The Verlag system in the Zurich countryside

A form of organisation

The term Verlagssystem denotes a form of decentralised production founded on home work. An entrepreneur, the Verleger, contracts out production to home workers, supplies them with raw materials or semi-finished goods and pays them a wage for the work done within a set time. Although the worker owns or rents the simple tools of the trade and works in his or her own dwelling, the material and the product belong to the merchant.¹ The word derives from vorlegen, to advance or lay out. That advance is the essence of the arrangement: the merchant pre-finances the production process. In an economy with little fixed capital, the working capital tied up in raw material, work in progress and finished goods awaiting sale was the decisive investment, which the merchant provided.

The putting-out system was contrasted in older German economic history with the Kaufsystem, the purchasing system, in which independent producers bought their raw materials themselves and sold their products at a market or to a merchant.² The Zurich case shows how fluid the boundary between the two forms was. According to Pfister, the Zurich cotton industry remained formally a Kaufsystem to a large extent until the second half of the eighteenth century, even though relationships of dependency resembling those of the Verlag existed within it. The merchants of the city controlled the import of raw materials, the finishing processes and the export of the finished goods. Rural cloth producers, known in Zurich as Tüchler and in the early phase often women (Tüchlerinnen), obtained credit from city merchants and advanced yarn to home weavers, sometimes through intermediaries.³

The Zurich variant thus had several layers. At the top stood the merchant of the city, the Kaufherr or Fabrikant, who bought raw cotton or raw silk abroad, controlled the dyeing and finishing works, and sold abroad. Between him and the home workers stood rural entrepreneurs, the Tüchler, who bought yarn or raw material on credit from the city, had it spun and woven by households in their villages, and delivered the cloth to the merchant. Around them operated the Fergger, intermediaries who carried raw material from the city to the villages and collected yarn and cloth, checked quality, paid out wages and returned the goods to the merchant.⁴ At the base were the spinners and weavers themselves, men, women and children, working in farmhouses and cottages. Since the exact division of functions varied between branches, regions and periods, and contemporaries used the terms loosely, historians have preferred to speak of a spectrum of arrangements ranging from pure purchase to full putting-out.

For silk the system was more strictly controlled by the city. Before 1800 silk processing was a monopoly of the city burghers, and rural silk weavers worked exclusively for the silk manufacturers of the city. A local history of the silk industry in Horgen describes the structure as one in which the Tüchler, acting as manufacturers, coordinated the work of home-working families with the help of Fergger.⁵ A case from 1680 illustrates the enforcement of the monopoly: a married couple named Bleuler in Wollishofen, subjects of the city and not members of a guild, were prosecuted for producing silk on their own account.⁶

Geography and numbers

The putting-out system transformed the countryside unevenly. Its heartland was the Zurich Oberland, the hilly region east of the Greifensee and Pfäffikersee towards the Töss valley and the Hörnli, where small farms on poor soils could not feed a growing population and where cotton spinning and weaving became the dominant trade in the eighteenth century.⁷

Local figures give an impression of the density of the system. In Uster, at the western edge of the Oberland, around 1790 some 1,553 people, roughly half of the community’s population, were engaged in home work, 34 per cent of them as weavers and 16 per cent as spinners. The merchants of Zurich supplied the raw materials and bought the finished goods at fixed prices, while the workers acquired their looms and spinning wheels on credit.⁸ The architecture of the region still bears witness. The Flarzhäuser, long rows of low attached cottages typical of the Oberland, and the rows of windows set into south-facing walls to give light to the looms, are the built form of proto-industry.⁹

At the level of the whole state, the figures of 1787 already cited, 34,000 spinners and 6,500 looms for muslin and indiennes, give the order of magnitude for cotton alone.¹⁰ Silk added several thousand more workers, many of them beyond the frontier. By the end of the eighteenth century, Zurich’s merchants directed one of the largest concentrations of rural textile work in continental Europe, in a cotton region that extended beyond the canton into Glarus, the Toggenburg, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Central Switzerland and the Rhine valley.¹¹

Home industry, household and population

The expansion of home work changed rural society profoundly. Rudolf Braun’s classic study of the Zurich Oberland, published in 1960, showed how the income from spinning and weaving allowed young people to marry and set up households without inheriting land, and how new patterns of consumption, dress, courtship and sociability emerged among the cottage workers of the region.¹² Braun’s work became one of the founding texts of the international debate on “proto-industrialisation” that Franklin Mendels, Hans Medick, David Levine and others conducted in the 1970s and 1980s.¹³

Later research refined the picture. Pfister found that the demographic behaviour predicted by the theory, early marriage and rapid population growth among landless home workers, appeared in the Zurich region only in the third growth phase of the late eighteenth century, and only where the activity required very little investment, as in cotton spinning.¹⁴ He also modelled the proto-industrial household as a unit that allocated its labour between agriculture and textile work according to its class position, its life cycle and the gender and age of its members,¹⁵ an approach he developed further in a study of the domestic economy of small textile entrepreneurs in rural Zurich in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose title, “Women’s bread – men’s capital”, captures the division of roles within such households.¹⁶

From the point of view of this book, the most important social consequence of the system was monetisation. Rural households that earned wages in cash became customers for goods, borrowers of money and, in good years, savers. Although home workers earned modestly and bore the full risk of trade cycles, their wages were often higher than those of small farmers and, above all, were paid regularly in cash.¹⁷ The Zurich countryside of the late eighteenth century was thus a society in which money circulated widely and debts and claims were common. Putting aside cash for a bad year had become a familiar idea. It was the social soil in which the savings banks of the early nineteenth century, and later the Zürcher Kantonalbank of 1870 (see Part D), would take root.

The system also concentrated risk on the weakest participants. When a crisis struck, as in the years of dearth in the 1690s and 1770–71, or when fashion or tariffs closed a market, the merchants reduced their orders, and spinners and weavers lost their incomes at the very moment when grain prices rose.¹⁸ From the late 1780s cheap English machine-spun yarn began to undercut hand spinning. Mechanisation put many hand spinners out of work, a process that Napoleon’s Continental System temporarily interrupted between 1806 and 1814 before mechanical spinning mills became dominant.¹⁹ The end of hand spinning belongs to the story of industrialisation told in Chapter C.III and Part D.

Notes

1. HLS, Ulrich Pfister, “Verlagssystem”, version of 2011 (edited 15 January 2014), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013880/2014-01-15/ (consulted via the legacy address http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D13880.php). ↩
2. HLS, Ulrich Pfister, “Kaufsystem”, version of 2006 (edited 7 August 2007), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/043650/2007-08-07/. Pfister notes that individual stages of the Zurich cotton and silk trades were still organised as a Kaufsystem in the second half of the eighteenth century, with only weakly developed official regulation. ↩
3. HLS, Pfister, “Verlagssystem” (cited above). Pfister describes the Zurich system as having taken the form, in its origins in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, of credit relationships between merchants and small urban and rural producers of linen and cotton cloth. ↩
4. Neuthal Textil- & Industriekultur, “Geschichte zu Industrialisierung”, https://neuthal-industriekultur.ch/entdecken/geschichte, describing the Fergger as intermediaries who took raw materials from Zurich to rural producers and brought yarn and fabrics back for sale. On the functions of transport, quality control and wage payment see also the entry “Fergger”, https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/436672, which notes that the term survives in Switzerland in the sense of a forwarding agent. ↩
5. Wikipedia (German), “Seidenindustrie in Horgen”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seidenindustrie_in_Horgen (content read in cached form): before 1800 “die Seidenverarbeitung ein Monopol der Stadtbürger blieb”, rural weavers “arbeiteten ausschliesslich für die Stadtzürcher Seidenherren”, and “die «Tüchler» (Fabrikanten), die im Verlagssystem die Arbeit der Heimarbeiterfamilien mit Hilfe von Mittelsmännern (Fergger) koordinierten”. The article concentrates on the period after 1820, when economic liberalisation allowed rural silk manufacturers such as Stapfer, Hüni & Cie and Abegg & Staub (both 1825) to emerge. ↩
6. “Wollishofer Seidengeschichte”, Wollipedia, https://www.wollipedia.ch/post/wollishofer-seidengeschichte, a local history site, reporting that an “Ehepaar Bleuler” was convicted of having made Burat silk on its own account and of having put it out to home workers as a Verleger. The same source records that in a census of 1781, 12.5 per cent of households in Wollishofen lived at least partly from the textile industry. ↩
7. Cornel Doswald, Claudia Fischer-Karrer and Barbara Thalmann Stammbach, “Die Industrielandschaft Zürcher Oberland von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart – eine Einführung”, 30 April 2016, https://docplayer.org/52558758-Die-industrielandschaft-zuercher-oberland-von-den-anfaengen-bis-in-die-gegenwart-eine-einfuehrung.html. The authors describe the rise of cotton spinning to the dominant trade, the appearance of rural intermediaries in the late seventeenth century and the population growth from the 1740s. ↩
8. Stadt Uster, “Die industrielle Revolution (18. und 19. Jahrhundert)”, local history, https://www.uster.ch/geschichte/14815?_display-mode=a11y. ↩
9. Stettler et al., “Baumwolle – Schicksalsfaden des Zürcher Oberlands” (cited above), on the Flarz houses and their large windows; Stadt Uster, “Die industrielle Revolution” (cited above), on the weaver windows added to south-facing walls. ↩
10. HLS, Tanner, “Baumwolle” (cited above). ↩
11. HLS, Pfister, “Verlagssystem” (cited above), on the spread of the system across central and eastern Switzerland in the eighteenth century. ↩
12. Rudolf Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben. Veränderungen der Lebensformen unter Einwirkung der verlagsindustriellen Heimarbeit in einem ländlichen Industriegebiet (Zürcher Oberland) vor 1800, first published 1960; bibliographic record at Wetzipedia, https://www.wetzipedia.ch/index.php/Medium:Industrialisierung_und_Volksleben. ↩
13. Ulrich Pfister, “The Protoindustrial Household Economy: Toward a Formal Analysis”, Journal of Family History 17 (1992), no. 2, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/036319909201700206, whose abstract names Braun, Mendels, Medick and Levine as the authors of protoindustry theory. ↩
14. Chronos Verlag, description of Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques (cited above). ↩
15. Pfister, “The Protoindustrial Household Economy” (cited above). ↩
16. Ulrich Pfister, “Women’s bread – men’s capital: the domestic economy of small textile entrepreneurs in rural Zurich in the 17th and 18th centuries”, The History of the Family 6 (2001), pp. 147–166; bibliographic record at the University of Münster, Center for Quantitative Economics, https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/cqe/en/publication/106148. Only the bibliographic record was consulted. ↩
17. Doswald, Fischer-Karrer and Thalmann Stammbach, “Die Industrielandschaft Zürcher Oberland” (cited above). The authors add that the hunger crisis of 1817 prompted the development of savings institutions in the region. ↩
18. HLS, Fridolin Kurmann, “Hungersnöte”, version of 16 February 2011, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/016226/2011-02-16/: “Die Krise der 1690er Jahre traf Gebiete mit niedriger Ertragsfähigkeit besonders hart”, and “die Hungersnöte der Jahre 1770-1771 und 1816-1817 [waren] mitverursacht durch Konjunktureinbrüche in der Textilindustrie”, which in regions with a proto-industrial employment structure caused widespread unemployment and aggravated the famines. ↩
19. Stettler et al., “Baumwolle – Schicksalsfaden des Zürcher Oberlands” (cited above); Stadt Uster, “Die industrielle Revolution” (cited above), on the Continental Blockade and the rise of machine spinning after 1814, and on Heinrich Kunz of Oetwil am See as a pioneer of mechanical spinning. ↩

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.