Legacy: from silk capital to financial centre

The silk capital of the nineteenth century

The Zurich silk industry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, organised by the merchant-manufacturers of the Saffron guild and based on the rural Verlag, is the subject of Part C. A brief look forward nonetheless shows what grew from the beginnings of the 1550s and 1560s. After 1685 the arrival of Huguenot refugees brought the knitting of silk stockings to Zurich. From 1730 Heinrich Escher vom Glas introduced crêpe in the Bologna style, while a hydraulic mill on the Sihl produced fine organzine. In the nineteenth century the industry expanded to a scale unimaginable to Zanino. Production in the Zurich region rose from 13.79 million metres in 1855 to 27.55 million in 1881 and 47.07 million in 1900. In 1866 Zurich exported fabrics worth 65 million francs to New York, Russia and the Orient. The firm of Schwarzenbach in Thalwil employed more than ten thousand people around the world by 1904.¹

Around 1900 the silk industry was the most important branch of the economy of the canton of Zurich. It provided work for up to fifty thousand people, and Zurich silk firms maintained sales offices in New York and St Petersburg.² In the decades before 1893 Zurich was the second-largest producer of fine silk fabrics in the world, with an annual production of more than fifty million metres. Firms such as Escher Wyss, Rieter and the Maschinenfabrik Rüti grew out of activities connected with the silk industry.³ The raw material now came from much further afield: after an epidemic devastated European silkworm stocks around 1850, Swiss merchants such as Hermann Siber and Caspar Brennwald imported raw silk from Japan, where the working conditions of girls of twelve or thirteen in the filatures were harsh.⁴ The industry declined after the world economic crisis of 1929 and came to a definitive end after the oil crisis of 1973, although the last silk factories in the canton closed in 2012.⁵

The connection between the silk industry and the financial centre is the most important legacy for the purposes of this book. The silk trade generated the capital, the international correspondence networks, the familiarity with bills of exchange and foreign currencies and the habit of long-term credit relationships on which Zurich’s banking developed. Textile houses began to act as banks in the eighteenth century, the Thalhof firm moved from silk into private banking, and nineteenth-century figures such as Hans Conrad von Muralt linked the old merchant world to the new joint-stock banks. The story that begins with a column of refugees on the road to the San Bernardino thus leads, through the silk warehouses of the Seidenhof and the counting houses of the Orelli, to the institutions discussed in the later parts of this volume.

The families in Zurich today

The Locarnese families remain present in Zurich. The von Muralt maintain a family foundation with a family archive that documents the Zurich and Bernese lines from the capitanei of Locarno to the present.⁶ The Muraltengut in the former municipality of Enge, a country house built at the end of the eighteenth century and later associated with the family, was saved from demolition by Martin Bodmer in 1924. Acquired by the city in 1943, it now serves the City of Zurich for the reception of distinguished guests.⁷ It is a fitting irony that the city which refused the Locarnesi citizenship for decades now receives its official guests in a house bearing their name. The Orelli are remembered in the name of Orell Füssli and in a long line of scholars, clergy and magistrates. The Pestalozzi, allied to the Locarnesi by marriage and business, gave their name to one of the most famous figures of Swiss education.

Collective memory has kept pace with the families. The Canton of Zurich, the Zurich silk industry association and the Swiss National Museum launched a joint project in 2013 to research and preserve the history of the silk industry, for which the canton requested 2.83 million francs from its lottery fund.⁸ City tours follow the traces of the Locarnese refugees through the old town, and church publications have presented them as the “migrants of former times” whose integration offers lessons for the present.⁹ In Locarno, the Castello Visconteo commemorates the exiled community from the other side of the Alps.

Notes

1. HLS, Italian edition, Mottu-Weber, “Seta” (cited above). ↩
2. Canton of Zurich, press release “Geschichte der Zürcher Seidenindustrie erforschen”, 20 June 2013, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2013/06/146_seidenindustrie.html. ↩
3. Limmattaler Zeitung, “Einst wichtigster Zürcher Industriezweig” (cited above). ↩
4. SRF News, “Historischer Rückblick: Wie Zürich dank Seide Weltruhm erlangte”, 12 December 2020, https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/historischer-rueckblick-wie-zuerich-dank-seide-weltruhm-erlangte. ↩
5. SRF News, “Historischer Rückblick” (cited above). The dating of the decline to the periods after 1929 and 1973 follows the Canton of Zurich press release of 20 June 2013 (cited above). ↩
6. Familienstiftung von Muralt, website, https://vonmuralt.ch/index.php?cid=17&lid=2. ↩
7. Stadt Zürich, “Muraltengut”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/sport-und-erholung/park-und-gruenanlagen/muraltengut.html; Swiss National Museum, blog, “The Protestants of Locarno” (cited above), which states that the Muraltengut once belonged to the politician and industrialist Hans Conrad von Muralt. ↩
8. Canton of Zurich, press release of 20 June 2013 (cited above). ↩
9. Dürmüller, “Migranten von einst” (cited above); Hutzl-Ronge, “Locarner Glaubensflüchtlinge & die Reformation in Zürich” (cited above). ↩

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 September 2025.