H. H. Meier and the Rise of the North German Lloyd, 1856 to 1914

This paper examines the role of Bremen’s merchants in tying the German Empire into world markets, through the example of Herman Henrich (“H. H.”) Meier, the founder of the North German Lloyd steamship company. Bremen’s merchant elite played an essential role for giving rapidly industrializing Germany access to foreign markets for goods and capital.  Until 1888, H. H. Meier was often the public face of Bremen’s merchants for a larger German audience.  Meier’s development reveals the tensions and contradictions through which Bremen found its economic role in the new order of a unified German nation within a world of nation-states. As patriarch of a long-established Hanseatic family, Meier represented the traditional roots of his mercantile estate; while as chairman of the North German Lloyd and the Bremer Bank, he acted the part of a modern business leader at the head of multinational concerns. As an economic actor on the world stage, Meier hewed to a free-trading orthodoxy informed by Adam Smith; while as a politician on a national stage, he negotiated demands for the protection and development of a “national economy” that relied on the power of the monarchy. Contemporaries and historians alike have interpreted Meier’s withdrawal in the late 1880s from his public roles at the helm of the Lloyd and in the Reichstag as a story of decline and failure.  This paper argues against such a reading, suggesting instead that the success of the Lloyd steamship company to 1914 was built on the groundwork Meier laid in managing productively the contradictions and tensions he found at hand.