Town, Amt and Commons: Zug before 1798 — conclusion
Conclusion of Chapter I
On the eve of the revolution of 1798, the canton of Zug was a small, Catholic, agrarian polity of about 12,700 inhabitants.1 It was governed by a federation of the town and three rural communes, which in turn ruled over the subject territories acquired by the town. Its economy rested on agriculture, on the market of the town and on the rents from foreign military service. Its political life was shaped by the need to negotiate between the partners of the cantonal federation and between the larger neighbours of the Confederation.
Four legacies of this period bear on the modern business location. The first is a political culture of negotiation, shaped by the experience of a small polity among larger ones. The second is the institution of communal property in the form of the corporations, which remain significant landowners. The third is an experience of foreign money, in the form of pensions and military pay, that brought wealth and conflict in equal measure while teaching the community both the value of foreign income and the dangers of depending on it. The fourth is a confessional identity that set Zug apart from the Protestant financial centres of Geneva, Basel and Zurich and left it without a banking tradition of its own. When the canton opened itself to international capital in the twentieth century, it did so without the institutions of a financial centre. That absence shaped the kind of business location it became: a place where companies are registered, managed and taxed and where money is invested, with banking in a secondary role.
Notes
- HLS, "Zug (Kanton)", population table: 10,618 in 1743 (count of communicants); 12,749 in 1798. ↩
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