Caspar Zeller

Caspar Zeller (born March 22, 1756 in Kempten (Allgäu) , † August 4, 1823 in Ems ) was the founder of a Hamburg trading company that was one of the first to take part in direct overseas trade in Hamburg in the 18th century.

Life

Caspar Zeller was born as one of seven children of the Kempten merchant Otto Philipp Zeller (* around 1712) and Sabine Barbara Zeller, b. König († 1764), daughter of a merchant in Venice , born on March 22, 1756 in Kempten (Allgäu). Zeller's father ran an "extensive linen trade to Italy " together with his great uncle Johann Georg König, mayor of Kempten .

After an apprenticeship in Ulm , Zeller joined the Lyonaiser Kontor of the textile trading company Scherer in St. Gallen in 1777 . After fourteen years he followed the merchant Pierre Mercier to Nantes as a partner in an overseas trading company . In the course of the suppression of the Vendée uprisings , Zeller fled to Hamburg in 1794, where he founded the trading company "Caspar Zeller & Co." together with the French émigré Michel Augustin de Goyon (1764–1851) in early 1796 . Based on a network between Hamburg , New York , London , Port-au-Prince and Paris , Zeller and his partner started importing goods directly from overseas. This trade division was new for Hamburg in the 18th century, as the city was excluded from direct imports of overseas goods until the 1790s by the restrictive trade legislation of the great colonial powers (French Exclusif or English navigation act ) and overseas agricultural products such as sugar , coffee , tobacco , Cotton or indigo only got to Hamburg through the brokerage of the large ports in Western Europe.

On December 13, 1798, Zeller married Henriette Charlotte Widow, the daughter of the future mayor of Hamburg, Peter Hinrich Widow, and prematurely separated from his business partner de Goyon towards the end of the same year. In the period that followed, the trading company - like most of Hamburg's import and export companies - was in dire straits due to the continental blockade and the English blockade, and it held out until 1821. Zeller died on August 4, 1823 in what is now Bad Ems.

literature

swell

• Caspar Zeller's curriculum vitae 1756–1823 , published by the Society of Book Friends in Hamburg, Hamburg 1964.

Representations

• Frank Schulenburg: "Une maison avec des jolies affaires et une correspondance agréable" - Caspar Zeller & Co. 1795–1798 , in: Markus A. Denzel (ed.), German elites in Übersee (16th to early 20th century), St. Katharinen 2006, ISBN 3-89590-170-9 , pp. 71-83.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Curriculum vitae of Caspar Zeller , p. 11.