Industries in Other Countries

The development of industry in the other states of the mainland offers comparatively few new features; and there is no reason to essay a monographic treatment of the several countries. Conditions in Bohemia seem to have accorded more or less completely with the developments in Saxony, while not only Baden, as has already been mentioned, but to a very large extent Italy, like Switzerland, came to suffer from the closing of the frontier of South Europe to all quarters. In the north the famous linen manufactures of Silesia especially suffered through the closing of the Italian frontier, so that the well-known misery of the Silesian linen-weavers—so dramatically treated by Gerhart Hauptmann, among others—began during this period. Thus we have here a very close parallel to the Swiss development. The industries of Denmark were of so little importance that they could not suffer much harm; but what the Continental System did to them was of a typical forcing-house character; the number of looms in the Copenhagen cloth manufacture increased from 22 in 1807 to 213 in 1814, only to fall back to 74 in 1825.

It is characteristic that the regions which worked for maritime trade were hard hit, not only by the stagnation of trade and shipping, but also by the fact that the blockade removed the very ground from under the feet of their industries, a thing which quite naturally could most easily happen in such countries because their industries are usually based to a very great degree on trade relations with other countries, either for raw materials or for sales or for both. In accordance with this, the industries of Hamburg were seriously crippled in every respect, because its sugar factories suffered from the scarcity of raw sugar and English coal, and its calico-printing works (to a small degree, it is true) from a shortage of unprinted calicoes; in the same way Holland suffered not only through the entire annihilation of its carrying trade, but also through the scarcity of salt for its fisheries and an absence of markets for its spirit manufacture.