ABSTRACT
The German territories in the eighteenth century were part of the Atlantic Enlightenment.1 True, no German state had founded a colony in America; there was no German mercantile organisation comparable to the trading companies of the British, French, Dutch, or Danish;2 and the Holy Roman Empire was an almost entirely landlocked entity, whose direct access to trans-oceanic trade was limited to a few ports on the coast of the Baltic and the North Sea. Yet many Germans were deeply involved in the eighteenth-century’s Atlantic networks of social, economic, and cultural exchange. Hamburg was Europe’s primary location for sugar refining and reshipping in the eighteenth century, due to its political neutrality;3 important German trading colonies had been established in foreign ports, such as Bordeaux and Cadiz, where they played a crucial role in connecting the proto-industrial production of the German hinterland to the world of maritime commerce.4
