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A Fraternal Organization of Eighteenth-Century German Merchant Clerks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Abstract

In eighteenth-century Germany, mercantile development had reached the point that not every merchant apprentice could hope to become an independent businessman himself. A good many had to be satisfied with living out their lives as merchant clerks. This led to social problems of the kind which became more common in the nineteenth century and which ultimately came to be handled by insurance and social security.

Type
Lagniappe
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1964

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References

1 The document is contained in an extremely rare book of which only one complete copy is known to exist. An incomplete copy and a completing microfilm are in the Kress Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. The 3-volume work, in fact the earliest collection of autobiographies to appear in German, is entitled Merkwürdige Lebensbeschreibungen verschiedener Kauftaute und Handlungsdiener nach ihren glücklichen und unglücklichen Begebeheiten (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1771, 1772, 1780). The document is to be found on pp. 349 ff of vol. 1.