Karl Marx

The Maritime Commerce of Austria

Written at the end of November 1856.

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 4906, 9 January 1857]

It may be said that the maritime commerce of Austria dates from the period when Venice and its possessions on the Adriatic coast were incorporated with the empire; this first took place by the peace of Campo Formio, and the peace of Lunéville confirmed Austria in the possession. Napoleon is, accordingly, the real founder of this branch of Austrian trade. It is true that, when he became aware of the advantages accruing to Austria from it, he rescinded these concessions in the treaty of Pressburg, and then by the peace of Vienna, 1809. But Austria, once directed into the right track, availed herself, in 1815, of the favourable opportunity of recovering her ascendancy on the Adriatic by treaty. The centre of this commerce is Trieste; its superiority over all other Austrian ports, and that for a considerable time already, is shown by the following table:

Ports

Fiume

Trieste

Venice

Other ports

Total

(in Florin)

1838

Imports

200,000

32,200,000

9,000,000

8,000,000

49,400,000

Exports

1,700,000

14,400,000

5,300,000

2,000,000

23,400,000

1841

Imports

200,000

22,300,000

8,500,000

5,300,000

36,300,000

Exports

1,600,000

11,200,000

3,100,000

1,900,000

17,800,000

1842

Imports

200,000

24,900,000

11,500,000

5,100,000

41,700,000

Exports

1,300,000

11,900,000

3,400,000

2,600,000

19,200,000

In 1839, the imports of Venice stood in proportion to those of Trieste as 1 to 2.84, their export ratio being 1 to 3.8. In the same year, the number of vessels entering each of the two ports was in the ratio of 1 to 4.

At present, the preponderance of Trieste is so great as to throw far into the shade all the other ports of Austria, Venice included. But if Trieste has supplanted Venice in the Adriatic, this fact is explained neither by the special favour of the Austrian Government, nor by the incessant exertions of the Austrian Lloyd. At the commencement of the eighteenth century an unknown creek on a rocky shore, inhabited by a few fishermen, Trieste, by 1814, when the French forces evacuated Istria, had developed into a commercial port of 23,000 inhabitants, and its trade in 1815 was three times that of Venice. In 1832, a year before the foundation of the Austrian Lloyd, the number of inhabitants exceeded 50,000, and at a time when the influence of the Lloyd could presumably hardly have been felt, Trieste already took the second rank in the Turkish trade, next after England, and the first in the Egyptian trade. This is proved by the following figures for the imports and exports of Smyrna during the period from 1835 to 1839:

[Imports]

[Exports]

Piastres

Piastres

England

126,313,146

44,618,032

Trieste

93,500,456

52,477,756

United States

57,329,165

46,608,320

The following figures, giving the imports and exports of Egypt for 1837, are equally instructive in this respect:

[Imports]

[Exports]

frs.

frs.

Trieste

13,858,000

14,532,000

Turkey

12,661,000

12,150,000

France

10,702,000

11,703,000

England and Malta

15,158,000

5,404,000

How, then, came it to pass that Trieste, and not Venice, became the cradle of the revived shipping of the Adriatic? Venice was a city of memories; Trieste, like the United States, had the advantage of having no past at all. Built up by a motley society of Italian, German, English, French, Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants and speculators, it was not, like the City of the Lagoons, burdened with traditions. While, for instance, the Venetian grain trade still clung to its old connections during the eighteenth century, Trieste linked its fortunes with the rising star of Odessa, and thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, succeeded in totally driving its rival from the grain trade of the Mediterranean. The deadly blow which the old commercial republics of Italy suffered at the end of the fifteenth century, in consequence of the circumnavigation of Africa, was repeated on a smaller scale in the shape of Napoleon's Continental System. The last remnants of Venetian commerce were destroyed. Despairing of the possibility of profitably investing capital in this declining maritime trade, the Venetian capitalists naturally transferred their capital to the opposite coast of the Adriatic, where, at the same time, the land trade of Trieste promised a twofold expansion. Thus Venice herself nursed the greatness of Trieste—a fate common to all sea powers. Thus Holland laid the foundation for the greatness of England; and thus England strengthened the power of the United States.

Once united with the Austrian Empire, Trieste occupied a natural position altogether different from that ever held by Venice. Trieste formed the natural outlet of the vast and inexhaustible territories of its hinterland, while Venice had never been anything but an isolated, outlying port of the Adriatic, laying hold of the carrying trade of the world, and basing this pre-eminence on the backwardness of a world unconscious of its own resources. The prosperity of Trieste, therefore, knows no limits save those dependent on the development of the productive powers and means of communication of that great complex of countries now under Austrian rule. Another advantage of Trieste is its proximity to the eastern coast of the Adriatic, which furnishes the foundation of a coasting trade almost entirely unknown to the Venetians; here, too, is the native school of that bold race of seamen which Venice was never able fully to avail herself of. As the decline of Venice kept pace with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, so the chances of Trieste rose with the growing superiority of Austria over Turkey. Even in its best times, Venice’s trade was hampered by the division of Oriental commerce, which was altogether founded on political causes. On the one hand, there was the overland trade of the Danube, which had hardly anything in common with the Venetian shipping; on the other hand, the Genoese, under the protection of the Greek rulers, monopolised almost the entire trade with Constantinople and the Black Sea, while Venice, under the protection of the Catholic Kings, monopolised that of Morea, Cyprus, Egypt, Asia Minor, etc. Trieste first united these two great channels of the Levantine trade with the Danubian commerce. At the end of the fifteenth century, Venice found herself, so to speak, geographically excluded. The advantages of her neighbourhood to Constantinople and Alexandria, the then centres of Asiatic trade, were lost by the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope, which transferred the centre of gravity of that trade first to Lisbon, then to Holland, and finally to England. The privileged position lost by Venice will, in our own day, probably be reconquered by Trieste, the moment the Suez Canal cuts through the Isthmus. The Chamber of Commerce of Trieste has not only associated itself with the French company for the Suez Canal, but has also sent out agents to explore the Red Sea and the coasts of the Indian Ocean, with a view to promoting the trading operations intended in those regions. Once the Isthmus is cut through, Trieste will necessarily supply all Eastern Europe with Indian goods; it will be as near to the Tropic of Cancer as Gibraltar, and a voyage of 5,600 miles will bring its ships to the Strait of Sunda.

Having now discussed the extent and prospects of the trade of Trieste, we will give a table exhibiting the movement of this port during the last ten years:

Ships

Tonnage

Ships

Tonnage

1846

16,782

985,514

1851

24,101

1,408,802

1847

17,321

1,007,330

1852

27,931

1,556,652

1848

17,812

926,815

1853

29,317

1,675,886

1849

20,553

1,269,258

1854

26,556

1,730,910

1850

21,124

1,323,796

1855

21,081

1,489,197

Comparing the average of the first three years of this period with that of the last three (973,220 with 1,632,000), it will be found that the increase in so short a space is 68 per cent. Marseilles exhibits by no means the same rapidity of growth. The advance of Trieste, moreover, rests on a so much sounder basis as it results from the increased trade with both Austrian and foreign ports. The national trade, for instance, from 1846 to 1848 averaged 416,709 tons a year; from 1853 to 1855 it had risen to 854,753 tons yearly average, that is more than double. During the years 1850 to 1855 inclusively, the tonnage of Austrian vessels clearing and entering Trieste amounted to 6,206,316 tons, that of foreign vessels to 2,981,928 tons. The trade with Greece, Egypt, the Levant and the Black Sea had during the same period risen from an average of 257,741 to 496,394 tons a year.

For all this, the trade and shipping of Trieste are as yet far from the point where trade and traffic become a matter of habitual, long-practised routine, the automatic consequence of fully developed resources. Let one cast a glance at the economic state of the Austrian Empire, at the imperfect development of its internal means of communication, at the large proportion of its population which still dresses in sheepskins and knows no higher wants than those of savages. In proportion as Austria brings her ways of communication at least up to the level of those of the German states, the trade of Trieste will also push rapidly and vigorously into the interior of the empire. The completion of the railway from Trieste to Vienna, with a branch line from Cilli to Pesth, will create a revolution in Austrian commerce, from which no town will derive greater advantages than Trieste. This railway will certainly commence with a movement of goods larger than that of Marseilles; but what extent it may attain can only be imagined when it is considered that the countries for whose maritime trade the Adriatic is the sole outlet possess a population of 30,966,000 inhabitants, as many as France in 1821, and that the port of Trieste will drain a territory of 60,398,000 hectares, exceeding France by seven million hectares. Trieste is, therefore, destined to attain, in the near future, the importance which Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes and Le Havre combined now possess for France.