The Maritime Commerce of Austria [I] (1856)

Published unsigned, under the headline “The Maritime Commerce of Austria”, in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4906, January 9, 1857, p. 3; attributed to Karl Marx by MEW (vol. 12); MEGA² I/15 not yet published. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.

The maritime commerce of Austria may be said to date from the incorporation into the Empire of Venice and its dependencies on the Adriatic shores, made over first by the peace of Campo-Formio, and confirmed to Austria by the peace of Luneville. Napoleon, then, is the true founder of this branch of Austrian commerce. It is true that, on becoming aware of the advantages thus bestowed on Austria, he rescinded those cessions, first by the treaty of Presburg, and again by the peace of Vienna, in 1809. But Austria, having been once put on the right track, used her opportunity to recover by the treaty of 1815 her ascendancy over the Adriatic. Trieste is the center of this commerce, and the superiority of that place over all the other Austrian ports, even at an earlier period, may be seen by the following table:

In 1839 the imports of Venice were to the imports of Trieste as 1 to 2.84, and their exports respectively as 1 to 3.8. In the same year the number of ships entering each harbor were in the proportion of 1 to 4. At present the preponderance of Trieste has assumed such dimensions as to eclipse all the rest of the Austrian ports, Venice included. But if Trieste has supplanted Venice in the Adriatic, the fact is to be accounted for neither by the special favor of the Austrian Government, nor by the unceasing exertions of the Austrian Lloyd. An obscure creek on an iron-bound coast, inhabited only by a few fishermen at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Trieste had grown into a commercial port numbering 23,000 souls by the time the French forces evacuated Istria in 1814, with a trade amounting to three times that of Venice in 1815. In 1835, the year before the establishment of the Austrian Lloyd, its population was above 50,000, and at a time when the Lloyd cannot yet be supposed to have attained any considerable influence, Trieste occupied the second rank after England in the Turkish, and the first rank in the Egyptian trade, as will be seen from the following tables of imports and exports from Smyrna from 1835 to 1839:

The following figures, giving the imports and exports of Egypt for 1837, are also instructive on this head:

How, then, came it to pass that Trieste, and not Venice, became the cradle of revived navigation in the Adriatic? Venice was a town of reminiscences; Trieste shared the privilege of the United States of having no past at all. Formed by a motley crew of Italian, German, English, French, Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchant-adventurers, it was not fettered by traditions like the City of the Lagunes. Thus, for instance, while the Venetian grain trade still clung during the eighteenth century to its old connections, Trieste at once attached itself to the rising fortunes of Odessa, and thus succeeded, by the commencement of the nineteenth century, in driving its rival entirely from the Mediterranean corn trade. The fatal blow sustained by the old Italian trade-republics at the end of the fifteenth century, in consequence of the circumnavigation of Africa, was repeated on a small scale by the Continental customs decrees of Napoleon. The last remnants of Venetian commerce were then annihilated. Despairing of all chances of profitable investment in that expiring maritime commerce, Venetian capitalists naturally transferred their capital to the opposite shore of the Adriatic, where the land-trade of Trieste promised to double its activity at that very epoch. Thus Venice itself nursed the greatness of Trieste—a fate common to all maritime despots. Thus Holland laid the foundation of the greatness of England; thus England built up the power of the United States.

Once incorporated with the Austrian Empire, Trieste commanded a natural position very different from what had ever been occupied by Venice. Trieste formed the natural outlet of the vast and inexhaustible dominions lying at its back, while Venice ever had been anything but an isolated, outlying port of the Adriatic, usurping the carrying-trade of the world, and resting that usurpation on the barbarism of a world unconscious of its resources. The prosperity of Trieste, therefore, has no limits but the development of the productive forces and means of communication of the enormous complex of countries now under Austrian rule. Another advantage of Trieste is its contiguity with the eastern shore of the Adriatic, furnishing at once the basis of a coast trade almost unknown to the Venetians, and the nursery of that hardy race of seamen whom Venice never succeeded in fully turning to account. As the decline of Venice kept pace with the rise of the Ottoman power, so the opportunities of Trieste grow with the ascendency of Austria over Turkey. Even in its best times, the trade of Venice was stunted by a division of Eastern commerce altogether dependent on political causes. On the one hand, there was the Danubian road of trade, hardly ever connected with Venetian shipping; on the other hand, while Venice, under the protection of the Catholic kings monopolized the commerce of Morea, Cyprus, Egypt, Asia Minor, etc., the Genoese, under the protection of the Greek Emperors, almost monopolized the trade of Constantinople and the Black Sea. Trieste for the first time has united these two great channels of the Levant together with the Danubian trade. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice found itself, so to say, geographically displaced. The privileges of its neighborhood to Constantinople and Alexandria, then the centers of Asiatic trade, were forfeited by the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope, transferring the center of that trade first to Lisbon, then to Holland, and afterward to England. The privilege lost to Venice is likely to be recovered in our own times by Trieste, by the cutting of the Isthmus of Suez Canal. The Trieste Chamber of Commerce has not only associated itself with the French Company for the Suez Canal, but also sent agents to explore the Red Sea and coasts of the Indian Ocean, in furtherance of the commercial operations contemplated in those parts. The Isthmus once cut, Trieste will necessarily supply all Eastern Europe with Indian goods; it will be as near to the Tropic of Cancer as it is to Gibraltar, and a navigation of 5,600 miles will bring its ships to the Sunda Straits. Having thus placed the outlines and prospects of Trieste commerce, we will now add a tabular statement of the commercial movement of that port during the period of the last ten years:

On comparing the average of the first three years of this period with the average of the last three years (973,220 against 1,631,664), the increase within so short a space is found to be in the proportion of 68 to 100. Marseilles is far from exhibiting the same rapidity of progress. The basis of the prosperity of Trieste, besides, is all the more solid, as it is owing to the increased intercourse both with purely Austrian and foreign ports. The national trade, for instance, from 1846 to 1848 amounted to 416,709 tuns average per annum; from 1853 to 1855 it had increased to 854,753 tuns average per year, or more than double. During the years 1850 and 1855, inclusive, the Austrian tunnage entered in and out at Trieste was 6,206,316; foreign, 2,981,928 tuns. The trade with Greece, Egypt, the Levant and Black Sea, had risen from 257,741 tuns to 496,394 tuns average per year during the same period.

With all this the actual commerce and navigation of Trieste are still far from having attained that point where traffic becomes a matter of regular routine, and the mechanical effect of fully developed resources. Let one only cast a glance at the economical situation of the Austrian States, the imperfect development of internal communications, and the great part of their populations still clad in sheep-skins, and strangers to all civilized wants. In the same measure in which Austria shall put its communications on a level say only with the German States, the commerce of Trieste will make rapid and powerful strides into the heart of the Empire. The completion of the railway from Trieste to Vienna, with a branch from Cilly to Pesth, will create a revolution in Austrian commerce from which no one will derive greater advantages than Trieste. This railway is sure to begin with a traffic greater than that of Marseilles, but the dimensions it may attain one can only realize by bearing in mind that the countries whose only outlet is the Adriatic possess a population of 30,966,000 inhabitants, equal to that of France in 1821, and that the port of Trieste will drain a territory of 60,398,000 hectares, i. e. by seven millions of hectares larger than France. Trieste, therefore, is destined to become, in its immediate future, what Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes and Havre united are to France.