Company
DissolvedThe Welser company
Augsburg · c. 1490 – 1614
The company went bankrupt in 1614. Its Venezuelan concession had already been revoked in 1556.
The Welsers were the other Augsburg house, rivals and sometimes partners of the Fuggers. They traded spices, lent to the emperor, and in 1528 accepted a contract that private bankers rarely received: the right to conquer and settle Venezuela in the crown's name.
The grant was a loan in disguise. Charles V owed the house money. Venezuela was supposed to repay it in gold. What the Welsers sent instead were armed expeditions that found little gold, enslaved the people who lived there, and made the company's name a colonial scandal even by the standards of the century.
A merchant house at sea
The Augsburg office still looked like a trading firm: factors, correspondence, shares inside the family. The American end looked like a small army. Governors appointed by the company raided inland. Most of the Germans who went did not come back. The commercial staff in Europe kept trying to make the ledger match a venture that was never commercial.
Revocation and bankruptcy
Spain revoked the Venezuelan concession in 1556. The house continued in European trade and finance, diminished, until bankruptcy in 1614. The Welser story is the museum's early example of a firm taking on the functions of a state and discovering that a state is an expensive thing to imitate.
The work it organized
- Factor
- Company governor
- Armed colonist
- Correspondent
On the timeline
Related
- The Fugger companyDissolved