FAMOUS CROATS 2006 - ANDRIJA LJUDEVIT ADAMIĆ

ANDRIJA LJUDEVIT ADAMIĆ Andrija Ljudevit Adamić, the original form of his name being Andrea Lodovico Adamich, is an almost forgotten merchant and entrepreneur of the early industrial and technical age. He was born in Rijeka in 1766 and died there in 1828. The list of his professional involvements is rather varied: in his youth he worked in a Viennese bank and then tried to found his own bank in Rijeka together with a friend. Afterwards he was employed as a construction technician, which resulted in his later drawing up plans and building his own theatre (1805) that could seat one thousand and six hundred spectators. He also established a modern orchestra, brought in various theatrical troupes, founded a merchants’ club and proposed the building of a big hotel for business people and merchants. As soon as the information about the British innovation of building chain bridges spread over the European continent, Adamić joined the group of the first designers of such a bridge (his bridge in Rijeka was designed at the same time as the planning for the building of the chain bridge in Vienna started (1823). Adamić’s design, unfortunately not carried out, of an iron bridge between Buda and Pest was definitely among the first bridges of this type in Europe and it was probably his initiative that motivated Istvan Szecheny to start the building of the famous Szecheny chain bridge. Adamić also instigated the building of canals, roads and railways, from Panonia all up to Rijeka, and he also tried to obtain state subsidies that would enable him to introduce his own steamship line between Rijeka and Boka Kotorska. He also proposed important town-planning interventions to be made in connection with the building of new streets and he also started the planting of a plane-tree avenue on Fiumara. He was involved in projects that tried to enhance the navigability of the river Kupa, and in order to improve the connection of the Rijeka port with the inland he was preoccupied with the building of the “Luisiana” highway. Adamić was prone to frequent, distant and long-lasting business trips. At the time of the revolutionary tensions of the year 1789, he made a round of the Mediterranean ports and harbours and went to Istanbul to save his ships from being confiscated. On account of the confiscation of his ships in Jamaica, then a British colony, in 1800 he went to London where he soon set upon the developing of the trade with the English. He promoted and advanced his business across the whole of the Mediterranean, and had his agents and partners all over the place – in Genoa, on Malta, in Tunisia. However, all of Adamić’s various activities and abilities could be subsumed under his business goals and be included in the context of the trading and economic development of that time. Those who follow the directions and encompassing span of Adamić’s running of his business, between Istanbul and London, Vienna and Malta, could also discover the image of the wide European space of that time, the rivalry of the European powers, the British and the French, the awakening of Central Europe, as well as the tempestuous circumstances in the Mediterranean, where new great powers continued completely ousting or seriously threaten the old ones – the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. Adamić’s versatility, dynamics and his extensive activity are impressive, as well as their origin – the ambience of a small port centre that tried to keep pace and be included in the mainstream of the leading European directions and could be, therefore, an excellent starting point for the study of the European economic and social conditions and the life of that time. As a matter of fact, the radical social changes and the accelerated technical development instigated at the end of the 18th century the destruction of old restrictions and the advent of early industrialization. Commoners started gaining fundamental civil rights and taking over civic obligations. The main character of our story belongs to the strata of such people, those who have emerged from the stratum of the common people. The first rise from the anonymous masses has been made by his, many people say, illiterate but rich father, who had made it possible for his son to get a good education in Vienna, to be able to achieve a social ascent and European breakthrough. Adamić is definitely a good example of the elevation of the middle-class class and the development of a new sort of merchants and entrepreneurs who started continuously specializing and defining a narrower scope of their activities – they started changing into wholesale merchants, industrialists, stock exchange speculators or bankers, growing from the lower middle-class into the big business class. This new moving force would soon completely oust the old feudal aristocracy and overtake the leading social role. Naturally, even the liberally organized big business could not do without the support of the political circles. On the contrary, Adamić preferred making business with governments and ministries, and he tended to use direct political activity which was the reason for his building up contacts with the Austrian court circles. He was a friend of the Austrian field-marshal Laval Nugent and the Hungarian nobleman Szecheny. On several occasions he led municipal delegations on their visits to the Austrian Emperor, he was also the town’s representative at the Hungarian parliament in Pozsony, present-day Bratislava, where he was also member of the Hungarian parliamentary economic commission. The majority of his political activity was directed at the development of economy and building of traffic lines towards Rijeka. At that time it was precisely his merchant firm which was not only the biggest in Rijeka but also very influential in the Mediterranean, reaching from Central and Eastern Europe to Great Britain, with occasional exports across the Atlantic – all the way to Central America and Brazil. Adamić’s subsidiary, for example, was the biggest merchant firm on Malta at the time when this island was one of the most important mercantile points of the Mediterranean. He had agents on the African coast, too, in several distant ports, and he used to enter new business undertakings with the greatest possible speed that was made possible by the fact that he was always excellently informed, and he also had exceptional abilities of creating business and political acquaintances. Furthermore, he used to regularly keep up correspondence not only with merchants and influential personages from the Hapsburg countries but with the English and French authorities, too, as well as with Italian merchants. Above everything else, Adamić was a merchant involved in the trade of tobacco, oak-timber and salt, and as an entrepreneur he was the owner of the manufactures of the liquor Rosolio, of sails, paper, glass and rope. He was the man representing the transitory, still pre-industrial and “non-specialized” era. His firms were mostly manufactures, factories not yet big enough or founded on new technologies. For a next step in Rijeka it was necessary to wait for the advent of the English and the introduction of the first steam engine, which took place exactly in Adamić’s former paper factory. Adamić’s example is quite topical nowadays. He was Rijeka-born, liked his native country, was of Croatian origin but acquired the features of the Italian culture, a citizen of Hungary and subject to the Austrian Emperor, but first and foremost a European and a pragmatist, a person speaking six languages – Italian, Croatian, German, French, English and Latin – and who, despite the sluggishness of communications, ran his business across the wide European space, and his merchant firm effectuated big, often monopole business with the governments of several countries. For many years he used to export to Britain oak-timber from the Croatian forests in the environment of Karlovac for the building of war ships, and he was also the chief supplier of salt for Napoleon’s Italian part of the later established Illyrian provinces. Andrija Ljudevit Adamić was the main hero of the history of Rijeka in his time, the turning point in time and era on the path to the final democratization and industrialization that would, somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, bring to the majority of continental Europe a new wave of middle-class revolutions and an equally unstoppable spread of railways, as well as the development of steel production. Fragments from the text written by Ervin Dubrović, Ma.Sc.