The Kaufmännisches Direktorium, the post and commercial information

A merchants’ body under public law

On 30 October 1662 the council of Zurich established the Kaufmännisches Direktorium, the Merchants’ Directorate, to organise the rapidly expanding textile trades. Its board consisted of seven directors elected from among the merchants, a number that rose to twelve after 1710. The Directorate dealt with customs and postal matters, the quality control of textiles, the supervision of the intermediaries and workers engaged in the trade, and the arbitration of disputes between merchants. Its declared purpose was to advance commerce in silk, wool and cotton and to protect the manufacturing privileges of the city against competitors.¹ The Directorate existed until 1834 and was then replaced by the cantonal chamber of commerce.²

The legal nature of the Directorate is noteworthy. Elected by the merchants and financed from their dues, it was their body. At the same time it was an organ of the state, created by an act of the council and exercising powers delegated by it, including the administration of the post as a public regal right. The HLS article on the postal service describes the typical arrangement in the Swiss cities as one in which the Merchants’ Directorate administered the post as an official regalian right.³ The Directorate thus stood at the intersection of private interest and public authority, a hybrid that anticipated the self-regulatory organisations of the modern Swiss financial centre. The Swiss tradition of entrusting business associations with the formulation and supervision of professional standards, from the Swiss Bankers Association’s codes of conduct to the self-regulatory organisations under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, has older roots than is often assumed, among them the Zurich Directorate of 1662.

The post and the Lyon connection

The Zurich postal service was a creation of the merchants. In 1610 Kaspar Hess (1578–1631), a cloth exporter, established a letter post between Zurich and Lyon and so laid the foundation of the Zurich postal service.⁴ The HLS article on the post confirms that the Zurich merchants maintained post-like connections from 1610, following the example of the Schaffhausen merchants from 1585 and the weekly courier that the merchants of St. Gallen had run to Nuremberg since the middle of the sixteenth century.⁵ After 1662 the post passed to the Directorate, which usually entrusted its operation to members of the Hess family. The postal business was profitable, with surpluses that flowed into the Directorate’s fund.⁶

The choice of Lyon as the first destination of the Zurich post had good reasons. Lyon was the great fair and exchange centre of France, the principal market for Italian raw silk north of the Alps and a place where Swiss merchants enjoyed extensive customs privileges. Those privileges went back to the Perpetual Peace of 1516 between France and the Confederates, the great agreement that granted Swiss merchants the right to free trade and commerce, protection and reduced customs duties. It was renewed in important respects in 1602, 1663 and 1777. The customs exemptions represented a considerable competitive advantage for Swiss textile exports against competitors from northern Italy and southern Germany.⁷ Under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, however, the privileges came into conflict with the fiscal policies of the centralising French state, and Colbert’s tariff reforms of 1664 and 1667 largely dismantled the Swiss advantages.⁸ The defence of what remained, and above all of the privileges at the Lyon fairs, was one of the two main preoccupations of the Directorate throughout the ancien régime, the other being the professional management of the post.⁹

Information as a commercial asset

The post was more than a means of transport for letters. For a merchant community whose business depended on prices in distant markets, the rhythm of fairs, the solvency of correspondents and the course of exchange rates, the post was the channel of information on which every decision rested. Since whoever controlled the post controlled the speed and reliability of information, the Zurich merchants took care that it remained in their hands. Their correspondence networks linked Zurich with Lyon, the Italian silk towns, the German fairs and the Dutch and Flemish markets, and through them bills of exchange, price lists, samples and news moved in both directions.

The link between the post and finance is structural. A bill of exchange is a written order to pay transmitted from one place to another, so that its circulation presupposes a reliable post. The interest rates at which merchants lent to one another, the exchange rates at which they converted currencies and the premium they demanded for risk depended on the information they received. The merchant house of the eighteenth century was an information business as much as a trading business. The skills it developed, the reading of markets, the assessment of counterparties and the discreet handling of confidential correspondence, were transferred directly to the private banking houses that grew out of it. When the post passed to the state in 1803, the Directorate lost the most important of its functions. After 1834, as the Staatsarchiv notes, it existed mainly to administer its considerable assets, which exceeded 1,140,000 gulden.¹⁰ The size of that sum, accumulated largely from postal revenues and dues, is itself a measure of the commercial wealth that the merchants’ corporation had built.

Notes

1. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, archival description of fonds D, “Archiv des Kaufmännischen Direktoriums, 15. Jh.–19. Jh.”, https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/detail.aspx?ID=259089. The standard monograph is Marcel Grossmann, Das kaufmännische Direktorium in Zürich 1662–1834, dissertation, University of Zurich, 1927. ↩
2. HLS, Martin Illi and Hans Stadler, “Kaufleute”, version of 23 March 2016, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/016380/, which records the foundation in 1662 and the dissolution in 1834 and notes that such merchants’ bodies were concerned above all with the maintenance of roads and bridges and with the postal service. ↩
3. HLS, Karl Kronig, “Post”, version of 20 January 2011, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/014057/2011-01-20/. ↩
4. HLS, “Hess (ZH)” (cited above). ↩
5. HLS, Kronig, “Post” (cited above). The article describes how the Bernese patrician Beat Fischer built up, from 1675, the largest postal organisation in the Confederation, with connections from Bern to Zurich and other cities. ↩
6. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, description of the fonds of the Kaufmännisches Direktorium (cited above). ↩
7. HLS, Ulrich Pfister, “Handelsprivilegien”, version of 2004 (edited 12 August 2010), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013777/. ↩
8. HLS, Pfister, “Handelsprivilegien” (cited above). ↩
9. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, description of the fonds of the Kaufmännisches Direktorium (cited above). On the older history of the privileges see Ella Wild, Die eidgenössischen Handelsprivilegien in Frankreich 1444–1635, 1915, cited in the same description. ↩
10. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, description of the fonds of the Kaufmännisches Direktorium (cited above), which states that the Directorate’s importance declined after the transfer of the post to the state in 1803 and that after its replacement by the chamber of commerce in 1834 it mainly administered its assets of more than 1,140,000 gulden. ↩

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.