German American Entrepreneurship around 1900 in a Global Context

Around 1900, German industrialists and merchants were found in all world regions, conducting multi-directional business and establishing complex transnational networks. Based on case studies from the United States and other countries, the paper shows that the hybrid and transnational character of these enterprises makes it problematic to apply labels such as ‘German’ or ‘German American entrepreneur’. They were integrated into their own local, national, and also global economies. Links with Germany, or specific regions therein, were important, but by no means the only factor to explain relative success. The main argument is that entrepreneurs were successful not because they acted in a national sense as Germans, but because they acted transnationally and aligned their strategies with the international markets of a globalizing economy. Their primary aim was not to strengthen the German Empire’s economy by acting as its outposts (as ideological constructions envisaged), but to strengthen the position of their enterprises, their transnational networks, and also their local economies. This does, however, not mean that they were immune to those nationalist ideas of a ‘Greater German Empire’ that took hold in Germany and its ethnic communities abroad. It only means that these sentiments had no ascertainable effect on business strategies. In terms of local impact, the paper shows that migrant entrepreneurs of German background had a modernizing effect in many areas, connecting these with global markets. The transnational approach, however, helps us to avoid the pitfall of interpreting these activities as a proof of German global contributionism, or, as contemporaries put it, of seeing German emigrants as ‘fertilizers of other people’. Migration scholarship has to be “emphatically non-contributionist” (K. N. Conzen).