The putting-out system: how the Zurich silk economy worked

Merchant, outworker and city

The economic form in which the Locarnese and the native silk merchants accumulated their capital was the putting-out system, known in German as Verlagssystem or Verlagswesen. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz defines it as a system of decentralized production based on home work, in which the entrepreneur supplied the workers with the raw materials or semi-finished products that they were to process in return for a wage.¹ The entrepreneur, the Verleger (literally "the one who advances"), owned the material throughout the process. He bought raw silk or silk waste abroad, had it cleaned, carded and spun by rural families, gave the yarn to weavers, collected the cloth, had it finished and dyed in the city and sold it at fairs and through agents in foreign markets.

The system expanded in the Zurich territory at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It led to a growing dependence of the small rural producers on the city merchants, because the producers were far from the markets and had little capital of their own.² The relationship between merchant and outworker was therefore a credit relationship as much as an employment relationship. The merchant advanced material and sometimes cash, the worker owed him the processed goods, and accounts were settled periodically. The merchant's books recorded thousands of small debts and credits, which made the Verleger a banker to the rural population long before any bank existed in the Zurich countryside.

The legal framework: city monopoly and rural production

The Zurich putting-out system rested on a legal privilege. The city reserved the trade in textiles and the right to import raw materials and export finished goods to its own citizens. Rural subjects could spin and weave, but they could not buy raw materials abroad or sell their products directly in foreign markets. Formally this was a system of purchase (Kaufsystem), in which rural producers sold to city merchants. In practice it functioned as a putting-out system because the merchants controlled supply and sale.³ The council repeatedly prohibited the establishment of workshops in the countryside. An ordinance cited by Paul Keller forbade rural subjects to employ silk weavers or to set up equipment for the manufacture of gauze, neckcloths or crêpe.⁴

The monopoly had two effects. It concentrated the profits of the industry in the hands of a small number of city families, among them the descendants of the Locarnese, and it kept the rural population in a position of economic dependence that contributed to the tensions between city and countryside in the eighteenth century. These tensions erupted in the Stäfa affair of 1794–1795, when inhabitants of the lake villages demanded equality with the citizens of the city, freedom of trade and the restoration of their old communal rights. The authorities occupied Stäfa with troops and condemned the leaders of the movement. Only the Helvetic Republic of 1798 abolished the privileges of the city and introduced, for a time, equality of rights between citizens and mere residents.⁵

Notes

1. Ulrich Pfister, "Verlagssystem", in DHS, version of 15 January 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/013880/ (consulted 4 October 2026): "L'entrepreneur fournissait aux ouvriers les matières premières ou les produits semi-finis qu'ils avaient à travailler en échange d'un salaire." ↩
2. Pfister, "Verlagssystem" (above): expansion "à la fin du XVIe s. et au début du XVIIe", with "une dépendance croissante" of the producers on the city merchants. ↩
3. Pfister, "Verlagssystem" (above), on the exclusive import and export rights of the Zurich merchants; Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques (above). ↩
4. Keller, "Der Einfluss der Hugenotten" (above), quoting the prohibition to "Seidenweber zu beschäftigen und andere zu Flohr, Halstüchern und Crepon Fabriquen dienende Rüstungen zu errichten". ↩
5. Wikipedia (German), "Stäfner Handel", https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A4fner_Handel (consulted 5 October 2026; used as a last resort): the memorial completed at Whitsun 1794 demanded "die Gleichstellung aller Bürger, die Gewerbe- und Bildungsfreiheit, die Ablösung der Feudallasten und die Wiederherstellung der alten Gemeinderechte"; military occupation of Stäfa; death sentences of six principal accused commuted to life imprisonment. Holenstein, "Habitants" (above): "La République helvétique institua, de manière éphémère, l'égalité des droits entre habitants et bourgeois". See also Christoph Mörgeli (ed.), Memorial und Stäfner Handel 1794/1795 (Stäfa 1995). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.