The Forgotten Majority: German Merchants in London, Naturalization, and Global Trade, 1660–1815, by Margrit Schulte Beerbühl

Abstract

The Forgotten Majority: German Merchants in London, Naturalization, and Global Trade, 1660-1815, by Margrit Schulte Beerbuhl, translated by Cynthia Klohr. New York, Berghahn Books, 2015. xii, 313 pp. $120.00 US (cloth). This well-researched text has much to teach us about the global systems of trade that developed around London during the early modern period, especially German merchants' impressive roles in those systems. Schulte Beerbuhl came to those insights indirectly. Her interest in naturalization laws revealed a number of surprising facts about the economic functions behind them. For example: allowing foreigners living abroad to become British subjects proved to be highly advantageous for both those foreigners and the British. In turn, her exploration of such facts exposed a forgotten majority of German merchants in London and abroad who played critical roles in expanding that city's global markets. At the same time, the lives of those merchants now teach how tightly intertwined immigration, naturalization, and individual merchants' interests were during the period in which Great Britain's empire became global. Anyone with an interest in naturalization laws or trade networks will profit from reading this book. So too will individuals who would like to know more about Anglo-German trade in the seventeenth century or the development of eighteenth-century German trading houses. Many scholars will also benefit from her revelations about the ways in which Germans became critical to London's trade with Russia, the importance of which has been largely obscured by our focus on British trade networks spanning the Atlantic, reaching into the Mediterranean, and extending as far as China and India. Russia, she reminds us, played a critical role in supplying industrializing England with raw materials, such as flax, hemp, and timber, and German merchants were essential to that trade. In part, the role of German merchants in building trade with Russia and other places came about as a result of trading patterns and cultural practices established by the Hansa cities. Germans were already well integrated in Russian trade by the time the British Empire began to grow. They were conversant in local customs as well as the Russian and German languages, and many German merchant families had established households in Moscow and later St. Petersburg, not to mention the Baltic States. British merchants, in contrast, were newcomers in those territories, and few were interested in staying in those locations for extended periods. As a result, after the signing of the 1734 trade agreement between Russia and Great Britain, naturalizing German merchants who had family connections in those areas, ties to Russia's political and commercial elite, as well as stores of local knowledge made good business sense. …