OBWEXER
The brothers Johann Anton and Peter Paul (von) Obwexer of Augsburg, bankers in the imperial city of Augsburg, were among the few south German entrepreneurs of the eighteenth century to engage in large-scale commerce with America.
In 1778 they established a trading house on the Caribbean island of Curasao, where their representative Pierre Brion marketed central European textiles imported via Amsterdam and purchased tropical goods. Despite heavy losses during the American War for Independence, the Obwexers continued their transatlantic trade until the French Revolutionary Wars forced them out of business.The Augsburg banking house was founded by Johann Obwexer (d. 1766), an immigrant from Klausen in south Tyrol who established himself in the imperial city in 1726. Obwexer financed Johann Heinrich Schule’s cotton-printing factory, the largest south German textile firm of its time, and invested in the trade with coins from the Austrian mints. A devout Catholic, he made large bequests to the church in his will. Of his nine children, four sons became clerics, while the others married into Augsburg’s leading Italian and Savoyan merchant families. As a businessman and benefactor of the church, Johann Obwexer was succeeded by his sons Joseph Anton (1730—1795) and Peter Paul (1739—1817). During the 1770s the brothers operated a cotton-printing factory in Bregenz on Lake Constance, and in the 1780s they joined a partnership exporting oxen and tallow to Venice. They also advanced large sums to the electors of Bavaria and various ecclesiastical princes, and acquired rural property in eastern Swabia. In 1778 Emperor Joseph II knighted them.
Their financial success and good business contacts with Italian firms in Amsterdam encouraged the Obwexers to venture into the American trade. In 1778 they outfitted five ships that transported textiles— particularly cotton cloth printed in Augsburg and Silesian linen—to Curasao.
Their agent Pierre Brion set up a trading house in the town of Willemstad and purchased colonial products like sugar, coffee, cocoa, hides, indigo, and sarsaparilla (a pharmaceutical plant). The Dutch island was a center of illicit commerce with the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean basin, and Brion forged an extensive trading network with merchants and planters on the islands of Saint-Domingue and Puerto Rico and in the coastal towns of New Granada (Colombia) and Venezuela. His business associates also included traders and ship captains from the Danish Virgin Islands and the United States.The Obwexers initially suffered heavy losses when the English captured several ships with their cargoes during the American War for Independence. They held on, however, and trade flowed steadily during the peaceful period from 1783 to 1793. After the outbreak of hostilities between revolutionary France and a coalition of European powers, transatlantic commerce was once again interrupted. Brion died on Cu- raςao in 1799, and the English occupation of the island in 1800 effectively finished off the firm’s trade there. After incurring further losses in its banking activities, the Ob- wexer firm went bankrupt in 1807. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, Brion’s son Luis became an ardent supporter of the South American independence movement led by Simon Bolivar and rose to the position of admiral in Bolivar’s fleet. He appears to have invested his father’s (and possibly some of the Obwexers’) fortune in the fight for Colombian independence.
Michaela Schmolz-Haberlein
References and Further Reading
Haberlein, Mark, and Michaela Schmolz- Haberlein. Die Erben der Welser. Der Karibikhandel der Augsburger Firma Obwexer im Zeitalter der Revolutionen. Augsburg: Wissner, 1995.
Schmolz-Haberlein, Michaela. “‘Voll Feuerdrang nach ausgezeichneter Wirksamkeit’—die Gebruder von Obwexer, Johann Heinrich von Schule und die Handelsstadt Augsburg im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Augsburger Handelshauser im Wandel des historischen Urteils. Ed. Johannes Burkhardt. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996, pp. 130-146.
Zorn, Wolfgang. Handels- und
Industriegeschichte Bayerisch-Schwabens 1648—1870. Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des schwabischen Unternehmertums. Augsburg: Verlag der Schwabischen Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1961.