Zurich’s economy between 1600 and 1790

City, territory and the textile trades

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Zurich was a city-state of a characteristic Swiss kind. The city itself, governed by its guild constitution, ruled a large rural territory stretching from the Rhine to the Albis and from the Töss valley to the Reuss. That territory was an aggregate of lordships, bailiwicks and jurisdictions acquired over two centuries by purchase, pledge and conquest, administered through Landvogteien and Obervogteien whose bailiffs were drawn from the city’s ruling families. The constitutional order treated as fundamental the distinction between the burghers of the city, who ruled, and the inhabitants of the countryside, who were subjects.¹

The economy of that territory was agrarian at its base. Grain was grown in the lowlands of the north and the Weinland, vines on the lake shores and along the rivers, and cattle and dairy farming dominated the hilly Oberland and the Albis region. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, a growing share of rural households earned part or all of their income from spinning and weaving for merchants in the city. This textile sector was the dynamic element in the Zurich economy. It produced the goods that Zurich exported, paid the wages that allowed the rural population to grow beyond what the land could feed and generated the profits from which the city’s merchant families built their fortunes. The economic historian Ulrich Pfister, whose study Die Zürcher Fabriques (1992) remains the fundamental analysis of this development, describes it as a case of long-term economic growth with largely absent technical change, in which output rose through the continuous mobilisation of additional labour and capital, protected export markets and the import of food at stable prices.²

Pfister distinguishes three phases of growth. In the first, from about 1560 to 1640, Zurich produced relatively simple goods, mainly cotton and linen cloth and silk yarn. In the second, from about 1660 to 1740, the merchants organised themselves corporately and introduced new products. In the third, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the industry turned to higher-value goods and grew intensively.³ The periodisation is useful because it shows that Zurich’s proto-industry advanced in surges separated by crises, each of them carried by a particular combination of products, markets and organisational forms.

Silk after the Seidenhof

Silk was the prestige branch. By the end of the sixteenth century the enterprises of the Werdmüller in the Seidenhof, of the Muralt at the Sihl and of the Orelli had made Zurich a significant centre for the throwing of silk and the production of floret silk (see Chapter B.V). When the emphasis shifted in the seventeenth century from the throwing of yarn to the production of fabrics, the Zurich silk industry entered a period of strong expansion.⁴ Zurich merchants imported raw silk from Italy and Spain and acted as a distribution centre for it. The finished products included velvet, taffeta and silk gauze, the light, transparent fabric known as Flor or crêpe, as well as organzine, the strong twisted silk used for warps. They were exported to Basel, France, Austria, the German lands and England.⁵

The Muralt enterprise shows how such a house developed. Johannes Muralt, a member of the Locarnese family that had acquired Zurich citizenship in 1566, founded the silk firm “Muralt an der Sihl”, which in the course of the seventeenth century became a successful putting-out enterprise and trading house with connections to northern Italy and Flanders. The family’s political integration followed its commercial success slowly: Caspar Muralt was the first member to enter the Great Council, in 1680, and the Small Council, in 1685.⁶ The Pestalozzi, who had come from Chiavenna around 1550 and obtained citizenship in 1567, specialised from 1579 in the trade and processing of silk and maintained commercial links with Bergamo, Milan, Lyon and Basel. Yet they were excluded from political office for two centuries and entered the Great Council only in 1767.⁷ The delay is instructive. In Zurich, commercial wealth opened the doors of the council chamber only once it had been converted into political standing through marriages, guild membership and patience.

Among the old Zurich families, the Escher vom Glas were particularly active in silk. The Neue Deutsche Biographie credits Heinrich Escher (1688–1767) with introducing the manufacture of so-called Bologna crêpe to Zurich.⁸ The HLS mentions a Heinrich Escher vom Glas as the entrepreneur who around 1730 established water-powered silk mills on the Sihl.⁹ Crêpe became one of the specialities for which Zurich was known in the eighteenth century, making the silk merchants who produced it some of the wealthiest men in the city.

The organisation of silk production changed during the seventeenth century in a way that anticipated the development of cotton. Because city policy restricted the combination of manufacturing and trading activities in the hands of the silk entrepreneurs, the merchants responded by moving the spinning of silk to the countryside while keeping their business headquarters, weaving and the finishing trades in the city.¹⁰ Rural households around the lake, in places such as Thalwil and Wädenswil, and in the Albis region, as far as Hausen am Albis, became part of a system of silk home work directed from the city.¹¹ Merchants recruited workers well beyond the borders of the Zurich state, in the Ticino, the Aargau, the pre-Alpine regions of Central Switzerland, Lucerne and Gersau, where silk was processed in small rural family workshops.¹² The silk industry thus pioneered the geographical extension of the Zurich merchants’ reach beyond the political frontier of the canton, a pattern that the capital of the city would follow in the eighteenth century.

Cotton, the mass industry

Cotton was the mass industry. Its roots in Zurich were older than silk: cotton working had become established in the city in the early fifteenth century, although it was never included among the guild trades. Because it lay outside the guild order, women played an important part in it until the second half of the seventeenth century, both as weavers and as small entrepreneurs.¹³ The Locarnese refugees gave the industry decisive impulses after 1555, above all by acquainting the city’s upper class with forms of putting-out and manufactory organisation. Those forms provided the institutional basis for the first growth surge between 1590 and 1620.¹⁴

The second growth phase, between 1660 and 1690, rested on innovations in technique and product. The spinning wheel spread through the countryside and replaced the older hand spindle, with the result that yarn production could be extended to rural households that had not spun before. At the same time the range of products widened to include printed calicoes known as indiennes, handkerchiefs (mouchoirs) and muslin.¹⁵ The third surge began around 1740 and, interrupted by short crises, lasted until 1787. At its peak, around 1787, the Zurich cotton industry counted some 34,000 women spinners, 4,400 looms for muslin and 2,100 looms for indiennes.¹⁶ Measured against the population of the Zurich state in the late eighteenth century, which is usually estimated at somewhat less than 200,000, those figures imply that a very large share of rural households depended at least partly on cotton.¹⁷

Raw cotton came from the Ottoman Empire, through the Mediterranean ports and the Alpine or Rhine routes.¹⁸ Zurich’s cotton merchants thus stood at the end of long supply chains whose financing required advances, credit on goods in transit and payment by bills of exchange, the elements of an international merchant banking business. Their products entered the markets of the German lands, France and Italy, while the indiennes, as will be seen, reached the Atlantic economy as well.

The Huguenots and the woollen trades

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 set in motion one of the great refugee movements of early modern Europe. Around 60,000 Huguenots passed through Switzerland, of whom some 20,000 settled permanently.¹⁹ Zurich received its share of the passage. A study published in 1925 by Paul Keller estimated that around twenty thousand Huguenots passed through the city between 1683 and 1688, while by 1699/1700 only about 304 remained in the city itself. The council granted them initial exemptions from dues and customs, but the guilds refused them the status of masters and admitted them only as journeymen. Their acquisition of land was restricted. In the winter of 1699/1700 a number of named entrepreneurs were given four months to wind up their affairs and leave.²⁰

Keller credited the refugees with introducing or improving several branches: the knitting of stockings in silk and wool, which he considered their most important contribution, the manufacture of silk ribbons, lustred taffeta and damask, gold and silver braid, crêpe and various woollen goods, and the printing of cotton indiennes. The brothers Bourguet from Nîmes set up a manufactory of fine silk and wool stockings in 1686, drawing raw silk from Italy over the Splügen and wool from France through Lyon. Their sales rose sharply during the 1690s before they were expelled. The merchant Salomon Negret, also from Nîmes, maintained trading links with Livorno, Genoa, Bologna, Nuremberg, Antwerp and St. Gallen.²¹ Keller’s assessment has been qualified by later research. The HLS article on cotton states that the passage of the Huguenots between 1685 and 1700, often cited in the literature, had no major effects on the Zurich cotton industry.²² The National Museum’s account likewise notes that the Huguenots’ often-cited influence on Swiss watchmaking is generally exaggerated according to newer research.²³

The balance may be stated as follows. The Huguenots brought to Zurich skills, products and commercial contacts that enriched the woollen, stocking and silk trades at the margin, a few of their enterprises passing to Zurich burghers. Their impact on the structure of the economy was limited, because the city admitted them as a transient population and closed its guilds and its citizenship to them. The contrast with Geneva, where the Huguenot refuge of the late seventeenth century left a lasting mark on the banking community and on the city’s connections with Paris, is marked and has been noted in the companion volume on Geneva. Zurich’s merchant capital was accumulated by its own burgher families. Even the principal foreigners who shaped it, the Locarnesi of 1555, had themselves become burghers by the time the Huguenots arrived.

Wool had a shorter career as an export trade. The Zurich wool manufacture began in the early 1570s and gained momentum from the late 1580s, the period in which the Werdmüller built the Wollenhof cloth works (see Chapter B.V). It reached its peak in the decades around 1700, when it was presumably Zurich’s most important export branch, but declined markedly between 1710 and 1730, probably in part because demand shifted towards cotton fabrics. For the rest of the eighteenth century silk and cotton were the export sectors that generated the fortunes of the merchant class.²⁴

Notes

1. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, Zürich: Chronos, 2000, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf, which describes the administration of the territory through Landvogteien and Obervogteien and the reservation of trade and crafts to the city burghers. ↩
2. Chronos Verlag, publisher’s description of Ulrich Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques. Protoindustrielles Wachstum vom 16. zum 18. Jahrhundert, Zürich: Chronos, 1992 (590 pp.), https://www.chronos-verlag.ch/node/19811. The contemporary term Fabrique referred to the textile trades as a whole, organised by merchant-manufacturers, and did not denote a factory building in the modern sense. ↩
3. Chronos Verlag, description of Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques (cited above). The same periodisation is used in the HLS article on cotton cited below. ↩
4. Elisabeth Abgottspon, “Zürcher Seidenindustrie”, Lebendige Traditionen der Schweiz, Federal Office of Culture, June 2018, https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/dam/tradition/en/dokumente/tradition/zh/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf.download.pdf/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf. ↩
5. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Liliane Mottu-Weber, “Seide”, version of 16 September 2020, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013965/. The article names the Werdmüller, Muralt, Orelli and Pestalozzi among the families that built their fortunes in the silk trade. ↩
6. HLS, Martin Illi, “Muralt”, version of 2 September 2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/049224/. Until 1798 the family provided four further members of the Small Council, and around 1807 it adopted the predicate “von”. ↩
7. HLS, “Pestalozzi (ZH)”, version of 16 September 2020, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/023830/2020-09-16/. According to the article the family initially traded in linen, cotton cloth, velvet and silk before specialising in silk. ↩
8. Werner Ganz, “Escher”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz13720.html, stating that the Glas branch was engaged primarily in textiles and commerce from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. ↩
9. HLS, Mottu-Weber, “Seide” (cited above). The Neue Deutsche Biographie, “Escher” (cited above), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz13720.html, records that Heinrich Escher (1688–1767) of the Glas line introduced the manufacture of Bolognese crêpe in Zurich and “errichtete Seidenspinnereien mit Wassermotor”, which supports the identification. The NDB gives neither the Sihl nor the date. ↩
10. HLS, Anne-Marie Dubler, “Textilindustrie”, version of 7 October 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013957/2014-10-07/. ↩
11. Abgottspon, “Zürcher Seidenindustrie” (cited above). ↩
12. HLS, Mottu-Weber, “Seide” (cited above). ↩
13. HLS, Albert Tanner, “Baumwolle”, version of 20 March 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013961/2015-03-20/. ↩
14. HLS, Tanner, “Baumwolle” (cited above). ↩
15. HLS, Tanner, “Baumwolle” (cited above). See also Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Daniel Stettler et al., “Baumwolle – Schicksalsfaden des Zürcher Oberlands”, October 2024, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/baumwolle-schicksalsfaden-des-zurcher-oberlands, which associates the spinning wheel with the spread of yarn production to rural areas. ↩
16. HLS, Tanner, “Baumwolle” (cited above). ↩
17. Wikipedia (German), “Geschichte des Kantons Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_des_Kantons_Zürich, giving 182,290 inhabitants in the census of the Helvetic Republic and 193,488 by the end of the Helvetic period (1803). The HLS article “Zürich (Kanton)” contains further figures. ↩
18. Marcel Brengard, Frank Schubert and Lukas Zürcher, Die Beteiligung der Stadt Zürich sowie der Zürcherinnen und Zürcher an Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel vom 17. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, report for the Presidential Department of the City of Zurich, University of Zurich, September 2020, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/web/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/koloniales-erbe/sklaverei-bericht-uzh.pdf, which identifies the Ottoman Empire as the main source of raw cotton in the eighteenth century and American slave plantations as the main source in the nineteenth. ↩
19. Benedikt Meyer, “Die Hugenotten und die Schweiz”, blog of the Swiss National Museum, 3 May 2019 (updated February 2026), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2019/05/die-hugenotten-und-die-schweiz/. Meyer notes that on a single day, 30 August 1687, 8,000 refugees arrived in Geneva, a city of some 16,000 inhabitants. ↩
20. Paul Keller, “Einfluss der Hugenotten auf die Industrie der Stadt Zürich”, article beginning at p. 295 of the 1925 volume of the Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik, archive of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, https://www.sses.swiss/journal/archive/pdf/1925/1925-I-26.pdf. ↩
21. Keller, “Einfluss der Hugenotten” (cited above). Keller concluded that the expulsion allowed Zurich burghers to take over the refugees’ enterprises and continue their innovations, and he traced a line from them to later houses such as those of S. Escher, Christian Bodmer and the brothers Schulthess. ↩
22. HLS, Tanner, “Baumwolle” (cited above). ↩
23. Meyer, “Die Hugenotten und die Schweiz” (cited above). ↩
24. HLS, Ulrich Pfister, “Wolle”, version of 2001 (edited 3 February 2015), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013960/: “Die Anfänge der Zürcher Wollmanufaktur reichen in die frühen 1570er Jahre zurück, doch gewann die Branche erst ab den späten 1580er Jahren an Schwung”; “Seinen Höhepunkt erreichte das Gewerbe in den Jahrzehnten um 1700; vermutlich stellte es um diese Zeit die wichtigste zürcherische Exportbranche dar”; “1710-1730 ist ein eindeutiger Niedergang des Gewerbes festzustellen.” The manufacture produced Burat, sold on the markets of Lyon and later at the German fairs, especially Frankfurt am Main. By 1850 about 2,000 workers were employed in wool processing, against some 52,000 in cotton and 45,000 in silk. ↩

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.