German Merchants in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic

This study brings to life the community of trans-Atlantic merchants who established strong economic, political, and cultural ties between the United States and the city-republic of Bremen, Germany in the nineteenth century. Lars Maischak shows that the success of Bremen's merchants in helping make an industrial-capitalist world market created the conditions of their ultimate undoing: the new economy of industrial capitalism gave rise to democracy and the nation-state, undermining the politi...