David de Pury

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David de Pury, painted by Thomas Hickey , Hôtel de ville Neuchâtel
Statue de Purys in Neuchâtel

David de Pury (born January 19, 1709 in Neuchâtel , † May 31, 1786 in Lisbon ) was a banker, diamond and slave dealer at the Portuguese court .

Life

David de Pury was the son of Jean Pierre Pury , who served four years as a corporal in the Dutch East India Company and was the founder of Purrysburg in South Carolina .

David de Pury grew up in the municipal orphanage in Neuchâtel. Despite the early death of his parents, he had an extensive and influential family network of the de Pury. In 1726 David de Pury went to Marseille , where he was trained as a merchant in a trading house. In 1730 (after the so-called South Sea Bubble) he joined the South Sea Company in London , which traded worldwide. Among other things, the company shipped slaves from African places of purchase to South America and to Central American islands.

In 1736 de Pury settled in Lisbon. He started a bank and got involved in the diamond trade with Brazil . He won the trust of the Marques de Pombal and was able to buy mining rights from the highly profitable state mine in Diamantina , Brazil. In addition, the Purry, Mellish and Desvismes company had a monopoly on the utilization of tropical woods such as mahogany between 1757 and 1784 . In 1755 Pury & Cia appears. with a larger block of shares as a shareholder in Companhia do Grão-Pará e Maranhão, a company that not only exported from Brazil, but also monopolized imports and thus the import of slaves from Africa for twenty years. During the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 , he lost three quarters of his property, which he quickly regained. He acquired enormous wealth with his economic activities, especially with the slave trade.

In 1762 he became court factor of the King of Portugal. Frederick the Great appointed him baron in 1785 (the Prussian king was also Prince of Neuchâtel until 1848).

De Pury remained unmarried and had no offspring. His grave is in the English cemetery in Lisbon. In his will, he bequeathed a huge fortune of two million livres tournois to his hometown Neuchâtel . The money went into urban design.

Traces in Neuchâtel

With the fortune left by David de Pury, the city of Neuchâtel was able to build several important structures:

  • 1781 or 1783, the old hospital, the more of a hospice was
  • 1788 the first public library in Switzerland
  • 1790 the town hall
  • 1836–1843 the diversion of the Seyon River
  • 1835 the Latin College
  • In 1853 the girls' school, now the Museum of Natural History
  • the street off plan

Out of gratitude he was given a statue in 1855, which had been made by the sculptor David d'Angers since 1848 . The city's main square bears his name. The statue was smeared with red paint on the night of Monday, July 12, 2020 as part of the protests following the death of George Floyd .

literature

  • Antonio Carreira, A companhia de Pernambuco e Paraiba - alguns subsídios para o estudo da sua acção. In: Revista de historia economica e social 11.1983, pp. 55-88.
  • Louis-Edouard Roulet: David de Pury , Hauterive, 1986.
  • Biographies Neuchâteloises , Vol. 1, Ed. Gilles Attinger, Hauterive suisse, 1996, p. 233f.
  • Thomas David / Bouda Etemad / Janick Marina Schaufelbühl: Black shops. The Involvement of the Swiss in Slavery and the Slave Trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries , Zurich 2005.
  • Hans Fässler : Journey in black and white: Swiss on-site appointments in matters of slavery , Zurich 2006. ISBN 978-3858693037
  • Jean-Pierre Jelmini: Neuchâtel 1011-2011. Mille ans, mille questions, mille et une réponses, Neuchâtel 2010.

Web links

  • Frederic Inderwildi: Pury, David de. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland. Accessed March 31, 2020 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Helen J. Paul: The South Sea Bubble: an economic history of its origins and consequences (=  Routledge explorations in economic history . No. 49 ). Routledge, London; New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-203-84206-5 .
  2. ↑ cooperaxion.org
  3. ↑ Friedrich Carl Gottlob Hirsching: Historical-literary manual of famous and memorable people which in the 18th century. died ... 1806 ( google.de [accessed on March 31, 2020]).
  4. ^ Statue of David de Pury covered with red paint , in Tagesanzeiger of July 13, 2020; accessed on July 14, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Pury, David de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Puri, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Banker, slave trader and court factor in Portugal
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1709
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuchâtel NE
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 1786
Place of death Lisbon