Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914, 2d 

edition (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006); Andrei Markovits and Frank Sysyn, Nationbuilding 

and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); 

Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 

1848-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).


More recently still, other historians have investigated the extent to which the national identities 

that took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also took precedence over other 

competing identities, the extent to which they were monolithic, and the extent to which they 

were universally compelling. Pieter Judson has argued that the great energy and enthusiasm with 

which nationalists made their case – in pulpits, newspapers, town councils, and provincial diets – 

was itself a reflection of their frustration that their message was not sinking in – that is, that more 

central and eastern Europeans than any nationalist would like to admit were actually indifferent 

to nation. 10 

Such studies have encouraged us to refuse to categorize people into discrete and 

internally homogeneous national groups. I would add that it is equally important to keep this 

lesson in mind when we do not explicitly take up this question as the object of study. Central 

European history now needs studies that move beyond describing the contingent development of 

nationalism to applying what we have learned from such analyses to other types of questions. 

After all, asking how Mazurians became Poles, or how Tyrolians became Germans, or how many 

Bohemians really thought they were Czech, need not reify a timeless concept of the nation – but 

it does leave the nation at the center of our analysis. The burgeoning fields of transnational, 

international, and entangled history (histoire croisée) suggest that, broadly speaking, the study of 

history can no longer accept the nationalist worldview as the rationale for the way we organize 

our historical inquiries. To apply this notion to the field of central and eastern European history 

does not require denying the seminal importance of nationalism as an inspirational and 

mobilizing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it does require that we move 

beyond nationalist categories of analysis. 

10 Judson, Guardians of the Nation; Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children 

in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).


In applying what we have learned from decades of excellent scholarship that has 

challenged the model of unidirectional progress from poorly delineated ethnic groups to clearly 

established nations and internationally recognized nation-states, we need not abandon the notion 

of heterogeneity. After all, a plethora of nationally, linguistically, and religiously defined groups 

was not the only feature that made central Europe a region characterized by diversity. Central 

Europe was not only home to the dozens of so-called nationalities that continue to garner so 

much attention today – it was also home to a diversity of landscapes, of natural resources, of 

climates – and, hence of economies. Its constituent states, provinces, and municipalities had 

different sets of political privileges and therefore different sets of political goals. Their social 

structures and mores varied. And from region to region – but also within regions themselves – 

there was great variation in definitions of what it meant to be wealthy, and what made land 

valuable. 

One of the empire’s most unique regions, both geographically and economically, was its 

segment of coastline along the northern Adriatic – the province known as the Littoral, with its 

capital city of Trieste. It was, with Dalmatia, the only part of Austria that enjoyed a 

Mediterranean climate. Moreover, the Littoral’s economy was dependent upon commerce and 

financial services, rather than agriculture, animal husbandry, or even industry. 11 Trieste, 

11 

There was, of course, substantial local industry in Trieste and its environs, much of it focused on the food, textile, 

and chemical industries. Prominent local industrial activities included shipbuilding; pasta-making, brewing, fish 

conservation, jute production, extraction of vegetable oils, cotton textiles, and mineral oil refining. As will be 

discussed below, Trieste was also a major insurance center. For information on families asscoiated with these 

ventures, see Anna Millo, L’Elite del Potere a Trieste: Una Biografia collettiva, 1891-1928 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 

1989), 24. Although Dalmatia was less developed and lacked a major shipping capital such as Trieste, both 

provinces shared in common an economic elite that was mercantile and Italophone. Barbara Jelavich, The 

Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977. In 1910, 

Josip Smodlaka, who represented the district of Split in the Austrian Reichsrat (Lower House in Parliament) in 

Vienna, blamed the Austrian government for Dalmatia’s underdevelopment. Outraged that his proposals for 

developing hydroelectric power in Dalmatia had been ignored, he demanded investment in his province in the 

language of colonial engagement: “Have you an Austrian Cecil Rhodes, a Cromer, a Curzon If you have, or even 

men of lesser caliber, then send them to Dalmatia.” Quoted in Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of 

Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 341.


however, has been more frequently celebrated for a different type of peculiarity. Since the turn 

of the twentieth century, according to historian Glenda Sluga, “ways of knowing Trieste and its 

population, and the ways in which that population could know itself, have been couched in 

narratives that unwaveringly reiterate the antithetical differences between an East/Balkan Europe 

and the West, and constitute the East as the West’s lesser ‘other.’” 12 

On the most immediate 

level, Italy represents the West and Slovenia or Yugoslavia represents the East, and the city’s 

story becomes one of conflict between its Italian-speaking urban bourgeoisie and the Slovenianspeaking 

peasants in the surrounding rural communities. More broadly, Ernest Gellner named 

Trieste part of the line that divided the healthy, civic nationalism of Western Europe from the 

pathologically violent ethno-nationalism of Eastern Europe; and Winston Churchill used Trieste 

to mark the southern hinge from which the Iron Curtain hung. The history of Trieste, then, has 

been used to exemplify two slightly different but still compatible arguments in favor of eastern 

European peculiarity. The first frames Trieste as ‘typically Eastern’ because it was part of the 

backward Austrian Empire. The second frames it as a border city between the West and the East 

– torn between a civilized, Western, Italian-speaking urban bourgeoisie and the purportedly 

ethno-nationalist, Eastern, Slovenian-speaking peasants in the surrounding rural communities. 

There is, however, another context for the history of Trieste that moves us beyond 

national and even civilizational differences. Trieste, the Habsburgs’ urbs fidelissima, or most 

loyal city, was also its most important port from 1815, until the Empire’s dissolution in 1918. 13 

12 Sluga, Trieste, 5. 

13 Venice had been Trieste’s strongest rival in the northern Adriatic in the eighteenth century (and had 

unquestionably eclipsed it in the early modern period). Two years prior to declaring Trieste a free port in 1719, 

Emperor Karl VI had directed an announcement of ‘Free Trade’ in the Adriatic to the Republic of Venice as a 

warning that any attacks on Triestine ships would be treated as attacks on his own territory. (The declaration of 

Trieste’s Free Port status is therefore often mistakenly dated to the 2 June 1717 ‘free trade’ decree rather than to the 

18 March 1719 decree that specifically addressed Trieste’s free port status.) N[atalis] Ebner von Ebenthall, Maria 

Theresia und die Handelsmarine (Trieste: Buchdrückerei der Österreich-Ungarishen Lloyd, 1888), 1. Larry Wolff 

has suggested that the “abrupt political annihilation” of the Venetian Republic at the hands of Napoleon in 1797,


Standing on Trieste’s Piazza Grande in 1900, one was (and still is) surrounded on three sides by 

buildings designed by the same architects who created the imposing landmarks along Vienna’s 

famed Ringstraße. 14 

On the fourth side, however, an unobstructed view of the sea invited 

onlookers to think outward – south to Mediterranean Africa, East through the Suez Canal, or 

West beyond Gibraltar to the New World. This unfettered access beyond continental Europe 

created in Trieste a cosmopolitan culture that was mobile, work-oriented, and self-consciously 

international. Its situation at the border of Habsburg Europe and at the center of Austrian 

overseas commerce made it particularly open to the newest trends in modern consumerism, labor 

relations, mobility, and tourism. 

Joyce’s lecture was hosted by the Università Popolare, but it took place in a building 

which had served as the city’s stock exchange from its completion in 1805 until 1844. By 

Joyce’s time, the stock exchange itself had moved to the Palazzo Tergesteo, but the Borsa 

Vecchia, or old stock exchange, continued to house the Triestine Chamber of Commerce. 15 

While delivering his lecture, Joyce had stood below an expansive fresco that covered the ceiling 

of the building’s main auditorium and that depicted “Charles VI granting Trieste its port 

franchise.” This visual image reminds us that Trieste’s status as a commercial port was 

fundamental to its existence, character, self-importance, global significance, and reputation. This 

came on the heels of “epidemic, economic, and discursive crises” that already plagued the “Adriatic Empire.” Wolff, 

Venice and the Slavs, 276. After the Treaty of Campoformio in 1797, Venice’s commercial decline was irreversible. 

Fulvio Babudieri, “Maritime Commerce of the Habsburg Empire: The Port of Trieste, 1789-1913,” in Southeast 

European Maritime Commerce and Naval Policies from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to 1914, vol. XXIII of War and 

Society in East Central Europe, Apostolos Vacalopoulos, Constantinos Svolopoulos, and Béla Király, eds. (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 227. In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, Trieste was rewarded with 

the title urbs fidelissima because of its loyalty to the Habsburg house, whereas Austria’s faith in Venice was 

irretrievably lost. 

14 Johann Heinrich von Ferstel and Theophil Hansen were both commissioned to design buildings for the Austrian 

Lloyd in Trieste. 

15 

The Palazzo Tergesteo, or Tergesteum, was located directly on the harbor: “An immense new edifice, 

undistinguished by any remarkable external architecture, is situated on a triangular public space, near the port... 

Here, at one o’clock, you meet every commercial man in Trieste.” Andrew Archibald Paton, Researches on the 

Danube and the Adriatic; or Contributions to the Modern History of Hungary and Transylvania, Dalmatia and 

Croatia, Servia and Bulgaria (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861), 412.


was the city whose bourgeois values were immortalized by Stendhal, who was briefly French 

consul in Trieste from 1830 to 1831: “In Trieste,” he wrote to Madame O’Reilly in 1831, “when 

a murder is committed it is because of theft and not out of jealousy.” 16 

Focusing on the city’s 

port status does not deny the importance of irredentism or multilingualism. Nor does it disregard 

the importance of nationalism where it swelled the hearts and moved the feet of people in the 

past. It does, however, not only challenge the reification of nationalism explicitly, but also 

undermine that reification implicitly by calling forth different categories of analysis and 

communities of interest. Trieste stood at the intersection of Austria’s continental and global 

colonial aspirations. It served as an outlet for its industrial production, and as the point of entry 

for both the raw materials its factories required and the consumer goods that its fifty million 

inhabitants grew to view as staples. 17 

Linguistically, Trieste was located not only at the 

intersection of Slavic and Italian, but also, only just a bit separated from the coastline, German 

and Hungarian language groups. Geographically, it marked the point where the Mediterranean 

met the central European continent, wedged between the rocky Alpine Karst and the sea. (This 

made for particularly lovely views, as Stendhal noted in the first extant private letter he posted 

16 Letter No. 946, to Madame [Marie-Anne] O’Reilly, Trieste, 21 January 1831, in Stendhal [Marie-Henry Beyle], 

Correspondance vol. 2, 1821-1834 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1967), 223. Stendhal was a persona non grata in 

Austria thanks to his enthusiastic service in the Napoleonic army and his suspect political views. He was stopped at 

the Austrian border en route to Trieste to take up the position of French Consul; only the intervention of France’s 

chargé d’affaires in Vienna made it possible for him to complete his trip on 25 November 1830. Nevertheless, on 4 

December 1830, Austria publicized its refusal to accredit his position, and on 31 March 1831 he left Trieste for a 

post in Civitavecchia (Rome). “Tableau Chronologique,” Correspondance, xvi. 

17 In 1903, Austro-Hungarian articles exported to South Africa included: brooms, beer, sheet metal goods, synthetic 

flowers, brushes, “chinese” silver (an alloy), brads, enamel tableware, boxes, felt hats, gloves, men’s ready-made 

clothing, fabric for men’s clothing, hops, cable wires, composition cork blocks, bone glue, lanterns, electric lamps, 

linens (ordinary and fine), malt, bodices, mineral water, furniture made of bent wood, musical instruments, paper, 

shoes, leather soles, soap, underwear, wagons, and sugar. Typescript of Julius Pisko’s report from H.M.S. Zenta, 

from Cape Town, 4 March 1903, “Bericht über die Geschäftslage in Südafrika.” HHStA, MdA, AR, F. 4 – 

Staatskanzlei und Ministerium des Äußern; Personalia, Box 262: Pisko Julius. Major “colonial goods” included 

coffee, sugar, tropical fruits, wine, oils, cotton, iron, wood. Horst Friedrich Mayer and Dieter Winkler, In allen 

Häfen war Österreich: die österreichisch-ungarische Handelsmarine (Vienna: Edition S, Verlag der 

österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1987), 31.


from Trieste: “Sea and hills magnificent.” 18 ) Because of its underlying economic function, it 

occupied the center of the web of commercial traffic that defined much of Austria-Hungary’s 

interaction with the non-European world. 

To understand the development of Trieste in the long nineteenth century, therefore, 

requires examining it not only in its Habsburg context, but also within the context of the Adriatic 

and Mediterranean Seas and, more broadly, the struggle of European economies to secure 

increasing benefits from global markets. To view it from only one perspective – as a Habsburg 

city, as a port city, as an Italian city in spe – would be to overlook fundamental elements to any 

explanation of its successes and failures. Trieste was the point at which the two different aspects 

of the Habsburgs’ imperial project met – the continental Empire with expansionist aspirations in 

southeastern Europe on the one hand, and the European “Great Power” with a right or even 

obligation to assert its influence through commercial relations with non-European peoples. 19 

As one of the sixteen Austrian provinces in the western ‘half’ of Austria-Hungary’s vast 

land empire, Trieste affected and was affected by the interplay of municipal rights and imperial 

privileges that constituted the relationship between the imperial center of Vienna and its diverse 

holdings. 20 

Unlike other acquisitions made by force or marriage, the Habsburgs had gained 

Trieste by invitation in 1382. 21 

Trieste had been ‘Austrian’ since the 14 th century; its 

18 Letter No. 923, to Adolphe de Mareste, Trieste, 12 December 1830, in Stendhal, Correspondance, 199. 

19 For more on Austria-Hungary’s colonial adventures and misadventures, see Walter Sauer, ed., K.u.k. kolonial: 

Habsburgermonarchie und europäische Herrschaft in Afrika (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002). 

20 According to Gary Cohen, “a growing part of the work of government after the 1860s went on in councils and 

agencies of the individual crown lands and communes, which enjoyed considerable legal and practical political 

autonomy. That autonomy made possible an increasingly intensive engagement of provincial and local political and 

economic interests in the formation and implementation of public policy.” Gary Cohen, “Our Laws, Our Taxes, Our 

Schools and Our Administration: Everyday Notions of Citizenship in Imperial Austria,” paper presented at 

“Internationalizing the History of Central Europe” Conference, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), May 2007, p. 

13. For more on this theme, see Gary B. Cohen, "Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and 

Government in Late Imperial Austria," Austrian History Yearbook 29, nr. 1 (1998): 37-61. 

21 Horst F. Mayer and Dieter Winkler, Als die Adria österreichisch war: Österreich-Ungarns Seemacht (Vienna: 

Edition S, 1987), 10. The dominance of Venice in the early modern period was so great that it was able to prevent


transformation into a major Mediterranean port was catalyzed by Maria Theresia’s reforms in the 

eighteenth century. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Trieste derived 

considerable benefit from its membership in the club of “Kingdoms and Provinces Represented 

in the Reichsrat.” 22 

Some of these were tangible: Trieste enjoyed free port status from 1719 to 

1891, government subsidies in the form of grants given to individual companies, tax breaks, and 

other financial support. 23 There were, however, other, less tangible costs and benefits to Austro- 

Hungarian rule, which it is impossible to quantify. For instance, how does one measure the 

absence of a local university against the availability of stipends to study in Vienna The stress of 

nationalist tension against the personal enrichment offered by multilinguistic or multireligious 

relationships The irritation of zealous censors’ regular confiscations of newspapers against the 

pride of visiting an imperial Adriatic Exhibition Answering these questions helps us understand 

just how ‘Habsburg’ this Adriatic port was, and what that meant for local culture, social 

relations, and commercial development. 

Austrian officials – in particular those assigned to overseas consulates – were well aware 

of the potential commercial advantages of their Empire’s location – not only in the middle of the 

continent, as the common phrase “Habsburg Central Europe” suggests, but also on its 

Mediterranean coastline. One of Trieste’s leading citizens, the merchant, shipowner, 

philanthropist, and patron of the arts, Pasquale Revoltella, urged the entire monarchy to expand 

the horizons of the mind to match the viewpoint from Trieste: “If we escape from the narrow 

ships flying any flag other than the Venetian from sailing in the Adriatic. Mayer and Winkler, In allen Häfen war 

Österreich, 16. 

22 After the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, the eastern half was called Hungary and 

the western half was called “the Kingdoms and Provinces Represented in the Reichsrat.” For more on the 

nomenclature of Austria-Hungary, see Erich Zöllner, “Perioden der österreichischen Geschichte und Wandlungen 

des Österreich-Begriffes bis zum Ende der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, vol. 

III, Die Völker des Reiches, eds. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, part 1 (Vienna: Verlag der 

Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1980), 1-32. 

23 For a detailed discussion of measures taken by Maria Theresia to raise Trieste’s status, see Ebner von Ebenthall, 

23-85.


circles into which Austrian traffic is now banished,” he predicted in 1863, “a wide, boundless 

horizon opens itself up – a world lies before us, which has until now only been known in 

Austrian schoolrooms and scholars’ studies – a world full of the liveliest activity, the playground 

of all other civilized peoples – where the spirit of commerce daily celebrates unheard-of 

triumphs.” 24 

In a pamphlet he published on Austria’s participation in global commerce, 

Revoltella in essence suggested that the monarchy should transform itself from a continental 

power to a global power – escaping the confines of central Europe, and spilling out onto the open 

seas. Revoltella’s own palazzo, which was constructed with the purpose of serving as a museum 

after his death, had been completed in 1858. Standing on the Piazza Giuseppina (today Piazza 

Venezia), it commanded a view of the Trieste harbor and the boundless horizon that Revoltella 

found so inspirational. 25 

Revoltella had good cause to be optimistic in the early 1860s. That decade represented, in 

many ways, the apex of Trieste’s potential to serve as Austria-Hungary’s gateway to a strong 

position in international commerce. The recent completion of the Südbahn, or Southern 

Railway, in 1857, had brought Vienna closer to that Triestine view of the sea and its horizons 

than it ever had been before. The port’s largest shipping company completed construction of its 

new ‘Arsenal,’ or shipyard, in 1861 and received a lucrative postal contract in 1865. In the years 

immediately following Revoltella’s observations, his dreams seemed on the verge of realization: 

any lingering Venetian competition was permanently removed by Austria’s loss of Veneto and 

the Serenissima itself in 1866. The empire had been reorganized into Austrian and Hungarian 

halves in 1867, at the same time that reconstruction (and substantial enlargement) of the Trieste 

24 Pasquale Revoltella, Oesterreichs Betheiligung am Welthandel. Betrachtungen und Vorschläge (Trieste: H. F. 

Münster’sche Buchhandlung, 1864). Revoltella completed his manuscript in November 1863 and distributed it to 

friends and colleagues in the Austrian government before publishing it in Trieste in 1864. 

25 Fulvio Caputo, “La Residenza di Città: Il Palazzo,” in Pasquale Revoltella, 1795-1869: Sogno e consapevolezza 

del cosmpolitismo triestino, ed. (Trieste: ), 315.


harbor began. Most importantly, the opening of the Suez Canal was celebrated with much pomp, 

and Austro-Hungarian participation, in 1869. With the canal’s completion, Austria-Hungary 

seemed poised to profit from Trieste’s position on a direct line between Alexandria and London. 

This was the moment of great promise that Trieste’s elites recognized as having been 

made possible not in spite of, but because of Habsburg patronage. 26 Thanks to the imperial 

connection, Trieste’s hinterland was a vast territory of 50 million souls, whose consumer needs 

could be satisfied by goods collected from all over the world and gathered in Trieste, just as the 

product of their labor was sent to Trieste and then distributed across the seas. 27 

At the heart of 

Trieste’s success stood a company whose raison d’être was so closely linked to the city’s that it 

is nearly impossible to tell the story of one without telling the story of the other: the Austrian 

Lloyd (Lloyd Austriaco / Österreichischer Lloyd). 28 

The Austrian Lloyd exemplified the optimism and frustration involved in envisaging the 

Habsburg monarchy as a global commercial power. Like its English eponym, the Austrian Lloyd 

emerged from the connection of shipping, information, and insurance. In the nineteenth century, 

thanks to London’s Lloyd, the name imparted thoughts of security, knowledge, speed, reliability, 

26 Following the First World War, Italian historians, chief among them Attilio Tamaro, argued that Trieste’s success 

was entirely attributable to geography and not at all to Habsburg intervention. To get a sense of Tamaro’s attempts 

to balance sober scholarship with an impassioned defense of Italy’s claims to the eastern shores of the Adriatic, see 

W.E. Lunt’s review of La Venetie Julienne et la Dalmatie: Histoire de la nation italienne sur ses frontieres 

orientales. 3 vols. Geographical Review 11, no. 1 (January 1921): 153-154. A few lone voices were prepared to 

credit Karl VI, Maria Theresa, and their successors with building up Trieste as an Adriatic port. The prolific 

historian of Trieste, Fulvio Babudieri, has done much to defend Austrian policy more recently, arguing, for example, 

that “Although the port of Trieste owed its development to its proximity to Central Europe, it must be admitted that 

the intervention of higher interests was necessary to turn it into a great maritime commercial center.” Babudieri, 

“Maritime Commerce,” 222. 

27 Fulvio Babudieri, Industrie, commerci e navigazione a Trieste e nella Regione Giulia dall’inizio del settecento ai 

primi anni del novecento (Milan: Dott. A. Giuffrè Editore, 1982), 177. 

28 The Austrian Lloyd became the Austro-Hungarian Lloyd (Lloyd Austro-Ungarico, Österreich-Ungarischer Lloyd) 

in 1872, but returned to its ‘Austrian-only’ status in 1891 when the Kingdom of Hungary refused to continue to 

subsidize the Lloyd. Instead, Hungary tried to build up its own shipping company, Adria, based out of 

Fiume/Rijeka. To minimize direct competition, Adria and Lloyd agreed to divide the world into spheres of 

influence: Lloyd kept East Asian routes, Adria got South American routes (with the exception of Brazil, which they 

shared). Passenger traffic to North American was taken over by a third company, Austro Americana Società di 

Navigazione Schenker Cosulich & Co. Bachinger, “Verkehrswesen,” 314.


and impartiality. It was used by dozens of firms that had no legitimate connection to Lloyd’s 

insurance market in London’s Royal Exchange – firms that ranged in type from steamship 

companies (such as the Austrian Lloyd) and insurance companies (such as Lloyd Adriatico) to 

newspapers and trade journals. The nominal network created by the ubiquity of the name 

“Lloyd” is one manifestation of Trieste’s participation in a pan-European awakening to the 

prerequisites for successful international commerce. 

The original Lloyd’s started out in London as a Lombard Street coffee-house in the last 

quarter of the seventeenth century. What better place for businessmen to gather, discuss 

common interests, receive mail, and share news than a public coffee house – and what better 

place for a coffee house than Lombard Street, the capital’s center for banking and moneylending 

What set Lloyd’s Coffee House apart was not the quality of its brew, but rather the 

quality of the news its customers could provide one another. To secure his shop’s reputation as a 

purveyor of useful information, Mr. Edward Lloyd took the bold step of committing the news 

circulating around his coffee-shop to paper as Lloyd’s News, a single-leaf newsletter that 

appeared three times a week from 1696 to 1697. Lloyd’s News brought the latest available 

commercial and shipping news from ports in southwestern England, along the Channel – in 

particular, Plymouth, Yarmouth, Falmouth, and Portsmouth, and featured news, when it could be 

had, from Ireland and even the continent. 29 

Unfortunately for Lloyd, however, he did not have 

access to enough shipping news to cover both sides of his sheet, and his method of filling empty 

spaces with whatever miscellany his printer could gather together gave the paper an uneven 

quality. According to one of Lloyd’s biographers, this habit guaranteed that the paper could not 

keep up with rival newspapers which, though not specifically dedicated to shipping news, were 

29 Frederick Martin, The History of Lloyd’s and of Marine Insurance in Great Britain (London: Macmillan and Co., 

1876), 63-64, 66-74; D.E.W. Gibb, Lloyd’s of London: A Study in Individualism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1957), 

1-16. Lloyd moved his coffeehouse from the original location on Tower Street to Lombard Street in 1691 (Gibb, 6).


run by professional gazetteers. 30 

Having run afoul of the authorities by publishing ostensibly 

political news, Lloyd voluntarily ceased publication of his unprofitable paper. Three decades 

later, after Edward Lloyd’s death in 1731, the idea was picked up by his successors as Lloyd’s 

List. By 1738, when Lloyd’s List was first published, the proprietors of Lloyd’s Coffeehouse had 

access to seaborne information so fast and reliable that they were able to share war news with the 

Prime Minister before he received it himself. 31 

At Lloyd’s, marine underwriters could get, in the 

words of one of its many historians, “the best available news service about the world’s shipping, 

messages from the Admiralty and from every British port, gossip brought by homeward-bound 

skippers from every part of the world in which they might be interested, and reports of casualties 

at the moment when they first reached London. … The attractions were all considerable, but the 

greatest of the three was the news service. It was on that rock that Lloyd’s was built.” 32 

This 

connection between shipping, insurance, and information proved to become one of Lloyd’s 

greatest contributions to nineteenth century commercial culture. 

What began as an informal gathering-place moonlighting as an information service 

became, over the course of the eighteenth century, Great Britain’s single most important market 

for maritime insurance. In 1769, a group of underwriters in the habit of gathering at Lloyd’s left 

the coffee-house because of a gambling scandal that had tainted the original institution. After a 

few years spent in unsuitable locations, they finally settled in the Royal Exchange in 1774. In 

the process, the New Lloyd’s Coffee-House also decided to form a society, “held together by 

fixed rules, under which none but persons of good repute could be admitted.” 33 

Under the 

30 Gibb, 8. 

31 Gibb, 35; Martin, 108. 

32 Gibb, 38. 

33 Martin, 119. The gambling that the underwriters found so distasteful involved placing bets on the remaining 

lifespan of prominent personages who had fallen ill. There was great concern that news of such a policy placed on 

one’s life could adversely affect the health of an invalid, and that participating in such schemes amounted to little 

more than abetting murder. Gibb, 46.


leadership of John Julius Angerstein, and buoyed by the importance of marine insurance during 

the Seven Years’, American Revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars, Lloyd’s became the most 

important market for marine insurance in London, Great Britain, and the world by 1815. And it 

continued to publish Lloyd’s List. 

It did not take long before the name “Lloyd” came to refer not to one specific company, 

but rather to a wide range of enterprises dedicated to news, insurance, or shipping in different 

capacities. The Austrian Lloyd was only one of many organizations to capitalize on the 

associations between the name and reliability, speed, and accuracy. In the nineteenth century, 

literally dozens of newspapers – most, but not all, of them dedicated to commercial and maritime 

news – were established in imitation of Lloyd’s List – perhaps without ever having heard of 

Edward Lloyd. These included Agramer Lloyd, Lloyd anversais, Bukowinaer Lloyd, Lloyd 

bordelais, Česky Lloyd, Lloyd cettois, Le Lloyd français, Lloyd havrais, Lloyd industriel et 

économique, Kredit-Lloyd, Mährisch-Schlesischer Lloyd, Lloyd nantais, Der ostasiatische Lloyd, 

Lloyd parisien, Lloyd rouennais, Lloyd Zeitung, Pester Lloyd, Polnischer Lloyd, Pražský Lloyd, 

Rumänischer Lloyd, Ungarischer Lloyd, Wiener Lloyd, and, last but most ambitious, Lloyd 

universel. Likewise, it was Lloyd’s List, its successful imitators, and the maritime information 

that they supplied, rather than Lloyd’s insurance market (although the two were clearly linked), 

that inspired Giovanni Guglielmo Sartorio to suggest the name Il Lloyd Austriaco for the new 

organization he and a group of other merchants and insurance underwriters founded in 1833 for 

the purpose of gathering commercial and maritime information. 34 

The new organization, he 

noted in his memoir, was originally intended to be “the central point for all maritime news items 

34 Giovanni Guglielmo Sartorio, Memorie: Pagine Scelte ed. by G. Stuparich (Trieste: Edizioni dello Zibaldone, 

1951), 76-77. Sartorio specifically mentions seeing the Lloyd parisien on the table when the idea of using the name 

Lloyd came to him.


relevant to insurance underwriters, shipowners, and everyone interested in the sea.” 35 

His cofounder, 

Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Bruck, was likewise attracted by the eminent example of 

Lloyd’s of London. 36 

When the Austrian Lloyd was founded in the 1830s, Trieste was a major shipping center 

– the port of entry of almost all Egyptian cotton reaching Europe. 37 Henry Muhlenberg, Minister 

Plenipotentiary of the United States in Vienna, wrote to Secretary of State John Forsyth in 1839 

describing the port: 

Trieste itself is a beautiful and for the greater part a new city – and, as in new 

cities generally, there is much activity and business. Its harbor is excellent with a 

sufficient depth of water for almost any vessel. It contains 50,000 inhabitants 

mostly engaged in commerce which is said to be lucrative and rapidly increasing. 

Its imports amount to 50 millions of Florins and its exports to 40 millions. … Its 

trade is principally with the Levant, England, Brasil, North America, Egypt and 

Naples, and promises in some years to become a place of very considerable 

importance. 38 

Muhlenberg’s impression of busy activity is backed up by registries of shipping traffic that show 

that 4392 ships left Trieste’s docks in 1832 alone. What exactly happened to those ships once 

they left the sight line of the Trieste harbor was often very difficult to determine. The Austrian 

Lloyd’s “Trade and Sea Reports” department was founded in 1833 as an information and 

insurance service – but what better way to control the flow of information than to secure imperial 

postal contracts To do that, or course, would require ships of one’s own. A second, “Steam 

Navigation,” branch of the Austrian Lloyd was founded in 1836 to focus on transport of 

35 “Questo in origine non doveva essere che il punto centrale di tutte le notizie maritime per norma degli 

assicuratori.” Sartorio, Memorie, 76. 

36 Richard Charmatz, Minister Freiherr von Bruck, der Vorkämpfer Mitteleuropas (Hirzel: Leipzig, 1916), 12. 

Pasquale Revoltella was also one of the co-founders of Lloyd. 

37 As early as 1780, the port of Trieste registered 10,000 ships moving in and out carrying 82,000 gross registered 

tons of goods. Fulvio Babudieri, “Maritime Commerce,” 224. 

38 Henry Muhlenberg (Minister Plenipotentiary in Vienna) to John Forsyth, Vienna, November 8, 1839, National 

Archives, Records of the Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Austria (Microfilm No. T-157, 

Roll 1), Vol. 1. Cited in Ronald E. Coons, Steamships, statesmen, and bureaucrats: Austrian policy towards the 

Steam Navigation Company of the Austrian Lloyd, 1836-1848 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975), 3.


passengers and mail via steamship. The third and final department was dedicated to publishing 

and supporting the arts. 39 

Within a decade, the Austrian Lloyd had established Trieste as one of the ten largest ports 

in the world, and was affectionately dubbed a “modern queen of the Adria” and “one of the first 

emporia on the Mediterranean.” 40 

The company’s wide-ranging correspondents provided 

enough news to publish German and Italian editions three times a week. One contemporary 

proponent of the firm alleged that the papers were “esteemed on the continent the most 

influential organs of political economy, commerce and navigation, and are distinguished by a 

strenuous advocacy of sound free-trade principles.” Lloyd also hosted a reading room with over 

200 periodicals, meeting rooms for merchants and shippers, and an insurance office; its printing 

office employed fifteen Stanhope presses and three large steam presses; its steam navigation 

division had secured a postal contract that made it exempt from taxes, and it had accumulated a 

capital of £300,000 by 1847. 41 

By the 1850s, the Austrian Lloyd was renowned enough to 

inspire the name of a new company that would later prove one of its greatest rivals: the 

Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd). 42 

A series of ‘accidental’ rammings of Lloyd steamers by French warships in the 1830s and 

1840s, caused a minor diplomatic problem, and lent credence to claims made by historians of the 

39 “La stamperia e società artistica.” Sartorio, Memorie, 77. 

40 “Queen of the Adria,” The Overland Mail and the Austrian Lloyd’s (London: G. Mann, 1847), 5. “First emporia,” 

Paton, Researches on the Danube, 411. 

41 Overland Mail, 5. This booklet was written to make the case for sending British mail to India across the European 

continent to Trieste, and from there via the steamships of the Austrian Lloyd on to Alexandria. The promotional 

nature of the booklet depended upon promoting Lloyd as a reliable company. 

42 “If [Hermann Henrich Meier, the founder of Norddeutscher Lloyd] did not simply baptize it “German Lloyd,” it 

was only because there was already in Trieste the renowned Austrian Lloyd, which, incidentally, had served the 

founders of HAPAG as their model.” Susanne Wiborg and Klaus Wiborg, Unser Feld ist die Welt: 150 Jahre 

Hapag-Lloyd (Hamburg: Hapag-Lloyd AG, 1997), 30.


company that the Austrian Lloyd’s success attracted the envy of Naples and France. 43 

Lloyd’s 

competitors’ alarm that it was quickly becoming the largest steamship company in the 

Mediterranean was justified. A series of experimental trips made in the 1840s showed that the 

British India mail could be delivered from Alexandria to London more quickly by sailing first to 

Trieste and then taking the train across the continent than either by steamship through Gibraltar 

or via Marseille. 44 

This, combined with the loss of the German mails, which were redirected via 

Trieste instead of Marseille, gave the former a feeling of momentum and the latter cause for 

disquiet. 45 

After all, Alexandria was separated from Marseille by 200 miles more than from 

Trieste, which made it more suitable for passenger traffic, since “the passage from Alexandria to 

Candia [lasts] only fifty hours, after which a charming coast remains constantly in view; and 

moreover eight different roads can be taken from Trieste to London, leading through the most 

important towns and the most beautiful districts of the continent; while from Marseille travelers 

can only go to Paris.” 46 The British diplomat Andrew Archibald Paton, whom the British 

ambassador to Vienna appointed in 1846 to report upon Austria’s Adriatic ports, pointed out that 

“no sea can lie better for the Indian line than the Adriatic; since a straight line drawn from 

Alexandria to London would pass through the Gulf of Trieste” and agreed that “even in pacific 

times, I think that the Triestine, or Venetian, is the more attractive route, from the variety of 

interesting cities that lie on the way of the traveler.” 47 

Triestine merchants and Austrian 

43 Max Smolensky, Die Stellung und Bedeutung des Österreichischen Lloyd, der Austro Americana und der freien 

Schiffahrt im Außenhandel Österreichs (Zürich: Buchdruckerei Züricher Post, 1916), 18. 

44 The sea route (from Alexandria to Malta, Gibraltar, and Southampton) took 364 hours and cost a passenger 27 

pounds 10 shillings. The route via Marseille (through Lyons, Paris, Boulogne and Dover) took 278 hours and cost a 

second class passenger 19 pounds 16 shillings. The route via Trieste (through Venice, Milan, Chur, Zurich, Basel, 

Mannheim, Mainz, Cologne, Ostend, and Dover) took 266 hours and cost a second-class passenger 17 pounds 16 

shillings. Overland Mail, 17-18. 

45 Overland Mail, 14. 

46 Overland Mail, 17. 

47 Paton, Researches, 413.


ministerial officials anticipated that these advantages would only increase with the completion of 

the Suez Canal. 

Thanks to the prescient vision of one of the founders of the Austrian Lloyd, Baron Karl 

Ludwig von Bruck, and the engineering expertise of the Tyrolian Luigi (Alois) Negrelli, Austria 

played a major role in the planning for the Suez Canal. Its role dramatically diminished only 

after the diplomatic and domestic crises precipitated by the Crimean War and the humiliating 

war of 1859 (against France and Piedmont) – ironically, at the very moment when construction 

of the long-awaited canal was finally set to begin. Nevertheless, with the completion of the canal 

ten years later, Austria seemed poised to profit from Trieste’s position on a direct line between 

Alexandria and London. 

As Revoltella’s manifesto on global commerce shows, the steady march of progress 

towards ever-greater prosperity seemed unstoppable in the 1860s, at least to Trieste’s 

commercial elites. They could point to Trieste’s cultural and commercial development as it 

proceeded hand in hand: between 1840 and 1857, Trieste saw the construction of the Teatro 

Grande, the Palazzo Carciotti, the Hôtel de la Ville, the Borsa (Stock Exchange), the Tergesteo, 

and the Chiesa di Sant’Antonio Nuovo as well as the Cantiere di San Marco, Lloyd’s Arsenal, 

and the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino. 48 

But for all of Revoltella’s urging and for all of the 

Foreign Ministry’s concern about securing power and prestige in the Mediterranean, Trieste 

never did unseat Genoa and Marseilles – let alone Bremen and Rotterdam. Of course, Trieste did 

grow steadily in the last half century prior to the First World War -- both in population and in 

trade. By the time Trieste’s connections with Switzerland, southern Germany, and western 

Europe were further enhanced by the opening of the Tauern railway in 1909, the traffic of goods 

between Vienna and Trieste had increased by 1200% (import) and 1350% (export) from 

48 Giani Stuparich, introduction to Sartorio, Memorie, ix.


1857/1859 to 1900/1909. Hamburg-based shipping companies had good reason to be alarmed – 

after all, from Trieste, the ports of Egypt, Albania, the Ottoman Empire, Tunisia, and Morocco 

could be reached easily – and south German industrial centers in Bavaria and Swabia were closer 

to Trieste than to Hamburg by rail. 49 

Ultimately, however, Hamburg and Bremen grew even 

more. Although the value of Trieste’s total trade grew by 150% in the first decade of the 

twentieth century, from 712.6 million crowns in 1900 to 1,801.6 million crowns in 1913, 

Hamburg’s growth in the same period was almost ten times as great. 50 

To explain Trieste’s failure to live up to the great promise it showed in the 1860s, 

historians have pointed to the state of the Austro-Hungarian economy and its industrial 

production, the physical challenges of transporting goods overland to and from Trieste across the 

rocky Karst and the Julian Alpine range that separated the coast from major industrial centers, 

and an unfavorable economic cycle for Mediterranean shipping, among other factors. But for 

contemporaries, one explanatory factor was favored above all others. Those consular officials 

who believed in an Austrian form of Manifest Destiny, who thought that a ‘modern’ Austria 

would be an Austria with flourishing trade with East and South Asia, South America, and Africa, 

had little difficulty identifying the ‘weakest link’ in Austrian commerce: the Austrian Lloyd. 

Several generations of consular officials in East Asia and Africa complained passionately, 

vociferously, and repeatedly about the deplorable condition of international shipping under the 

49 Heinrich Weber, Der Verkehrskampf Hamburg-Triest. Seine historische Entwicklung und jetzige Form 

(Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Hohen Philosophischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls- 

Universität zu Heidelberg. Beerfelden, 1930), 41-42. After the reorganization of the monarchy into two halves in 

1867, Hungary started to build up its own Adriatic port of Fiume/Rijeka. Consequently, goods shipping to or from 

Hungary were included in the first set of figures, but not in the second – since they no longer went to or from 

Trieste. The growth of the port’s traffic was enough to compensate for the loss of Hungarian products, as these 

statistics show – but it would be more remarkable still were it not for the politically-motivated expansion of 

Fiume/Rijeka. 

50 Giuseppe Lo Giudice, Trieste, L’Austria ed il Canale di Suez (Catania: Università degli studi, 1979), 228.


Austrian flag. 51 

Service on the Austrian Lloyd, they contended, was so unreliable, slow, and 

irregular that Austrian companies relying on their own national shipping company for import or 

export were at a serious disadvantage. In report after report, consuls bemoaned cases in which 

import/export company contracts required that shipping be entrusted to “any company other than 

the Austrian Lloyd.” 52 

The state-subsidized shipping giant, its critics contended, steadfastly refused to compete 

in earnest for East Asian or North African markets, and its protectors at the Ministry of 

Commerce seemed completely inured to consular officials’ pleas for closer imitation of the 

German and British model. Not only were consular officials sympathetic to local businessmen’s 

complaints about the challenges of doing business, they were positively mystified by the 

Ministry of Commerce’s tolerance of what they perceived to be an obvious abuse of generous 

state subsidies. Although other large national shipping companies, like Norddeutscher Lloyd, 

received government subsidies only in exchange for promises of rapid and regular service, the 

aging and even the degeneration of the Austrian Lloyd’s fleet was tolerated. The Austrian 

Lloyd’s reticence to expand its service in East Asia and North Africa was based on brief 

excursions into these markets that did not prove immediately profitable. Local consuls pleaded 

for more regular and more reliable service to their ports, promising tremendous and growing 

markets for Austria-Hungary if its merchants could only become established. 53 

Lloyd argued 

51 The conclusions that follow are based upon commercial reports (handelspolitische Berichte) from consulates in 

Yokohama, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bombay, Tunis, Cape Town, and Tangier. Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv 

(HHStA), Ministerium des Äußern (MdA), Administrative Registratur (AR), F 4, 8, 38, 68 and 95. 

52 Among dozens of examples: Report from Consul Julius Pisko to MdA, Shanghai, 28 May 1900, with copy of 

excerpts from a letter from Herren Carlowitz & Co., Hong Kong, to Herren Carlowitz & Co., Hamburg, HHStA 

MdA AR F68/2; also report from Vice-Consul Max Kutschera to MdA, Hong Kong, 1 Feb 1899, HHStA MdÄ, AR 

F68/1. 

53 

Vice Consul Baron Ramberg wrote a series of reports between September and December in which he soberly, but 

emphatically, outlined the importance of increasing contact between Trieste and Port Elizabeth, but also of lowering 

railroad freight rates between Austria-Hungary’s industrial centers and Trieste. Z. 66017/1902 from Ramberg in 

Cape Town to MdA (6 Sept. 1902), Z78283 pr 25 XI 1902, note from Ramberg, Cape Town to MdA (5 Nov. 1902),


that its service met current needs – but consular officials and the overseas business communities 

that they represented (in addition to disputing even that claim) countered that expanded shipping 

opportunities had to precede, not follow, expanded commercial relations. 54 

While echoing 

liberal critics of protectionism who argued that government subsidies lulled Austrian Lloyd into 

laziness and a “lack of initiative,” consuls also suggested that those very subsidies should serve 

as the government’s excuse to insist upon reform. 55 Case after case of embarrassing delays, theft 

or damage of goods, interruptions of service, and other problems were forwarded by the Ministry 

of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Commerce – in each case soliciting little more than excuses 

and justifications proffered by the Ministry of Commerce on behalf of the Austrian Lloyd. 

The Ministry of Commerce might have had many motives for defending the Austrian 

Lloyd. As an Austrian, rather than Austro-Hungarian, ministry, it was inclined to protect an 

Austrian company against potential Hungarian threats posed by the Austrian Lloyd’s competitor, 

Adria, and by extension, Trieste’s competitor, Fiume (Rijeka). There were deep ties in personnel 

between the Ministry of Commerce and the Austrian Lloyd’s board. This may have led 

ministerial officials to share a perspective on the costs and benefits of expansion with Lloyd’s 

executive board that the consular officials did not understand. 

note from MdA to HM (29 Dec. 1902), Z 79750/9 pr 1 Dec 1902, letter from Ramberg in Cape Town (12 Nov 1902 

to MdA), all in HHStA, MdA, AR, F68: Schiffahrt – Lloyd, Box 1: Allgemein, 1899-1902. 

54 

The Hungarian steamship line, ‘Adria,’ was accused of a similarly conservative approach. For example, the 

service it introduced to Morocco in 1902 was cancelled after only a few months during the “most unfavorable 

season of the year.” Report from Leopold Count Koziebrodzki, Tangier (13 Feb. 1907) to MdÄ. HHStA, MdA, AR, 

F 95: Schiffahrt Adria, Akt 1: Generalia 1901-1915: Agentien, Beschwerden, Fahrbegünstigungen, Tarife, Varia, 

Verkehrslinien. 

55 “Mangel an Initiative,” from Vice-Consul Maximilian Kutschera’s report Nr. 405, Hong Kong, 6 November 

1899. HHStA, MdA, AR, F68/1. For a contemporary criticism, see Royal Meeker, History of Shipping Subsidies. 

Publications of the American Economic Association, Series 3, Vol. 6, No. 3. (New York, 1905), 119. Meeker 

argues that the Austrian Lloyd had “no incentive for improvement” because of subsidies and “governmental favors” 

that nullified the effects of domestic and foreign competition. Nachum Gross asserted that “it is not surprising that 

Austria-Hungary’s tonnage [through the Suez Canal] is the smallest of the six greatest European powers” due to “the 

geographical position of the monarchy and its protectionist policies.” Nachum Gross, “Die Stellung der 

Habsburgermonarchie in der Weltwirtschaft,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Vol. I, Die Wirtschaftliche 

Entwicklung, ed. Alois Brusatti (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973), 21.


Measured against the German model of commerce, or, for that matter, our contemporary 

understanding of what drives globalization, the Austrian Lloyd appeared conservative, lacking in 

initiative, or even backward. But Trieste belonged to a different context than did Hamburg or 

other North Atlantic ports. Indeed, it was only one of many Eastern Mediterranean ports 

balancing between prosperity and obsolescence in the late imperial period. Traffic in people 

(including perennial problems with stowaways), as well as traffic in goods and ideas, not to 

mention competition with one another, tied these ports’ fates together. 56 

This Mediterranean 

connection invites comparisons between Trieste and other second-order Mediterranean ports as 

they struggled to compete with the likes of Marseille and Genoa. Like Salonica, Trieste was 

transformed by the advent of steam in the middle of the “hurried [nineteenth] century.” 57 

The 

“power and the reliability” of the steamship, along with its sheer speed, radically altered the 

accessibility of seaside towns formerly remote from the European mainstream. 58 It took more 

than a fleet of steamships to navigate between age-old Mediterranean concerns and the new 

problems of global commercial networks created by technological advance. 

Trieste was neither part of the dominant western European commercial networks, nor was 

it perceived to be as ‘oriental’ as vicinal ports belonging to the Ottoman Empire. 59 

The British 

diplomat, Andrew Archibald Paton, noted that “the traveller here feels himself no longer in a 

provincial atmosphere, but in one of the great centres of political action and commercial 

56 For typical complaints about stowaways traveling from Alexandria to Trieste, see AST LT AP Busta 6 (1865) 

folder 1/12.8 (Lloyd). 

57 The quotation comes from an 1881 guidebook written by E. Isambert, cited in Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of 

Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (New York, Knopf, 2005), 176. 

58 Max Maria von Weber, as cited in David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making 

of Modern Germany (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 156. 

59 Stendhal noted in 1830 that in Trieste, “one feels the proximity of Turkey” (on sent le voisinage de la Turquie) in 

the persons of men visiting the port not only visually, thanks to their attire (wide pants, handsome caps), and 

culturally (“amiable half-savages”), but also sensually (“their boats stink of rotten oil” [“leurs barques senttent 

diablement l’huile pourrie”]. Letter No. 928 to Adolphe de Mareste, Trieste, 26 December 1830, in Stendhal, 

Correspondance, 202-203.


transaction,” and, in a formula intended to distinguish Trieste from one of the most ubiquitous 

tropes about the East, added “of all the ports I have seen, Trieste is the cleanest.” 60 

But even as 

he notes “our vicinity to Italy” and “the vicinity to the lands broad and wide that stretch from the 

Alps to the Baltic,” Paton is struck by the diversity of “commercial men” who collected in 

Trieste’s port. “Those dark-complexioned men with mustachios, full of gesticulation, are Greeks 

striking a bargain; for this nation is in great force in Trieste, and exercises a great influence. The 

German of the north is seen, with his round face, his blue eyes, and fair hair; and the Italian, with 

his regular features, glossy black hair, and pale complexion. Nor are the darker hues awanting; 

for a band of Arab sailors is seen entering, who look with surprise at a Frank bazaar.” 61 

Lying 

somewhere between Arabia and Greece on the one hand, and Italy and Germany on the other, 

Trieste was “the tangent of Italian, German, and Slaavic [sic].” 62 

But Trieste was also a gateway between west and east of a different sort than Churchill 

had in mind. This element to Trieste’s liminal nature is nicely captured in two passages from 

Mark Mazower’s Salonica. On the one hand, Mazower credits Trieste with a critical role in 

opening Salonica to traffic: “As the Austrian Lloyd Company, the Ottoman Steam Navigation 

Company and the French Messageries Maritimes established weekly steamer services linking 

Salonica to Istanbul and the Adriatic, the slow transformation of its prospects began.” On the 

other hand, that Trieste did not garner the respect of other western ports is clear from the 

apparent tone of surprise with which Mazower notes, in his words, “In the event, Izmir, 

Alexandria and even Trieste outstripped the Macedonian port.” 63 

60 Andrew Archibald Paton, Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic; or Contributions to the modern history of 

Hungary and Translvania, Dalmatia and Croatia, Servia and Bulgaria (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861), 410. 

61 Ibid, 411-412. 

62 Ibid, 411. 

63 Mazower, Salonica, 211 and 217.


Like many European ports, Trieste’s liminal quality was not only symbolic or 

geographic, but also functional. Trieste did not only benefit from domestic migratory traffic; it 

was also a stopping point for Europeans looking for work farther a field. In 1913 alone, more 

than 52,000 emigrants used Trieste as their port of departure on their way to the Americas. 38 

percent of them came from the Russian Empire. 64 Their health – in particular, the danger that 

they might carry infectious diseases out of notorious ‘cholera hot spots’ (Choleraherden) – was a 

perennial source of concern – one that fit into narratives of Eastern European ‘disease’ more 

broadly. 65 

That this problem had, simultaneously, a local and an international dimension is 

demonstrated by the story of the Argentine health inspector assigned to Trieste, Dr. Philipp 

Justo. Justo arrived in Trieste in December of 1908, and, according to the office of the Viceroy 

of Trieste, examined passengers destined for Buenos Aires to predict whether or not emigrants 

would be allowed to disembark once they reached Argentina. The Triestine viceroy’s office and 

the Ministry of the Interior greeted his appointment coolly. The first problem was that Justo 

confessed privately that he had been instructed by the Argentine government that Russian Jews 

were considered “troublesome immigrants,” and that he should focus his attention on potential 

health problems within that community. The second, perhaps greater worry, was that Trieste 

would become responsible for the support of those invalids who were refused passage due to 

infectious disease. Justo became a persona non grata in Trieste at the very same time his 

colleagues were expelled from Hamburg and Bremen in the fall of 1910. 66 

The logistical 

challenge of managing emigration was one of many features that Trieste shared with other major 

European ports. 

64 Babudieri, Industrie, 159. 

65 Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

2000). 

66 Correspondence between the Ministry of the Interior and the Statthalterei Präsidium in Trieste, April 1909 until 

September 1910. AST, LT AP, Busta 339 (1909), 16. Consolati.


Trieste was perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in a multinational empire, and, 

consequently, it was, in its linguistic diversity, social structure, and economic underpinnings, 

also a very typical Mediterranean port. Trieste’s diverse population may seem to reflect its 

belonging to an overtly supranational empire. But it was also at the heart of its economic growth 

in a way that was far from unusual in Mediterranean ports. In order to attract merchants to the 

newly designated free port, Maria Theresa offered economic and social advantages including 

imperial patents, immunities, commercial privileges, and religious self-government that drew 

immigrants from across Europe. 67 Its leading citizens included Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and 

Orthodox Christians who migrated from Illyria, England, Denmark, Switzerland, the German 

states, and the Kingdom of Italy, as well as Armenian, Turkish, and Greek regions of the 

Ottoman Empire, and all the many regions of the Austrian Empire itself, including Bohemia, 

Croatia, and Hungary. The grand bourgeois mercantile families who dominated Triestine society 

had surnames that were sometimes, but not always, suggestive – the Brunners came from 

Vorarlberg, the Alboris from Dalmatia, the Afendulis from Athens, the Chaudoux from 

Switzerland, the Glanstättens from northern Germany, the Economos, who were Jewish, from 

Ottoman Turkey – but the Cosulich and Tripcovich families were proud Italians. Moreover, the 

diversity of other mercantile families’ origins was not communicated by their surnames, which 

were frequently Italianized, or their language of daily use, which – in the nineteenth century, if 

67 Cristina Benussi, “Dentro Trieste: un po’ di storia,” in Dentro Trieste: Ebrei, Greci, Sloveni, Serbi, Croati, 

Protestanti, Armeni, ed. by Cristina Benussi, Giancarlo Lancellotti, Claudio H. Martelli, Patrizia Vascotto (Trieste: 

Hammerle, 2006), 6. Although Trieste was a particularly attractive destination for foreign merchants and 

entrepreneurs, it should be noted that all of Austria offered a certain appeal to ambitious entrepreneurs from 

elsewhere in central and western Europe. In particular, immigrants with “technical know-how” came to Austria to 

fulfil “colonializing tasks” such as introducing new forms of industrial technology. Josef Mentschl, “Das 

österreichische Unternehmertum,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Vol. I, Die Wirtschaftliche 

Entwicklung, ed. Alois Brusatti (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973), 255.


not earlier, was always Italian. 68 

Rather, it was revealed by their citizenship – Greek, Eyptian, 

Ottoman, German, Swiss, which often remained unchanged even after several generations of 

residency in Trieste. And why change it In Trieste, resident foreign nationals were permitted to 

vote in municipal and provincial elections. According to legislation established to promote 

immigration to the free port, neither a resident’s commercial activity nor his participation in 

public life would be adversely affected by foreign citizenship. Citizenship, like religion, was left 

entirely to the discretion of the individual. 69 

Under the old estate-based voting system, it had 

seemed only natural that the men who could vote should be the men who ran the city’s 

mercantile enterprises and were most directly invested in its prosperity. In a cosmopolitan port 

city, it had seemed equally natural that some of these men might have been born abroad. As, for 

that matter, were a significant number of the laborers they employed. 

Trieste’s cosmopolitan labor force was shaped by streams of immigration from within 

and without the empire. Gazing at the Arsenal, or shipyards of the Austrian Lloyd, Emilio 

Brentani, the protagonist of Italo Svevo’s second novel, Senilità, calls Trieste ‘the city of 

labor.’ 70 

Indeed, from the city’s richest patrons, most of whom were merchants rather than 

landed magnates, to its poorest, the profits of and search for work were at the center of public 

activity. Immigrants from the Kingdom of Italy streamed into the city in search of work in its 

many shipyards, much to the chagrin of the 3 rd Corps Command in Graz, which saw in every 

68 

For intelligent speculation about the linguistic habits of local peasants in the eighteenth century, see Cathie 

Carmichael, “Locating Trieste in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Mediterranean Ethnological Summer 

School Vol. I (Ljubljana: Knjižnica Glasnika Slovenskega etnološkega društva), 11-21. For brief accounts of the 

experiences of each of Trieste’s minority populations (Jews, Greeks, Slovenes, Croats, Protestants, Armenians), see 

Cristina Benussi, Giancarlo Lancellotti, Claudio H. Martelli, Patrizia Vascotto, eds., Dentro Trieste: Ebrei, Greci, 

Sloveni, Serbi, Croati, Protestanti, Armeni (Trieste: Hammerle, 2006). 

69 Anna Millo, L’Elite del Potere a Trieste: Una Biografia collettiva, 1891-1928 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989), 32. 

70 Italo Svevo [Ettore Schmitz], Ein Mann wird älter trans. Piero Rismondo (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 

2000), 85-86. Or, in English, As a Man Grows Older, transl. by Beryl de Zoete (New York: New York Review 

Books, 2001), 48.


Italian worker a potential spy. 71 

This perspective must have been the source of great frustration, 

since regnicolli, or citizens of the Kingdom of Italy, made up 12.5 percent of Trieste’s 

population. 72 

Temporary workers from the Karst (most of them Slovenian-speaking), young Hungarian 

and German-speaking Naval cadets, and aspiring sea captains from every province of the Empire 

joined Istrian, Dalmatian, and Italian job seekers, western European consuls, traders, language 

teachers, and tourists, and Habsburg subjects who longed for the coastline’s open vistas. 

Enormous migration made Trieste a multilinguistic city even by Austrian standards, and 

accounted for its remarkable population growth. According to the 1880 census, of the city’s 

120,000 legally registered inhabitants, 83,000 were Italian speakers, 26,000 spoke Slovenian or 

Croatian, 6,000 spoke German, 1,000 spoke Greek, 2,000 spoke other official languages of the 

monarchy. 73 

In 1910, Trieste had 191,000 registered inhabitants – marking a population increase 

of sixty percent in only 30 years. In contrast, Austria’s entire population grew by only 28% over 

the same period 74 Migration created a fluxuating labor population and a sense of demographic 

dynamism in Trieste. This clearly had an impact on tensions between nationalists claiming to 

represent the Italian-speaking urban community and nationalists claiming to represent a growing 

71 See, for example, K.u.k. 3. Korpskommando, Graz, 31 Mar 1909, to Statthalterei Präsidium in Trieste, RE: 

“Eliminierung ital. Arbeiter.” Archivio di Stato di Trieste (AST), Luogotenenza (LT) Atti Presidiali (AP) 1906- 

1918, Busta 338 (1909), 10. Polizia di stato e pubblica sicurezza; or K.u.k. Generalstabschef des 3. Korps, Graz, to 

Statthalter, 6 October 1908, RE: “Lloydagent Martinolich mit Funktionen eines kgl. ital. Konsularagenten betraut.” 

AST LT AP 1906-1918, Busta 330 (1908),16. Consolati, Pr 915 – 08. 

72 Population statistic from Alfred Alexander, The Hanging of Wilhelm Oberdank (London: London Magazine 

Editions, 1977), 14. The last decades of the nineteenth and first of the twentieth centuries were the “outstanding 

years of Italian emigration.” Luigi de Rosa, “The economy and the national question in Italy,” in Economic Change 

and the National Question in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. by Alice Teichova, Herbert Matis, and Jaroslav Pátek 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177, citing Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, Annuario 

statistico della emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925 con notizie sull’emigrazione negli anni 1869-1875 (Rome, 

1926), 6ff. 

73 Alexander, 14. 

74 Calculated using data in Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altöstereich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation: 

die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszählungen 1880 bis 1910 (Vienna, Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 

1982), 436 and 442.


and chronically undercounted Slovenian-speaking population. Nevertheless, increasing tension 

was neither inevitable nor universal. This was a mutable population – but while its linguistic and 

religious diversity seemed to some Italian nationalists to diminish its cohesion, for others it 

constituted the city’s fundamental character, and lay at the heart of a sense of community built 

upon pluralism. 

If, then, Trieste can illuminate Habsburg domestic politics and foreign commercial 

policy, it can also do more. It also clarifies the relationships and challenges that emerged in the 

second half of the nineteenth century in one of Europe’s oldest imperial spaces – the 

Mediterranean – when new lines of migratory and commercial traffic across the Atlantic, Pacific, 

and Indian Oceans posed such a critical challenge to its importance. These challenges were 

raced by all European economies, and by innumerable merchants and investors on all sides of the 

venerable Middle Sea. 

For all that it shared with other ports, though, in one respect Trieste was entirely unique. 

It was, after all, the only major port in Austria and bore responsibility for representing the 

accumulated prestige of seven centuries of Habsburg Imperial glory. Its possession of Trieste, 

and, more broadly, its physical geography (on the Mediterranean) colored Austria-Hungary’s 

vision of its rightful place among the great ‘civilized’ powers of Europe. Austria-Hungary 

boasted Europe’s sixth-largest navy and its seventh-largest steam-powered merchant marine on 

the eve of the First World War, which placed it in a reasonable position globally, but also meant 

it was unable to dominate the Mediterranean. 75 

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ 

75 The ten largest (measured in gross tonnage) steam-driven merchant marines in Europe were (in order) Great 

Britain, Germany, France, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, Spain, Russia. Alfred Escher, 

Triest und seine Aufgaben im Rahmen der österreichischen Volkswirtschaft (Vienna: Manz, 1917), 35. The largest 

navies were Great Britain; Germany; France; Italy; Russia; Austria-Hungary. Lawrence Sondhaus, The Naval Policy 

of Austria-Hungary, 1867-1918: Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette: 

Purdue University Press, 1994), 188.


interest in Africa, the Levant, South America, and East Asia – and its consular officials’ sense of 

entitlement, even, to a share of those markets – are a useful reminder that the scramble for 

overseas influence was not restricted to those powers that actually succeeded in acquiring 

colonies abroad. Austria-Hungary’s foreign ministry as well as its business community 

perceived the empire to be an important competitor in the battle for economic power in the 

Mediterranean, and beyond. The significance of that competition went beyond profits, according 

to Revoltella, who argued that “one can measure the wealth and cultural status of a people by the 

condition and use of those connections that exist between its own centers of production and 

consumption and foreign ones.” 76 This contest for power not only took the form of occasional 

military confrontations between Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and France, but also was waged 

using the scores of ships that carried consuls, businessmen, shipping agents, tourists, migrant 

laborers, emigrants, journalists, manufactured goods, and raw materials across the Mediterranean 

in all directions. 77 

Its participation in international commerce, and its perception of that 

commerce as competitive, shed new light on the question of whether the Austro-Hungarian 

Empire truly deserves to be called an empire. It is certainly fair to describe the monarchy as “an 

imperial great power without colonies, so not a colonial power in the real sense.” 78 

Austrian 

scholars have argued that Austria-Hungary tried to minimize its colonial pretensions by 

describing itself as a “soft” or “selfless” power with a maternal responsibility to care for 

76 Revoltella, Oesterreichs Betheiligung, 8. 

77 The Ottoman navy requisitioned several Austro-Hungarian mercantile ships during the Balkan War of 1912-1913 

– but Austria-Hungary was itself rarely involved in naval conflicts after its victories against Italy in Custoza and 

Lissa in 1866. Nevertheless, the results of confrontations like the First and Second Moroccan Crises or the Italo- 

Turkish War of 1912 showed the importance of military strength in securing influence – if not territorial sovereignty 

– in the region. For the Austro-Hungarian navy’s participation in the Balkan war (and the fate of its mercantile 

ships), see Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), Ministerium des Äußern (MdA), Administrative Registratur 

(AR), F 36. Schiffswesen, Krieg, K. 31: Balkankrieg 1912/1913, folder 10: Schiffahrtsangelegenheiten, 10/1: 

Beschlagnahme der Zurani-Dampfer “Buena” u. Liqeni” durch die türk. Militärverwaltung von Skutari, später durch 

Montenegro. 

78 Ursula Prutsch, “Habsburg postcolonial,” in Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, and Moritz Csáky, eds., 

Habsburg postcolonial (Innsbruck, Vienna, Munich, Bolzano: StudienVerlag, 2003), 36.


neighboring peoples in southeastern Europe. Emil Tietze, the president of the “Geographischen 

Gesellschaft” or Geographical Society, claimed “the Austrian traveler has, as a rule, no other 

primum mobile than the love of research itself.” 79 These claims notwithstanding, Austria- 

Hungary’s failure to secure extra-European colonies was just that – a failure, and not an “anticolonial” 

policy. Austria-Hungary, while not a “colonial state” (Kolonialstaat), was also “not an 

anti-colonial power.” From 1780 to 1914, the monarchy made seven concrete attempts to gain 

territorial sovereignty outside of Europe, two of which were briefly successful. 80 

What has long been commonplace in British history – that informal empires can be as 

significant as formal colonial relationships – has received less attention in the case of secondorder 

European ‘great powers’ like Austria-Hungary. 81 

For Austria-Hungary, though, ‘informal 

empire’ was an overt proxy for, rather than an extension of, legal sovereignty. Ludwig von 

Callenberg, the ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco, warned that a complete reorganization 

of Austro-Hungarian shipping connections to Morocco would be necessary in order to prevent 

the utter collapse of trade between the countries: “We run the risk that our local trade will lose 

even its last positions in the near future. If we act soon, we can easily save them; once they are 

lost, however, it will cost us twice the effort to reconquer lost territory later.” 82 It is not the 

statistical significance of trade with Morocco that makes Callenberg’s concern interesting, but 

79 Prutsch, 36. See, for example, Sauer, ed., K.u.k. kolonial. Tietze quotation: Walter Sauer, “Jenseits der 

‘Entdeckungsgeschichte’: Forschungsergebnisse und Perspektiven,” in K.u.k. kolonial: Habsburgermonarchie und 

europäische Herrschaft in Afrika, ed. by Walter Sauer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002). 7. 

80 

Unsuccessful: Suqutra [off the coast of Somalia, belongs to Yemen] 1857/58, Nicobar Islands [in the Bay of 

Bengal] 1858, Solomon Islands 1895/96, Western Sahara 1899, Southeastern Anatolia 1913. Successful: 1777- 

1781, trade stations established (as part of Austrian East Indian Company) in Mozambique’s Delagoa Bay and 

Nicobar Islands; 1901-1914: 6 square kilometer section of Tientsin in China occupied by AH army. Walter Sauer, 

“Schwarz-Gelb in Afrika. Habsburgermonarchie und koloniale Frage,” in K. u. k. kolonial, 17. 

81 See, for example, the lively debate launched by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free 

Trade,” The Economic History Review 6, No. 1 (1953): 1-15. 

82 

“Wir laufen Gefahr, daß unser hiesiger Handel in nächster Zeit auch seine letzten Positionen verliert. Bei einem 

baldigen Eingreifen würden sie sich leicht retten lassen; sind sie dagegen einmal verloren, so wird es später doppelte 

Mühe kosten, das verlorene Terrain wieder zu erobern.” Note from Ludwig von Callenberg, Tanger, 20 Juni 1909, 

to MdÄ, Betreff: Klagen über den “Adria”-Dienst. Neuregelung des österreichisch-ungarischen Schiffahrtsdienstes 

nach Marokko. HHStA, MdA, AR, F 95: Schiffahrt Adria, Akt 1: Generalia 1901-1915.


rather his choice of metaphor (the reconquest of lost territory) – which is itself a telling reflection 

on the perceived and real connections between military strength and economic expansion. How 

could the great and noble tradition of a dynasty of emperors reaching back into the thirteenth 

century be reconciled with Austria-Hungary’s real military inferiority on the continent 

Pasquale Revoltella, in a memorandum intended to spur the monarchy on to greater ambitions in 

global commerce, argued that it was nothing short of scandalous to have such modest mercantile 

aspirations: “It will remain a puzzle to coming generations that the powerful Danube Empire, 

while it took on a primary role in Europe and claims a distinguished place thanks to its 

institutions and its progress in all branches of cultural development, with an ambitious, active 

population of 36 million, in possession of a seacoast and all of the material means necessary to 

create extensive commercial connections, in a time when commerce reshaped the non-European 

world, stood by, as if on purpose, outside of the greatest currents of traffic.” 83 

It is impossible to draw an impermeable line between trade and strategic issues here. 

Certainly the eastern Mediterranean was a critical region for the Monarchy’s military security, 

geopolitical position, economic development, and even prestige. 84 For example, although trade 

with the Montenegro could hardly be considered a buttress of the Austro-Hungarian economy, 

the “competing imperialism of Austria-Hungary and Italy” made the protection of even 

insignificant commercial privileges and prerogatives with the tiny kingdom a matter of great 

concern. 85 

83 Revoltella, Oesterreichs Betheiligung, 16. 

84 According to Nachum Gross, “The monarchy made a great effort in its foreign policy objectives to earn and 

maintain a position in Mediterranean shipping, due to the prestige associated with it.” Gross, “Stellung der 

Habsburgermonarchie,” 21. The segregation of economics and politics would have been even more difficult for 

nineteenth-century economists, whose university training (generally in the Faculty of Law) contributed to a “fixation 

on political issues.” Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction 

(Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2007), 41. 

85 Ugo Cova, “Österreich(-Ungarn) und Italien,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Vol. 6, Part 1, Die 

Habsburgermonarchie im System der internationalen Beziehungen (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der


Commercial competition was not entirely directed towards foreign powers: Austria and 

Hungary were often one another’s most distressing rivals. To recreate Austria-Hungary’s 

position as an informal imperial power requires stepping outside municipal borders to consider a 

larger swath of the empire’s Adriatic coastline, including Trieste’s sister cities Fiume/Rijeka and 

Pula/Pola. After the division of the monarchy into Austrian and Hungarian ‘halves’ in 1867, 

Trieste was, strictly speaking, only an Austrian city. The main port for the Kingdom of Hungary 

was Fiume/Rijeka – smaller, younger, but with equal pretension. Austria and Hungary wrangled 

over tax rates, subsidies, quotas, and other means of state-sponsored favor of one port city over 

the other. Both halves shared, however, responsibility for the imperial navy, stationed in the 

Croatian town of Pula/Pola. Here, too, tensions between Croatian- and Italian-speaking 

nationalists have overshadowed their common cause – to represent the monarchy in all its 

grandeur in the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and beyond. The ties – in personnel, matériel, and 

training – between the navy, the merchant marine, the consular corps, and various scientific and 

exploratory missions emphasized the interdependence of these three cities. Following the 

discovery by “a rather obscure merchant, A[rnold] Szél by name,” that “there was in Africa a 

country named Abyssinia with which the Monarch had neither official nor commercial 

relations,” preparations were quickly made to remedy this absence that demonstrated the 

constant need for cooperation between the navy, the Foreign Office, and Austrian commercial 

Wissenschaften, 1989), 678. For a contemporary view of Austria-Hungary and Italy’s rivalry in the Balkans, see 

Leopold von Chlumecký, Österreich-Ungarn und Italien. Das westbalkanische Problem und Italiens Kampf um die 

Vorherrschaft in der Adria, 2d ed (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1907). Chlumecký argued that Austria- 

Hungary would have to be proactive to protect its position: “Einstens der überwiegende und im Norden des Landes 

[Albania] von keiner Seite bestrittene, sah der österreichisch-ungarische Einfluß neben sich Zoll um Zoll den 

italienischen emporwachsen” (p. 220). For an argument in favor of Italy’s imperial expansion from the Italian 

perspective, see G. Prezzolini, “Come fare l’espansionismo,” Il Regno 30 (1904) as well as articles in Il Regno 14 

(1904), 11-12.


interests. 86 

Members of the diplomatic mission that was to establish relations with Menelik 

included not only the naval commander of the H.M.S. Panther, Ludwig Ritter von Höhnel, and 

the Austro-Hungarian vice consul at Port Said, several members of prominent aristocratic 

families (“to add glamour,” as Höhnel put it), a representative of the Ministry of Commerce, 

twelve sailors, and one hornist. 87 

A year or two earlier, an Austrian company, Vulkan 

Werkstätte, had already managed to provide the Emperor Menelik with non-functioning coining 

equipment (ein Münzprägestock). It was therefore critically important, as a show of goodwill 

and as a sign of the potential benefits of commercial relations with Austria-Hungary, to repair the 

plant’s machinery. Neither Vulkan Werkstätte, nor the Foreign Ministry, however, was willing 

to bear the cost of sending a firm specialist on the mission, so an engineer from the Panther was 

sent to Vienna and trained in the appropriate repairs. Rumor of the Panther’s mission, which the 

Admiralty and the Foreign Ministry were supposed to keep secret, was enough to lead 

representatives of the Museum of Natural History and other scientific institutions to send along 

requests for “collections of every description, including living animals and plants,” – a request 

that Höhnel found “completely accorded with my own inclinations.” Although Höhnel was 

irritated by the potpourri of important personages he was required to host during the mission, he 

never questioned the blending of military, diplomatic, commercial, and scientific goals. 88 

A 

survey of correspondence between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna and members of the 

consular corps stationed in Southeastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America is enough to 

prove that these gentlemen, too, viewed Austria-Hungary’s military, diplomatic, and commercial 

position as inextricably linked. 

86 Ludwig Ritter von Höhnel, Mein Leben zur See, auf Forschungsreisen und bei Hofe. Erinnerungen eines 

österreichischen Seeoffiziers (1857-1909) (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1926), 239. 

87 Ibid, 242. 

88 Ibid, 243.


The strategic and commercial importance of the Eastern Mediterranean is easy to 

overlook in an age when the Scramble for Africa and, for that matter, for Asia, was so much 

more dramatic. Bismarck famously commented to Eugen Wolff in 1888, “Your map of Africa is 

very nice, but my map of Africa is in Europe. Here is Russia, and here is France, and we are in 

the middle; that is my map of Africa.” 89 This quotation is a perennial favorite in discussions of 

German foreign policy. Did Bismarck, as Niall Ferguson (and before him, AJP Taylor) have 

argued, mean that Africa could be used “as an opportunity to sow dissension between Britain and 

France” 90 Or did he, as I am inclined to believe, mean that Germany should concentrate its 

strategic energy on the continent, securing economic domination in eastern Europe In either 

event, Bismarck’s attitude may hint at Austria-Hungary’s approach to influence (even ‘informal 

empire’) within the eastern Mediterranean. Even if Bismarck did not speak for Austria, a 

country for which he had nothing but scorn, his vision of powerful European states choosing to 

extend their significance within the continent was appropriate to the circumstances in which 

Austria-Hungary found itself at the turn of the twentieth century. Gaining or maintaining 

influence without provoking resistance required a kind of delicacy at which the Austro- 

Hungarian foreign office seemed to excel. Consular reports from southeastern Europe and the 

Levant showcase their sense of familiarity with the region, and suggest that, in their own minds, 

consuls expected that familiarity brought with it certain entitlements to influence. In exchange 

for that influence, they were prepared to display a heightened sensitivity to outward displays of 

89 “Ihre Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa. Hier liegt Rußland, und 

hier liegt Frankreich, und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist meine Karte von Afrika.” 

90 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New 

York: Basic Books, 2003), 196. AJP Taylor refers to the same quotation: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848- 

1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 294.


respect for foreign sovereignty. 91 

Nevertheless, when Germany shifted to a colonial policy 

focused on acquiring territory in Africa, Austria-Hungary could not follow. 

The Habsburg experience of pre-war global commerce, or ‘Welthandel,’ serves as a 

useful corrective to accounts of international commercial networks that tend to be teleological in 

their emphasis on steady progress towards a twenty-first century model of globalization. 

According to that perspective, Austria ‘lagged behind’ Germany and Great Britain. Austro- 

Hungarian consular reports from Asia and North Africa suggest that several important 

representatives of Austria-Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were highly resentful of 

Germany’s greater commercial stature. The treatment, at the institutional level, of Germany as 

an ally rather than as a competitor was the source of significant anxiety within the consular 

corps. This can be seen in the products of a typical example of cooperation between the Austro- 

Hungarian military and consular service: the cruise of the naval vessel, SMS Zenta, to nearly 

every Austro-Hungarian consular post located in a port. Over the course of 1903 and 1904, both 

Vice Consul Julius Pisko, who was assigned to the ship, and the ship’s captain, von Boeckmann, 

prepared book-length reports on the conditions of the consulates they visited. Among the many 

concerns that von Boeckmann expressed was his strong disapproval of the Austro-Hungarian 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ predilection for entrusting German businessmen with consular 

duties as Honorarkonsuln. Captain von Boeckmann complained to the Foreign Minister that 

“The allocation of the post of honorary consul to German professional merchants must be termed 

nothing short of harmful to our state and trade policy interests in many cases, since [those 

German merchants] are, unfortunately, all too often tempted by their own patriotism to exploit 

their position as imperial royal honorary consuls to the blatant disadvantage of our citizens in the 

91 The storied career of Maximilian Kutschera is particularly illustrative of the delicacy required. HHStA, MdA, AR 

F. 4 – Staatskanzlei und Ministerium des Äußern; Personalia, Karton 184 (Kutschera, Maximilian).


interest of the powerfully emerging German commerce.” 92 

Pointing out that Austria-Hungary’s 

participation in global commerce was dwarfed by Germany’s fits all too well with conventional 

wisdom about the differences between the German Empire and what Bismarck once referred to 

as “That Slavic-Romanian half-breed state on the Danube, whoring with pope & emperor.” 93 

But if we look at Trieste’s immense growth in the second half of the nineteenth century and first 

decade of the twentieth, Hamburg’s supremacy seems anything but pre-ordained. 

Studying Trieste in its local, regional, and international contexts suggests that even in the 

age of empires there was no universal trajectory towards the acquisition of distant colonies, and 

that an older Mediterranean world did not disappear just because broader connections were 

opening up across the Atlantic and Pacific. While trade within the Mediterranean may not have 

been able to compete with transatlantic trade in volume or value, taking the familiar seascape of 

the Mediterranean into account is an important part of understanding how older networks of 

commerce and exchange were transformed in this period. Trieste and other European ports were 

part of more powerful European economies that wrote the rules of global economic interaction – 

but not all Europeans benefited equally from the military and economic strength of the West. 

Nor can geographic determinism survive this kind of analysis unscathed. The claim that the 

Habsburg Monarchy’s merchant shipping remained underdeveloped because of what one 

Habsburg historian has called the absence of “fundamental structural preconditions” is not 

92 Report prepared by Captain von Boeckmann of the SMS ‘Zenta,’ Triest, 2 October 1903, to the Ministry of 

Foreign Affairs. HHStA, MdA, AR, F4/262, Personalia, Pisko: “Als unseren staatlichen und handelspolitischen 

Interessen in vielen Fällen geradezu abträglich muss die Besetzung von k.u.k. Honorar-Konsularämtern durch 

deutsche Berufskaufleute bezeichnet werden, da selbe durch ihren eigenen Patriotismus leider nur zu häufig dazu 

verleitet werden, ihre Stellung als k.u.k. Honorarkonsuln zum offenkundigen Nachteile unserer Staatsangehörigen 

im Interesse des mächtig aufstrebenden deutschen Handels auszubeuten.” 

93 Bismarck quotation from James Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 

865.


entirely convincing. 94 Trieste’s so-called “isolation” from the Austrian interior was ended no 

later than 1857, with the completion of the Southern Railway. Nor can geography alone explain 

why Austria-Hungary’s share of tonnage shipped through the Suez Canal dropped from 4% in 

1870/1878 to 3.3% in 1904/1907 while Germany’s rose from none to 15.5% in the same period – 

or why Italy’s share declined even more sharply than Austria-Hungary’s (from 4% to 1.5%). 95 

Trieste’s position appeared disadvantageous when measured by the distance from the Atlantic, 

but advantageous when seen in the proximity of the Suez Canal – an advantage that went 

unexploited because of strategic and domestic political considerations more than because of 

geography. Placing Trieste within both its Mediterranean and its Habsburg contexts, examining 

its demonstrated prosperity against its unrealized potential, viewing both of these in the global 

framework of shifting commercial and strategic networks, and historicizing the cultural and 

political logic and debates underpinning economic “rationality,” enhances our understanding of 

the late imperial world. And it helps us do justice to a city whose multilingual nature was not a 

function of some peculiarly eastern ethnic mixing, but rather a reflection of its function as an 

emporium for a European empire with a population larger than all of South America. Before 

Trieste was woven into the Iron Curtain, it was a city of commerce and communication, of labor 

and literature, of commitment to an imperial past and longing for an international future. 

94 Karl Bachinger, “Das Verkehrswesen,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Vol. I, Die Wirtschaftliche 

Entwicklung, ed. Alois Brusatti (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973), 312- 

313. 

95 Gross, “Stellung der Habsburgermonarchie,” 21.

Alison Frank Imperial Trieste: Local Culture and Global Commerce ...

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