Abstract
Outside of Germany, the Rickmers family from Bremen are best known for the ships they built and the shipping company they ran in the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century. Some of us probably also know their name from the museum ship, the Rickmer Rickmers, that found its final destination in the port of Hamburg. In an extension of shipbuilding and shipping, however, the Rickmers family ran a third business activity: the trade in and processing of oriental rice. Dannhauer’s book about the German rice trade in the later part of the long nineteenth century, is the result of a dissertation in the social sciences at the University of Bremen in 2012. Dannhauer is a student of political sociology, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political history. The book is published in the German maritime studies series of the German Shipping Museum in Bremerhaven, the twenty-second volume in the series.
Why did the city of Bremen, under the leadership of members of the Rickmers family, become the world’s largest centre of the rice trade before the Great War, and why did the processing of rice in Europe concentrate in Germany? These are the key questions Dannhauer answers in this book. It is noteworthy that in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, the Germans played a significant role in the rice business, where – at the height of colonialism – one would expect Americans, British or Asians to dominate. These were the areas and countries that either produced the rice or had the largest fleets to direct it to processing facilities and consumer markets across the globe. This, however, was not the case and Dannhauer explains to us why and how.
For his analysis, Dannhauer takes the global dimension of the rice business as an analytical starting point. He uses the theory and methodology of the history of globalization to frame north German history within this global perspective. From the method used in the history of globalization, he takes five main ‘categories’, which he argues are central to an explanation of the history of the rice business in the nineteenth century. These categories are: political decisions, changes in communities, technological development, communication and shifts in markets. These five categories shape the structure of each chapter, albeit unevenly as technology does not get the attention it should, compared to the political and market categories.
In six chronologically ordered chapters, Dannhauer describes the development of the rice trade and industry, starting with North America in the seventeenth century, and ending with the presence of the German rice industry, or what is left of it, in the present century. The end we know because of the last (and short) chapter. This chapter can be considered as an epilogue to the history related in the preceding chapters. Even before getting to this epilogue, it has already become clear that after the Great War German interests had lost their momentum in the global rice trade; momentum they had initially gained around 1872, when Andreas Rickmers redirected his business finance from shipbuilding and shipping to rice trade and rice processing. Rickmers concentrated his business in the north of Germany, primarily in the city of Bremen. Dannhauer embeds this Rickmers story in the description of the global rice trade. Rickmers made use of the possibilities then being created by changes in international politics, technology and markets. Politics in the second half of the nineteenth tended to become increasingly liberal. This process started with the abolition of the Navigation Acts in the UK in 1849 and lasted – for Bremen at least – until around 1890, when German customs regulations were imposed on the city. But also technology (steam power used in ships and rice mills), changing communities (the many immigrants and movements of forced labourers), changes in markets (the UK’s loss of its American rice supply in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War, and subsequently the opening of Burma and Siam as a rice producing areas,) and rice becoming common food for the masses instead of being a luxury for the wealthy, all contributed to a dynamic industry that had many interrelationships between a small number of parties and stretched over four continents.
In the 1870s, these developments came together in Bremen because of the foundation of a new steam shipping company (D.D.G. Hansa), the presence of entrepreneurs like Andreas Rickmers investing heavily in the rice trade and rice processing, and the adaptation and expansion of the port. However, this boom lasted only until 1890, when German customs regulations changed and the city of Bremen became part of the German customs union. From that moment on, import taxes were levied on rice, which made the business more expensive and so less competitive. In the meantime, Asian (mainly Burmese and Chinese) companies started processing and transporting rice themselves for the growing Asian markets. On top of that, rice mills were founded in other countries in Europe. Rickmers responded with diversification of his activities. Instead of producing starch from rice, he also had his mills produce fodder, he moved part of his business to Hamburg, which as a free town was exempt from national customs taxes, and he invested in mills outside of Germany, such as those in Bangkok and Trieste.
Clearly, the changing global context influenced the investment behaviour of Rickmers, which until the 1890s had mostly been limited to the surroundings of Bremen. It resulted – according to Dannhauer – in a ‘de-bordering’ (Entgrenzung) of the economy. It is this behaviour that can be seen as the start of globalization. In the case of the German rice industry, however, the process stopped at the beginning of the Great War, which had a devastating effect on the rice industry in Germany. It still exists, but never regained the scale and size it had before 1914.
In Deutscher Reishandel, Dannhauser links a local history to a global history within the realms of one commodity: rice. This he does in a very convincing way. Much room is given to the context in which the German rice business began, evolved, grew big, and collapsed. Taking the global dimension as a starting point, it provides the case of the rice business with a strong explanatory framework. On top of that, both levels of description gain impact: we know now that in the late nineteenth century, globalization was shaped by individuals, and that individuals used the changing global dimension to shape their businesses. Yet, this book also shows that crises, such as wars, can disrupt and damage an industry to the extent that it will never rise again.