Since 2021, the Swiss Economic Archive owns a new fond that documents on several linear meters the residues of the British Chamber of Commerce for Switzerland. Explore the centerpiece of this fond – the business directories which form the basis of the here shown database.
About the Project
"Trade with Switzerland will be Easy and a Pleasure if You will Remember ..." is a warmly reminder for the readers of a small booklet issued by the British Chamber of Commerce (BSCC) for Switzerland. The quote is followed by fourteen business advices that are worthy to keep in mind when dealing with Swiss businessmen at the beginning of the 20th century. What at a first glace already revels one of the BSCC’s core competencies – the promotion of British-Swiss trade relations – is expanded in the rest of the booklet to specific information provision for their members. Since 1920, when the BSCC was established, this so-called “Trade Index” was yearly published and included detailed information about the BSCC and their members. The core of this booklet are the member lists, which include the name of the firm, the address and the goods or services they traded or offered. This enables to investigate the internal structures, the geographic distribution, the activities and especially the far-reaching network capacities of this rather unknown institution over time.
Until now, historiography investigates chamber of commerce as institutionalized interest of trade and industry. They broadly describe chambers of commerce as privately organized, interbranch interest groups which represent a counterweight to private or governmental representatives of antagonistic interest. These contributions focused mainly on a national context, on the instruments that gave liberal access to the market, but less on their practices, the function of networks, individual actors, and their ties to the global market. To investigate this a digital approach is useful in two respects. First for the digitization and therefore, the unrestricted digital long-term accessibility, of the source material and the gathered data. Second digital technologies offer the advantage of more efficient and faster data processing and analysis. But much more relevant is the possibility of investigating new units and dimensions that are practically impossible to process without digital technologies.
Front Page of the Trade Index 1921