Introduction
Several studies have illustrated how marriages are the key to understanding the business strategies and social status of elite merchant families in early modern Europe. Leos Müller, who has studied the eighteenth-century business elite in Stockholm, has demonstrated the importance of reproduction and continuation in family and business strategies.
The merchants’ marriage strategies were either reductive, meaning that the families tried to maintain the business within the family, or expansive, where marriage aimed to bring new resources to the business (Keskinen 2012, 69–154, 401–417; Andersson 2009, 98–104; Müller 1998, 24–33; Bourdieu 1976, 24–25).Müller’s concept of social reproduction combines both economic and social aspects of business. He argues that social reproduction includes not only the basic necessities—such as food, shelter, and reproduction—but also the transfer of values, ideas, and culture. Furthermore, it includes practices that maintain or increase social status (Müller 1998, 24–25). Family strategies concerning education and marriage supported this social reproduction. Families could increase or maintain their social status by educating their children in the ‘right’ schools or by finding them the ‘right’ spouses. Education was not only a way to transfer values and culture but also a means of harnessing new ideas. Knowledge and expertise in business could also be supported by marriages; spouses might bring new technologies and enlarge business networks.
This chapter discusses the above-mentioned aspects of social reproduction by focusing on family strategies associated with marriage and education. It concentrates on two extended families—or rather a network of families—in the nineteenth-century Northern Baltic. The Hackman family lived in Vyborg, and the Sutthoff family lived in Narva1 (Ijäs 2014, 2015; Karonen 2013a, 68–107; Karonen 2013b, 246–266; Karonen 2013c, 394–415; Tigerstedt 1940, 1952).
The two towns, situated on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, were originally established by the Swedes, but during the period under examination, they were under Russian rule. Nevertheless, German was the official language in the Russian Baltic provinces, and there was a powerful German elite in both Vyborg and Narva.The Hackmans and the Sutthoffs represent rather typical German bourgeois families in the Northern Baltic. They were involved in the timber trade and some family members served the state as officials. They had family connections with Germany and the German community in St Petersburg, and they spoke German and mainly mingled with other Germans in the area. In their local communities, these families belonged to the elite; they held the highest posts in town councils as chief magistrates (burgomasters), and some of them were ennobled for their services to the emperor (Ijäs 2018a). During the nineteenth century, the Hackman family became involved in state politics in Finland. Both family businesses, Hackman & Co. and Carl Sutthoff & Co., grew substantially into conglomerates by the turn of the twentieth century. Hence, by studying these families, we might learn something essential about the family strategies of Baltic German businesspeople in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century.
In an early modern society such as the one discussed in this chapter, marriage partnership was ‘the most fundamental level of economic activity’, as Amy Louise Erickson has pointed out. Women’s capabilities to pass on financial and social capital to the next generation were essential, especially among the merchant elite (Erickson 2005, 3–20, quote p. 3). The capacities of women to produce heirs, manage large households, and pass on cultural codes to the next generation were crucial for the German community. Typically, young girls with a bourgeois or noble background received their education at home; private tutors were hired to teach them the necessary skills in languages and socialising (Rahikainen 2015, 32; Vainio-Korhonen 2012, 44–63; Albisetti, Goodman, and Rogers 2010; Bull 2002, 193–210, esp.
196–199). At home, women prepared the annual festivities, taught small children to read and write, and kept the family network alive by writing letters and sending information about family affairs. While women’s work is much studied, so-called kin-work has been noted and studied only recently (di Leonardo 1987, 440–453; Ilmakunnas 2013, 156–184).Furthermore, Gudrun Andersson (2005, 57–73) highlights the importance of economic and social capital in family strategies. By studying the Swedish urban elite, she has found that both sons and daughters were treated almost identically. However, education was the only unequally shared family resource; access to education was better for sons compared to daughters. Ida Bull (2002), who has studied merchant houses in eighteenth-century Norway, has demonstrated that the education of sons was part of the family’s ‘dowry’, whereas the daughters’ dowry was typically in the form of movable goods or money. This chapter illustrates that similar patterns can be found among the Northern Baltic German elite.
First, I focus on the background of Germans in the Northern Baltic and illustrate opportunities for marriage and education in the area. Second, based on family accounts and letters from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, I will provide an in-depth analysis of the educational choices of the studied families. The following research questions are of particular interest: What strategies were used when marrying? What kind of roles did women play in marriage strategies? How were children educated? What were the parents’ goals when sending their children to school? How were gender roles understood, and did the education of sons differ from that of daughters?
The two families formed the overlapping network of an extended family originating in the late seventeenth century and stretching from St Petersburg to Germany and even to Britain. I will use two family archives, the Hackman’s archive in Finland and the Sutthoff’s archive in the present-day Estonia. The information about eighteenth-century family networks, marriages, and education is sourced from biographies and diaries written by contemporaries.