Royal warehouse
The Royal Warehouse was one of the most important wool manufacturers in Prussia in the 18th century . It was founded in 1713 by the banker and entrepreneur Johann Andreas Kraut . The manufacture was located in the high house on Klosterstrasse in Berlin-Mitte . The warehouse temporarily employed the entire Berlin cloth making trade and was Berlin's largest company for a long time.
The company's early years were in deficit . However, the economic problems could be overcome. Typical mercantilist measures such as import restrictions for foreign cloths, an export ban on raw wool and the equipment monopoly for the Prussian army helped .
Due to changing ownership and competition with local silk and cotton production , the company's development stagnated despite its monopoly rights . The warehouse's products were increasingly judged to be too expensive for their quality. The company finally went down at the beginning of the 19th century.
prehistory
In the Kingdom of Prussia, wool was one of the few, abundant natural raw materials. The wool industry thus offered itself as a natural lead industry for the economically backward country. In addition, the necessary sales market seemed to be secured by the company's own needs. The textile industry in Prussia had been in a crisis since the Thirty Years War and had still not reached the level of 1618 when King Friedrich Wilhelm I took office in 1713 . The king intended to help this industry to grow again by setting up a central wool publishing institute. According to the plans, this publisher was to supply the Prussian army with fabrics and uniforms .
The soldier king combined three important goals of absolutist economic policy with the promotion of wool production . First, it prevented raw materials and money from going out of the country. Second, it secured supplies for the army regardless of the importation of foreign - until then mostly Saxon - manufactured goods . Thirdly, it promoted job and livelihood opportunities for the residents of the capital Berlin and thus also ensured increasing tax payments.
In Johann Andreas Kraut , the king found the right personality for this project. The banker , who possessed wealth, extensive connections and enterprise, was commissioned in August 1713 to establish a warehouse from which the army could meet its needs at any time.
Concept of manufactory
Originally this warehouse was only intended as a publisher, which was supposed to advance the Berlin craftsmen with the wool they needed and to buy the finished goods for a fee. It should also keep the wool necessary for the production process in stock.
The production of coarse cloths for the clothing of the soldiers in the army was not a problem. Fine cloths for the officers were only rarely produced in Prussia up to this point. So from now on the fine types of cloth in the rooms of the warehouse, apart from spinning , were made and manufactured by the company. In addition, the coarser team cloth supplied by the homeworkers was processed further in the warehouse.
In terms of type, the warehouse was therefore a hybrid between a centralized and decentralized manufacture: centralized, because all the products for the manufacture of a product were carried out under one roof using a division of labor; decentralized, as it had important parts of the work carried out by formally independent craftsmen outside the company and only refined the products.
Company history
Under King Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–1740)
How big the project was planned from the beginning is shown by the building made available to the manufactory: the high house on Klosterstrasse . Until the city palace was built in the 15th century , the high house had served as an apartment for the electors when they visited the cities of Cölln and Berlin. When Johann Andreas Kraut took over the complex, which was now intended for commercial use, in 1713, it consisted of three connected elongated buildings.
In 1713, Kraut brought in an initial capital of 100,000 thalers . With royal support, Kraut brought weavers from Lower Lusatia , New Mark and South Polish clothmaking towns and employed journeymen from Saxony to process the simple local land wool . These did the work of spinning and weaving as commissioned work in their homes.
The fine wool, mostly imported from Spain, on the other hand, was scrubbed, combed, tapped and spun in the warehouse itself. The warehouse recruited masters and journeymen in the Netherlands and Jülich for these activities and also employed experts from Huguenot circles.
The actual management was soon taken over by Kraut's brother-in-law, Severin Schindler . In 1715 production finally began in the warehouse. The main buyer was the Prussian army. In 1714, the army's assembly regulations stipulated that every two years and from 1725 annually, the entire army should be dressed again.
As early as 1716 the Prussian army was largely supplied with uniform material from the warehouse . There were 148 weavers in the warehouse in 1719, 154 in 1722, and 242 in 1724. There are also 30 journeyman cloth makers and numerous auxiliary workers. In total there were about 500 employees in the warehouse in 1724. There were also an estimated 5000 misplaced spinners. The high proportion of homeworkers corresponded entirely to the wishes of the king, because he wanted to bring as many impoverished and underemployed weavers as possible into wages and bread, otherwise the state would not take care of them. Tailoring work, on the other hand, was not carried out in the warehouse, but was reserved for the craft. In 1719 there were a total of 20 looms for fine cloth production in the warehouse.
In 1718 and 1719 Friedrich Wilhelm I issued a permanent ban on wool exports in the interests of the warehouse and in 1720 the use of foreign woolen goods. What was new about the edicts that were issued was that the ban also included the noble landowners who had previously been left out and thus, in contrast to earlier edicts, an effective export ban was achieved.
The result of this edict was an immediate drop in the price of raw wool by up to 50 percent. The result was an upswing in the local wool industry and with it the warehouse, which until then - due to the high raw material prices and fixed delivery contracts with fixed prices - had been operating at a loss. The nobility , who had the sole right to raise sheep since 1593 , suffered considerable financial losses.
In order to bind the nobility to the manufactory, he obliged them to provide the warehouse with an interest-free loan of 100,000 Reichstalers . The king hoped that the nobility, who were wool producers themselves and represented their own interests, would now play a major role in the flourishing of the manufactory.
A conflict arose between Kraut and Friedrich Wilhelm I due to the king's rigid policy of intervention. It was about the fact that the wool, the most important raw material for cloth production, should be completely taken over by the warehouse due to the export ban and processed there in wage labor (i.e. in the publishing house). Kraut himself shied away from this additional burden, as he feared that he could no longer sell the increased production. Soon after, Kraut died in 1723. After state reprisals, Kraut's heirs had to cede their share of the warehouse to the Potsdam military orphanage.
The management of the company was taken over by the board of directors of the military orphanage, consisting of two staff officers and some councilors from the board of directors . As a result of the nationalization, the warehouse was given the addition of “royal” to its name. Between 1724 and 1727 around 500 to 900 boys and 42 girls worked in the military orphanage for the warehouse. In the years 1735 to 1740 there were already 1,300 to 1,400 boys and up to 150 girls. 1778 even 1950 children. Due to the constant overload of the children - they had to work up to 10 hours a day - around 200 of them died annually. The management of the warehouse was taken over in 1723 by a committee of officials from the military orphanage.
Under King Friedrich II (1740–1786)
In 1741 the new King Frederick II lifted the previous cotton ban imposed by his father to protect the wool industry. This gave the wool manufacturers strong competition, which kept them falling more and more behind.
The Seven Years' War led to a poor economic situation for the warehouse. As a result of the deterioration in coins set by Frederick II and the rigid supply contracts, the manufactory only took around half of what it was before. In 1764, the cloth manufacturer from Aachen, Heinrich Schmitz, took over the company as a tenant, which until then had been under the management of the Potsdam military orphanage. He paid the military orphanage an annual rent of 22,000 Reichstaler. He managed to reorganize the company again. In the 1870s it was twice as big as it was in 1740. After Heinrich Schmitz's death, his son Simon Schmitz and his son-in-law Paul Benedikt Wolff took over the inheritance.
From the middle of the second half of the 18th century, the wool industry in Berlin showed a slight decline. This was due to the increasing competition from other countries that could offer better goods at lower prices. In addition, England flooded all of Europe with cheap woolen fabrics. There was also domestic competition (Cottbus, Luckenwalde, Silesia). They too offered better quality at lower prices due to lower wages. In Berlin itself there were also 13 different wool manufacturers around 1782. The warehouse, now privately owned, was the third largest wool manufacturer in Berlin with 2962 employees. (Next to it: Manufactory Wegely: 3466 employees (had to close), Manufactory Lange: 3534 employees).
In 1783 the king had a large weaver's house built behind the warehouse, which contained 48 rooms and 84 Spanish chairs , where the local weavers went about their work. This construction deviated from the usual home work. In 1785 the warehouse had 221 cloth and fabric chairs and 339 weavers employed in the warehouse. In the year they produced 9,280 pieces of cloths and witnesses, which corresponded to a goods value of 474,300 Reichstaler. The number of other skilled workers was several thousand. At this time, many weavers outside Berlin, such as B. in Brandenburg, Ruppin and Treuenbrietzen, cloths for the warehouse.
Under King Friedrich Wilhelm II. (1786–1796)
In 1787 the company lost its monopoly on the production of fine cloths for officers . In the same year, the warehouse started to flourish again after weavers' wages and privileges were cut. Paul Benedikt Wolff led the company in the style of Manchester capitalism . He tried to keep the workers completely without rights. In 1794 the weavers went on strike. After hard disputes, the weavers' strike ended on August 22, 1794 with a weavers victory. The heyday of woolen cloth and fabric production ended around 1800 when the competition for cotton became too strong. As a result, the warehouse collapsed.
Work processes in the warehouse
There were huge work rooms in the warehouse for production. The management of the manufactory owned a small office in which money was kept in a large chest. The other administrative employees (such as accountants , calculators) shared a spacious office. In the middle of the 1720s, double-entry bookkeeping was used in the warehouse , which significantly simplified the overview of the manufactory's economic situation.
The purchase of wool was required a complicated process, the experienced buyers. This was because the different parts of the country produced wool of different quality. So the buyers had to know the “best” villages. Immediately after buying the wool in the villages or at the wool market, it was weighed . Then it was sorted. The Order of the wool was a very important process. The differences in quality depended on the origin and the season in which it was sheared . When sorting, wool of the same thickness had to be brought together so that the fabrics were equally fine. After this step, the respective types were filled into sacks and brought on small carts to a wash house with copper kettles and washed there .
After washing, the wool was separated into the coarser native wool and the finer Spanish wool and placed in specially numbered chambers. In the warehouse, Spanish merino wool was used for the finer types of cloth . It was much better than the wool from Kurmark, but also cost ten times as much.
The actual machining process now followed. For this purpose, women in the large hall of the warehouse cleaned the wool of coarseness and other parts and loosened it by pulling and plucking the wool. Then the wool was heated in a kettle filled with water, rotting urine , a little salt and potash and then washed in a wire basket in the Spree .
This was followed by the combing operation . The wool left over from this process was then reintroduced into the manufacturing process by the pound.
This process was followed by scrubbing and spinning . After spinning, the yarn still had to be combined and spooled. Then the yarn was sent to a twist mill for further processing , which were often independent businesses. After the yarn had been washed there, it was now dyed.
This was followed by the process of weaving . To do this, the yarn is spooled in a chamber and pulled onto large “shear frame chains”. The so-called Spanish looms , called Spanish because they only processed Spanish wool, stood in the large work room.
The fine Spanish cloths produced in the warehouse were used for the officers' uniforms, while the homeworkers produced the ordinary blue land cloth (uniform for the soldiers) and the equipment of the common soldier.
The weaving was followed by fulling , the felting of the fabrics. There were two types of drumming: first, with soap and urine, or second, with urine, earth and oil. The fulling process lasted about half an hour, after which the cloth had to be washed in pure water for a long time.
After fulling , before the fabrics had dried, the cloth was roughened with so-called " Weber cards ". These were clamped into a device and scratched over the cloth.
Then the cloths were stretched on a “cloth maker frame” and prepared there with plugs . Existing faults were marked on the edge with string so that the tailor could use them when cutting the cloth. This process was very important because it allowed existing errors to be concealed.
See also
literature
- Erika Herzfeld: Prussian Manufactories. Large-scale production of porcelain, silk, tapestries, clocks, wallpaper, weapons, paper, among others, in the 17th and 18th centuries in and around Berlin. Bayreuth, Verlag der Nation 1994, ISBN 3-373-00119-6 .
- Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Ed.): Berlin and its economy. A path from history into the future, lessons and insights. Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin et al. 1987, ISBN 3-11-011152-7 .
- Ingrid Mittenzwei , Erika Herzfeld: Brandenburg-Prussia 1648 to 1789. The age of absolutism in text and images. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-373-00004-1 .
- Helga Schulz: Berlin 1650-1800. Social history of a residence. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-05-000310-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helga Schultz: Berlin 1650-1800 - Social History of a Residence , page 114
- ↑ Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry : Berlin and its economy , page 29
- ↑ Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry: Berlin and its economy , page 32
- ^ Helga Schultz: Berlin 1650-1800 - Social History of a Residence , page 113
- ↑ a b Erika Herzfeld: Prussian Manufactories , page 73
- ↑ a b Erika Herzfeld: Prussian Manufactories , page 72
- ↑ Erika Herzfeld: Prussian Manufactories , page 76
- ↑ Erika Herzfeld: Prussian Manufactories , page 77