Abstract

"Financing the Spanish Wool Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Case of Dutari Hermanos"

Léa Meyer, University of Geneva (lea-soline.meyer@unige.ch)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Europe’s leading woollen manufactures depended on high-quality Spanish wool, prized for its fineness on the international market. Yet the mechanisms connecting Castilian wool growers to foreign buyers remain poorly understood, as the existing historical literature has a strong national orientation and overlooks the transnational dimensions of the trade.
In this paper, I analyze accounting books and correspondence to show how transnational connections relied on powerful intermediaries who mobilized the substantial capital that financed the wool trade and structured commodity chains across borders. I focus on the case of Dutari Hermanos between 1764 and 1792, a Spanish merchant-banking house based in Madrid. Linking Spanish wool producers to foreign markets, the Dutari employed local commissioners to handle key steps in the sourcing, processing and transport of wool in Spain before exporting it to their foreign partners in Rouen, Amsterdam and London.
This paper reveals that the Dutari business model relied on wool consignments to foreign merchants without receiving advance payment – a different structure than the consignment system described by Manuel Llorca-Jaña (2016) for the nineteenth-century Spanish wool trade. This exposed them to significant commercial risk and made their business dependent on their ability to mobilize and advance capital and then wait months, sometimes years, for proceeds from the final sale. Thus, the Dutari’s control of capital was essential to establishing and maintaining its privileged position in late eighteenth-century transnational financial networks and to the crucial role it played in bridging raw material producers and international consumers.
By reconstructing this earlier model in the wool trade among states, this paper provides a crucial baseline for understanding the changes that took place by the nineteenth century that led to the dominance of London-based houses like Huth & Co. and Baring Brothers in the wool commodity chains.