A Case Study in Entrepreneurship: The Hanseatic Merchant Johannes Crasemann in México ; Paper read at the 18th. Mesoamerikanisten-Tagung, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg (16-18.01.2015), on 16.01.2015

A strong business relationship has connected the Hanseatic cities to México since that country gained independence from Spain. Although the economic activities of some of the major companies overseas have been documented, few personal career-stories are known. This paper presents the case of Johannes Carl Heinrich Crasemann, descendent of a business family from Hamburg, who worked in México a quarter of a century long. In 1857 he left for México City where he began his training as a simple employee. By 1868 he had acquired sufficient experience and accumulated enough capital to open his own business in Mérida, Yucatán, city whose potential he was able to foresee. Crasemann experienced, and wrote about, the transformation of México City into a metropolis, and also witnessed the short-living Second Méxican Empire and its repercussions, both in the capital and in Yucatán. Additionally, he attended the economic boom in the Peninsula, where he became Germany's first Honorary Consul. Through the establishment of what was to become the first large hardware store in the Mexican Southeast, Johannes Crasemann, on one hand, contributed considerably to the business relationships between Hamburg and Yucatán; on the other, some of his business activities promoted the onset of consumerism, and created certain discordance. The sources informing this case study were consulted on both sides of the Atlantic; they include public and private collections