The Kniffler Correspondence: Online edition of the international business correspondence of L. Kniffler & Co., 1859–1876

The German trading company L. Kniffler & Co. was founded in Nagasaki in 1859. It was the largest German trading house in Japan in the 19th century and one of the first Euro-American trading houses to establish itself in Japan after the isolation policy was abandoned. The long tradition of the company is also unusual, as it is still operating in the form of its legal successor C. Illies & Co. based in Hamburg, which is still active in Asian trade today.

In the possession of C. Illies & Co. are 156 letters in German, English, French and Dutch, which various business partners in Asia and Europe sent to L. Kniffler & Co. in the period from 1859 and 1876.

The business correspondence of L. Kniffler & Co. is an almost unique collection of sources, because in contrast to the industrial sector, company sources in the commercial sector have hardly survived. In particular, the companies involved in traded with Asia in the 19th century were often short-lived. Many left no trace except for their names, which occasionally appear in the documents of business partners or in consular reports. In any case, discretion was (and still is) the top priority in day-to-day business, so that trading companies per se attached less importance to archiving business records than industrial companies, which endeavoured to document the development of succesful products for posterity.

The online edition of the Kniffler correspondence can give new impetus to international research in the field of economic history at the time of accelerated globalisation and Japan's incipient integration into world trade in the mid-19th century. At the same time, German-Japanese relations in particular are essentially characterised by economic exchange in the form of trade. However, the joint trade history of the two countries has been little analysed to adte, not least due to the patchy source situation.

The Kniffler correspondence was reviewed for the first time and partially analysed for the company history of C. Illies & Co. published in 2009: Johannes Bähr/Jörg Lesczenski/Katja Schmidtpott: Handel ist Wandel: 150 Jahre C. Illies & Co.; München: Piper (2009). [English translation: Johannes Bähr/Jörg Lesczenski/Katja Schmidtpott: Winds of change: On the 150th anniversary of C. Illies & Co.; München: Piper (2009)].

The letters have been digitised, fully transcribed, annotated and translated into English. They have been made searchable by keywords such as sender, description of goods, company names, places etc. in order to enable targeted academic work with the sources.

The project was financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was supported by C. Illies & Co. (Hamburg), the Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte [Business History Society] (Frankfurt) and the Digital Humanities Center at University Library Bochum.