The Prussian Silk Industry in the Eighteenth Century 1892
I have already attempted, some years since, to shew that the whole mercantilist policy can only be understood when it is regarded as a stage and a means in the creation of a larger economic and political community. As the mediaval city-states and the great lordships became more and more incapable of serving as adequate organs of social life, as their contests one with another degenerated into a chaos of anarchy, it became necessary that all conceivable means should be employed, - if need be, through "blood and iron," - to erect territorial and national states. Enlightened princely despotism was the representative and leader of this great progressive movement; a movement which was destined to annihilate the freedom of the Estates and corporations, to establish freedom of trade and great markets at home, and to combine all the resources of the country, economic as well as financial and military, in face of the foreigner. Those states most quickly became powerful and rich, which carried out this centralising tendency with the greatest energy. Germany remained so far behind the greater Italian states, behind Burgundy, Holland, England, and France, behind even the smaller nortHern states, because it remained fast bound by mediaval forms; because, moreover, even its greater territories were too small, too fragmentary, too far from the coast, to pursue this new kind of centralising policy like the western states of Europe. The Great Elector made a beginning; he tried to create a German-Baltic coast state and a naval power, and thereby to seize the Dominium Maris Baltici, and the commercial control of the east of Europe. The attempt was bound to fail, because Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Austria, and Russia had interests opposed to it, and because the position and extent of the Brandenburg state, as it then existed, were inadequate for the task. Abandoning, as it must, the main feature of its plan, the attempt to secure maritime power, only one way remained open by which the young military and Protestant state could arrive at its economic ends. And this was to endeavour, upon the agrarian and feudal foundation furnished by the provinces grouped around Brandenburg, to create an industry which should rival the civilised states of the west, using for that purpose all the devices of state-aided immigration, of encouragement of industry, and of protective tariffs. Such an industry would have alike the power and the duty to control the domestic market, to raise the decaying handicrafts of the little rural towns, to free the country bit by bit from dependence on west-European trade and credit, and to strengthen its influence on Poland and the other eastern states.
On this path, then, Frederick William I and his ministers entered with conscious purpose and energy; and out of this school came Frederick II, who pursued the same object with greater boldness and genius. To the question how it was that Frederick regarded the silk industry as occupying so very important, if not the most important, place in such a policy, Dr Hintze gives a simple and conclusive answer.
Starting with the generally recognised fact that, before our modern age of iron and coal, the centre and summit of industrial development were to be found in the finer textile manufactures, Dr Hintze shews us how economic supremacy passed from Byzantium to Italy, from Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Lucca to the greater Italian states, Milan and Piedmont, from italy to Spain and France, and thence to Holland and England; and how this transference was always accompanied, partly as effect, partly as cause, by tHe rise of the silk industry by the side of the woollen industry. In no case was the production of raw silk itself the cause of the silk industry, as is sometimes supposed; the actual production of silk took place elsewhere; and even in Italy and France it was a consequence of the silk industry, and came comparatively late. France and England had created their silk industries with all the political resources at their disposal and with the greatest sacrifices. In Lyons in 1667 there were counted 2000 looms, in 1752, 9404. In the great economic struggle of England against France, the prohibition in 1688 of the importation of French silk wares into England was, perhaps, after the Navigation Laws and the victories at sea, the most telling blow. Up to that time silk goods to the value of ?00,000 had every year gone from France to England; in 1763 the English silk industry gave employment to 50,000 persons. But not only the great states, the smaller ones also, desired at any price to have a silk manufacture of their own. The Italian traders who first brought the silk wares were followed by Italian weavers and dyers. Zurich and Basel, Ulm, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, had a good many silk-workmen as early as the sixteenth century. In Antwerp in the seventeenth century 2000 looms were at work. In the Netherlands, Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Utrecht became rich through this industry; and from thence it passed to Hamburg. Belgian and French refugees joined the Italian workmen in bringing it to Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. About 1700 Leipzig had already a considerable velvet and silk business; in 1750 a thousand looms were at work. In the Palatinate, in Munich, and in Vienna, J. Joachim Becher had made various attempts to call a silk industry into existence by means of companies; all through the eighteenth century like attempts were made in every German capital. But they succeeded, on any considerable scale, only in Prussia, and there especially in Berlin. It can certainly be maintained that, though Hamburg and Leipzig, Krefeld and Utrecht had greater facilities in reaching a market, in all other respects Berlin was as well fitted as many other places to support a flourishing silk industry; and also that, according to the ideas of the eighteenth century, it was bound to make the attempt as soon as the provinces of Brandenburg and Prussia were conceived of as forming an independent economic body ready for rivalry with Holland and England and France.
[Then follows an account of the measures of the government, and of the organisation and progress of the manufacture.]
We have watched the foundation, upon a stubborn soil, of an industry which reached at last a high degree of technical excellence; and this by the use of all the measures that a consistent mercantile policy could prompt. In scarcely any other case have like measures been applied with so wide a sweep and such steady persistency. In scarcely any other case have they been so carefully, step by step, adapted to the concrete conditions. What we have had under our consideration has been a domestic industry, which had already partially gone over to the factory form, but yet in which the workpeople were protected by gild regulation, state control, and governmental inspection. We have had to do with an industry producing for a great inter-state and foreign market, and with undertakers (Unternehmer) and factors (Verleger) occupying the most difficult position conceivable. In spite of all the state support and protection they received, they had to contend with a stern competition, with the shifting chances of the market, and with a task, both in the matter of manufacture and in the matter of trade, of the utmost severity.
The attempt on the whole succeeded. Berlin in 1780-1806 stood almost on a level with all the other places where the silk industry was carried on. It was mainly through the silk industry that Berlin became an important factory town, and the town whose inhabitants were distinguished by the best taste in Germany. Of course people in Berlin could not yet produce quite so cheaply as the manufactures of Lyons which were three centuries older; in many of the finer wares they were behind Krefeld, Switzerland and Holland; but they had caught up with Hamburg and Saxony. They had not yet got so far in 1806 as to be able to meet with unconcern the fluctuations produced by the great war - a period of long and terrible impoverishment, together with the sudden abolition of the gild system, of the old regulations and of all state support, as well as the removal of the prohibition of importation. But since, in the province of Brandenburg, 1503 looms were again at work in 1831, and as many as 3000 in 1840-1860, it is clear, after all, that most of the business concerns that had taken root before 1806 were able to maintain themselves for at least a couple of generations even in the current of free international competition. And the fact that in the sixties and seventies, as living became dearer in Berlin, and the competition of Krefeld and of foreign countries became more intense, most of the Berlin men of business, capitalists and workmen, turned to other occupations, - while some parts of the old industry, like the business of dyeing, maintained themselves in an even more flourishing state, - this fact is no proof that the Berlin silk industry of the eighteenth century was not in its place.
The task set before the men of that time was to secure for the real centre of the Prussian state a share in the industries, and in the forms of industry, that constituted the essential features of the higher civilisation of western Europe. The prosperity of the silk manufacture in a distant and isolated fragment of the state, close to the Dutch frontier, namely Krefeld, could not make up for its absence in the east. Again and again did Frederick the Great endeavour to induce the von der Leyen brothers to move eastward with a part of their business; but all in vain. And so he had to make an effort to reach the same end in another way. In the course of his reign he spent some two million thalers over the silk industry, more indeed than for any other branch of manufacture. And what did he obtain therewith? That he had an industry which every year produced wares worth two million thalers or more, says the mercantilist; - no! that he created an industry which in the nineteenth century disappeared, says the free-trader. I say, the two million thalers are to be looked upon as an expenditure for schooling, as money spent on education, which engrafted on Berlin and the eastern provinces those powers and aptitudes, those manners and customs, without which an industrial state cannot endure. In these feudal territories with their impoverished country towns and craftsmen, both the undertakers and the workmen were altogether wanting who were indispensable for the finer manufactures aiming at the world-market. The introduction of foreigners and the laborious training of natives could be the work only of a political art which realised both its object and its materials. It is significant that at first we are met by Frenchmen and Jews among the factors, and by foreigners, chiefly Lyonese and Italians, among the workpeople; while in 1800, natives prevail in both classes. It might with truth be said, that by their services to the silk industry the French and the Jews repaid the Prussian state for its magnanimous toleration. It was in this way that the best Jewish families of Berlin, the Mendelssohns and Friedlanders, the Veits and the Marcuses, gained their reputation and social position, and at the same time turned the purely mercantile Hebrew body into an industrial one: they themselves changed in character in the process, and grew side by side with the state and society. Most important of all, Berlin in 1800 had a working class of great technical skill, and a body of business men possessed of capital and ability; and this fact remained the great result of the policy of Frederick, whether or no the silk industry survived.
And it was not the least merit of that policy that it constantly, and with clear understanding, laboured towards a double end: to create a flourishing industry by state initiative and political means, and then, as quickly and as completely as possible, to set it on its own feet, and create thriving private businesses, - and so render itself superfluous. Similarly, in a place like Krefeld, where the favouring conditions afforded by the neighbourhood of the Dutch created a considerable industry without protective tariff or subsidy or regulation, the king did not think of state intervention: the most he did was to support the practical monopoly of the von der Leyen brothers, because he saw that this great house was capable of elevating and guiding the whole industry in an exemplary fashion. Moreover, his administrative wisdom, running not along the lines of rigid schemes, but in accordance with the men and circumstances before him, shewed itself precisely in this contemporary application of such divergent systems of industrial policy; in Berlin the most extreme state control and in Krefeld complete laissez-faire.
The truth is, he himself, in his innermost nature, was just as much the philosophical disciple of the individualistic enlightenment (Aufklarung) of the period as the last great representative of princely absolutism. Under him the Prussian state was based as much on legal security and on freedom of thought and individual opinion as upon discipline, obedience, and subordination. Had he not combined these rare qualities in himself, he had not been the great king, and on his death the Swabian peasant would not have asked the naive question "Then, who is to govern the world?"
The yelping curs, the men astride of principles, who did not understand him when he died, understand him and his policy no better now. They will still less understand the great problem of the creation of states and national economies. It lies in this: that as civilisation advances, the state and the national economy diverge more and more the one from the other, each a separate circle with its own organs; and yet that this separation must again constantly make way for a unifying guidance, a growing interaction, a harmonious joint-movement. And the secret of great times and great men consists in their taking account of this twofold development; in their leaving individuals to form themselves, in their allowing free play to individual life in its various shapes, and yet in their being able to bring the newly emerging as well as the old forces into the service of the whole. As states get larger, as social relations become more complicated, it will be increasingly difficult to reach this ideal: - that economic forces, while living for themselves should yet entirely serve the state, and that the state, pursuing its own ends, should at the same time place all its might and all its members in the true service of the national economy. The Prussian state, - in its own fashion and after the manner of the eighteenth century, - more nearly arrived at this ideal than any of the other states of the time. We may well ask whether we to-day, under conditions so much more difficult, have approached it more nearly.
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