The purpose of this paper is to bring to our attention the important role of women in wholesale international commerce in eighteenth century northern Germany, using examples from Stralsund as a case study. (Stralsund, a port-city formerly in the Hanse, was at that time the capital of Swedish Pomerania and had a population, including garrison, of some 14,000 around 1800; it was an economic center of regional importance, specializing in the production of malt and the export of grain to Sweden and Western Europe). After sketching a social and economic profile of Stralsund's female merchants ca. 1750–1830, I will discuss the crucial issue of control, i.e., to what extent and how these women were able to operate independently within a political and legal system that favored men. In my conclusion, I suggest that women left, or were forced out of, the wholesale trade around 1850 as a result of political changes and a shift in the meaning of the concept of Bürger, rather than as a result of industrialization or market expansion. Throughout, I consider whether my observations about female merchants in Stralsund have any wider validity by comparing them with research on the commerce of other ports in Northern Europe and in North America.

One consequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-century Bürgertum, the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of the Bürgertum has flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures.1 Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-century Bürgertum shared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a mélange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of the Mittelstand and claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement.2

At the end of 1918, Harry Graf Kessler, the astute German observer of domestic and international affairs, summarized the essential conflicts that Germany would face in the years following World War I. Considering the demands of the German revolution along with the urgency of economic recovery from the war, Kessler responded to his compatriot, Hermann Graf Keyserling, that “The crucial point is how we are to combine broad social measures without reducing production. If we can solve this problem, we really shall be ahead of the rest of the world. What Kessler perceptively anticipated in the dying days of the last year of the Great War would be Weimar's effort to create a social welfare state predicated on private sector economic recovery and prosperity. Germany after the First World War was the first industrial nation in the twentieth century to broach this agenda, one which would become more familiar and successful following the Second World War.

United Germany has become more ethnically divers and, to a certain extent, more “multicultural” with a growing minority of immigrants and temporary migrants living within its borders. There are labor migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with restricted work permits, immigrants coming out of the former “guest worker” population, and ethnic Germants from Eastern Europe as well as various groups of asylum seekers and other refugees.