Commodity trading, globalization and the colonial world

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This book is a micro-historical study of the modern trade in commodities based on the example of the Swiss trading company Volkart Brothers. The Volkart company was founded in 1851 by the brothers Salomon and Johann Georg Volkart, with offices in Winterthur, a small city north of Zurich, and in Bombay. By the end of the nineteenth century, the firm had risen to become one of the largest cotton exporters in India and during the twentieth century it joined the ranks of the world's leading cotton and coffee trading companies, making it one of the leading companies in Switzerland. 1 The fact that a Swiss merchant house during the colonial era could so successfully engage in business activities on the Indian subcontinent shows the degree to which countries that did not possess any overseas territories of their own were nevertheless integrated into the colonial world order. This study thus ties into recent research efforts to shed light on Swiss involvement in colonialism. 2 Furthermore, it illustrates that even during the Imperial Age markets were often not congruent with imperial borders. Even during the colonial era, the key sales markets for Indian raw cotton-for many years the main product traded by Volkart-were not within the confines of the British Empire, but rather in continental Europe and East Asia. Furthermore, the present work follows up on recent endeavors to look beyond the formal empire when examining India's economic history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries