Early modern Central Europe was a major market for colonial goods, particularly plantation crops such as sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco and dyestuffs, imported from France, Britain, Portugal and Spain. Until the disintegration of the anciens régimes, mercantilist restrictions issued by the Western European Atlantic empires impeded direct trade between their colonies and Central European ports. Consequently, colonial goods were first imported into Western European ports such as Bordeaux, Nantes, London, Lisbon, Seville and Cádiz, and reshipped to ports like Amsterdam and Hamburg. These two cities were important hubs for the processing of colonial goods and for transportation to the Central European hinterlands.

This chapter illuminates the long-term development of Hamburg’s sugar market and the market portfolio of a sample of major sugar importers in Hamburg in the course of the eighteenth century. The primary sources for the following quantitative data analysis are the Admiralitäts- und Convoygeld-Einnahmebücher (the Admiralty and Convoy Duty records), hereafter referred to as ACEB. Sugar was one of the – if not the – major colonial commodity traded throughout the eighteenth century. It was cultivated on plantations in several regions within the Americas, and is well suited as a case study to explore Western European colonial trade and Central European markets in a long-term perspective. Of all taxable products imported into Hamburg and listed in the ACEB database, sugar made up a total value of 247 million Mark Banco (36.75 per cent), followed by coffee (131 million Mark Banco, 19.6 per cent) and woollens (30.2 million Mark Banco, 4.5 per cent). Who were the merchants that imported sugar into Hamburg? How many merchants dealt with sugar and what were their market shares? What were their business strategies and how did they adapt to changing market conditions in times of warfare and during the Atlantic Revolutions?

To answer these questions, the first part of the chapter analyzes Hamburg’s sugar market by quantities, types and origins, between 1733 and 1798. The second part deals with the sugar importers in Hamburg. The figures used in this chapter are taken directly from the ACEB database and not from the figures published by Jürgen Schneider, Otto-Ernst Krawehl and Markus A. Denzel.