Rarely are we offered a microstudy, comprehensive yet detailed, that covers both shores of the Atlantic and, despite a paucity of personal papers, provides fresh insights into the workings of both the sending area of emigrants (here, Switzerland) and the principal receiving zones in Latin America, Brazil, and Mexico. This is what Beatrice Veyrassat, author of a previous study of the Swiss cotton textile industry until 1840 (Negociants et fabricants dans l’industrie cotonnière suisse, 1750–1840, 1982), has done here; mainly, but not exclusively, for the first half of the nineteenth century. More important, her book is about the “fifth” and forgotten Switzerland—its emigrants.

Mining Swiss consular reports, and supplementing them with statistical materials culled from French customs data (Swiss exports to the western Atlantic usually moved through Le Havre), Veyrassat finds that Swiss watch and textile manufacturers cultivated Spanish and Portuguese colonial consumers before 1810 indirectly through their metropoles. Thereafter they established their own agents, usually consignees, in major distribution centers in Brazil (São Luis, Recife, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro) and Mexico (the capital), during the decades when protectionism restricted Swiss exports to European markets. They returned to European consumers after about 1860, when tariffs were lowered, and later they also cultivated outlets in the Middle East and Asia. To the “pull” factor of Latin American consumers was added the “push” factor of rural poverty, which sent many Swiss as “colonists,” for example, to Nova Friburgo in Brazil; most Swiss emigrants, however, had some commercial expertise.

The universe of Swiss emigrants to both Brazil and Mexico was limited to several hundred (far fewer than went to the United States, the largest market for Swiss products). More went to Brazil (as high as 194 at one time, half from the Jura) than to Mexico (in 1852 only 87 were present there). While the opening of Latin America to non-Iberian penetration after 1820 may have been a kind of second commercial revolution in the area (Veyrassat offers an excellent introduction to the Latin American world “discovered” after that date), this is not to argue that the Swiss were particularly welcome. For years, the Mexican government was unreceptive to foreigners competing with established wholesale and retail firms or with an embryonic textile manufacture; for its part, the Brazilian government preferred agricultural labor to merchants. Swiss merchants there, moreover, were bedeviled by a fluctuating, usually devaluating paper currency. In Mexico, the hostile commercial environment and the absence of major exports other than silver diverted the Swiss into mining, banking, and speculation in government securities as agiotistas, which led to the role of Swiss banker Jean Baptiste Jecker (local agent for French creditors of the Mexican government) and the excuse for French armed intervention in the 1860s.

Swiss textile manufacturers, Veyrassat notes, began their market penetration by shipping specialized textiles, such as cotton prints, silks, and muslins, in which they had an initial comparative advantage. Between 1830 and 1845, about 50 percent of Swiss silk exports went to the United States, Mexico, and Central and South America. Over the century, however, manufacturers chose to compete—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—with English mass-produced goods for the lower end of the market. Other Swiss entrepreneurs proved more flexible, for by the end of the century, many were shifting their exports to Brazil, for example, to condensed milk, shoes, chemical products, and machinery.

Veyrassat’s breakdown of Swiss exports to the Middle East and Asia at the end of the nineteenth century is as revealing as her observations about the Brazilian and Mexican governments’ negative attitude toward Swiss commercial representatives. Long-term admirers of Asia’s sophisticated handmade products (bedspreads, bath linens, prayer rugs, handkerchiefs, women’s trousers, turban cloths), which European manufacturers carefully copied, Swiss manufacturers had to concentrate on finer cottons and silks for discriminating Asian consumers while lowering the quality of their textile exports to Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. This underscores the difference—which Veyrassat develops all too briefly in a section on “Marchés de masse américains et raffinement asiatique”—between Asian peasants and Latin American campesinos after centuries of Iberian colonialism.

What in one context appears to be a massive treatment of an insignificant facet of nineteenth-century Latin American economic history, Veyrassat has turned into a model study of nineteenth-century transatlantic trade between a small, industrializing area of Western Europe and Latin America, developing its staple export economy.