Foot Soldiers in the Empire of Goods: The German-Speaking Merchant Community of Colonial Philadelphia

This paper examines how the German merchant community of colonial Philadelphia developed commercial networks that made these traders into hubs of goods, credit, and information from the frontiers of British North America to English ports and German-speaking Central Europe. These networks have largely been ignored as scholars have focused instead on Philadelphia’s dominant Anglican and Quaker trading families (e.g. Coxe, Drinker, Hollingsworth, Shippen). Yet these German networks played a crucial role integrating tens of thousands of continental European migrants into the British North American imperial project in the mid-eighteenth century. Exploring the colonial Philadelphia German-speaking merchant community reveals that the German Atlantic was not an independent space, but rather one deeply intertwined with the British Atlantic and British Empire.

In order to break into the competitive commercial space of British North America’s largest port, German merchants had to balance their newly secured status as British subjects with preserving their language and continental European connections to gain access to revenue streams and trading opportunities. These merchants thus were active participants, rather than bystanders, in eighteenth-century empire building and the expansion of global commerce. These merchants’ trade in imported European products, European colonial goods, and credit facilitated the expansion of what HT Breen famously called “the empire of goods” and the Anglicization of British North America, especially among German-speaking settlers. Using their linguistic and social connections, German merchants sought to build steady relationships with backcountry German-speaking shopkeepers, tavern owners, and settlers. Furthermore, the merchants sought to secure products from Central Europe that their Anglophonic competitors did not supply, from Lutheran religious texts to handmade rifles. Ultimately, these trade networks nurtured German settlers’ connections back to the British metropole as well as their homelands through economic, material, and cultural bonds.