This study brings to life the community of trans-Atlantic merchants who established strong economic, political, and cultural ties between the United States and the city-republic of Bremen, Germany in the nineteenth century. Lars Maischak shows that the success of Bremen's merchants in helping make an industrial-capitalist world market created the conditions of their ultimate undoing: the new economy of industrial capitalism gave rise to democracy and the nation-state, undermining the political and economic power of this mercantile elite. Maischak argues that the experience of Bremen's merchants is representative of the transformation of the role of merchant capital in the first wave of globalization, with implications for our understanding of modern capitalism, in general.
Author(s): Lars Maischak
Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 318
City: Cambridge
Cover
Contents
List of Tables, Graphs, and Maps
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Globalization and Its Enemies
The Political Economy of Globalization
The Politics of Globalization
Pioneers of Globalization
Part I Moorings of the Hanseatic Network
1 Prudent Pioneers
Bremen’s Merchant Capitalists in America
Bremen as a Liberal, Free-Trading Port
Hanseats as Economic Conservatives
Small Firms, Big Business
Old Boys’ Networks
Family Networks
The Lürman Family
The Meier Family
Conclusion
2 The Hanseatic Household
The Spirit of the Hanseatic Household
Christian Seafaring
The Calvinist Axis
Mothers, Sisters, and Wives
Hanseatic Women and the Family Fortune
Husband and Wife in the Christian Family
Commercial Morality
The Household as a Source of Identity
Making Children into Hanseats
Conclusion
3 Cosmopolitan Conservatives
Tradition and Modernity
A Cosmopolitan Place
Bremen in the International System
Bremen as Hometown
The Corporatist Order of the 1850s
Wilhelm Kiesselbach: Organic Intellectual of Bremen’s Elite
Kiesselbach and America
Transnational Conservatism
Part II Exchanges in a Transnational World
4 Free Labor and Dependent Labor
Free Labor and Improvement
Sailors and Emigrants
Transients and Residents
Patriarchs Gone Bad
Free Labor vs. Guild Labor
Reluctant Modernizers
5 International Improvement
Whigs and Democrats
Hanseats in American Politics
The Political Economy of Transatlantic Commerce and Communication
The Bremish Effort to Gain the First Euro-American Steamer Line
Winning Friends in Congress
International Trade, National Principles, and Local Interests
Bremish American Steamer Lines between 1846 and 1860
Hanseats, Democrats, and Whigs: The Transnational Second Party System
The Irony of Modernization
6 Nations, Races, and Empires
Essential Assumptions
The Elephant on the Commons
Ships’ Names as Cultural and Political Statements
Socializing with the Other
Race and Empire
Nation and Culture
Foreign Affairs
Nation and Democracy
Conclusion and Outlook
Part III Decline of a Cosmopolitan Community
7 The End of Merchant Capital
The End of Merchant Capital?
A Changing World
Changes in Business in the 1860s
The New Economy and the Rise of Friedrich Wilhelm Keutgen
Families or Stockholders?
Crises and the Fall of Friedrich Wilhelm Keutgen
Bremen’s Integration into the Industrial-Capitalist World Market
8 Decisions and Divisions
Bremen and the International Situation, 1859
Plotting a Course toward Prussia
Cosmopolitans and Confederates
A Dinner with Lincoln and a Mission to Richmond
Dealing with Prussia
Doubts about the Nation
The End of Independence, 1866–1867
9 Patriarchs into Patriots
The Transformations of Meier and Schwab
Family Business
The Children of Schwab as American Patriots
Hollywood Endings
Bombing Nights
Conclusion
Bremen’s Historical Role
Conservative Modernizers
Cosmopolitan Conservatives
Capital and Community
Nation, Religion, Gender, and Class
Sources
Manuscript and Printed Sources
Baltimore
Maryland Historical Society Library
Archival Materials (Manuscripts Department)
Johns Hopkins University, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Government Records
Other Holdings
Holdings
Bremen
Staatsarchiv Bremen
Archival Materials
Newspapers
Other Holdings
New Haven
Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives
Archival Materials
New York
New York Public Library, Research Library, Special Collections Department
Archival Materials
Newspapers
National Archives – Northeast Region, New York
Archival Materials
County Clerk, New York County, County Court House
Archival Materials
Other Sources
Internet and Telecommunication
Bibliography
Index
