The industrialisation of Switzerland

Take a quick look around you: machines wove your T-shirt, your train runs (almost) to the minute, and your mid-morning snack comes from the supermarket. Around 200 years ago, none of this could be taken for granted. Most families in Switzerland lived off their own plot of land – and earned a little extra by spinning and weaving cotton in the main room of their home.

Then, within a few decades, almost everything changed: factories with smoking chimneys sprang up amid farmland, the first railway steamed from Zürich to Baden, and children spent twelve hours a day at noisy machines. Small Switzerland – with no coal deposits and no access to the sea – was one of the earliest countries in Europe to industrialise after Great Britain.

In this module, you will find out:

• Why industrialisation began so early in Switzerland
• How home-based work gave way to factory work
• What the railway had to do with Switzerland's economic rise
• What price men, women and children working in factories paid – and how the country began to change with the Factory Act of 1877

Before factories existed, textile production operated through the putting-out system: a merchant brought raw cotton to farming families in the countryside. Women, men and children spun and wove in the main room of their home, alongside their farm work. The merchant collected the yarn and cloth and sold them on. This home-based work was widespread in areas such as the Zürcher Oberland and eastern Switzerland.

The big turning point came around 1800: spinning machines had been invented in England that worked much faster and more cheaply than any spinning wheel. In 1801, the first English-style spinning machines were installed in St. Gallen, and in 1802 the Spinnerei Hard on the Töss near Winterthur began operating – one of the first mechanised spinning mills on the European continent. For many people who spun at home, this meant that their manual work no longer paid. Many eventually looked for work in the very factories that had competed with them.

Why Switzerland in particular? Three advantages were crucial:

1. Water power: Switzerland has no coal, but countless rivers and streams. Water wheels and later turbines drove the machines – which is why many old factories stand right by the water.
2. Capital: Swiss trading and merchant families had built up fortunes through the textile trade and could invest in expensive machines and factory buildings.
3. No guilds in the countryside: In the towns, guilds strictly controlled the crafts. These rules did not apply in the countryside – there, people were allowed to build factories and produce goods freely. There were also many people who already had experience of textile production from working at home.

This made the textile industry by far Switzerland's most important export industry in the 19th century.

On 9 August 1847, the moment arrived: the first railway line running entirely on Swiss soil began operating. It covered around 23 kilometres from Zürich to Baden – a journey of about 45 minutes instead of several hours on foot or by carriage. According to legend, it got its name because wealthy people in Zürich had fresh "Spanisch Brötli" – a popular puff pastry from Baden – delivered by train: the Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn. (A French railway line from Elsass had, in fact, already reached Basel in 1844.)

From the 1850s onwards, a real railway boom followed, fundamentally changing the economy:

• A strong machinery and metal industry developed to supply rails, bridges and locomotives.
• To finance the expensive railway projects, Zürich politician and entrepreneur Alfred Escher founded the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt in 1856 – banks and insurance companies grew alongside the railway.
• Goods, people and news travelled faster than ever before.

The most ambitious project was the Gotthardtunnel: from 1872, thousands of workers – most of them from Italy – dug the tunnel, around 15 kilometres long, through the mountain. Conditions were brutal: heat, dust, flooding and accidents cost around 200 workers their lives. When tunnel workers in Göschenen went on strike for better conditions in 1875, the strike was violently suppressed – four workers were killed in a hail of bullets. The building contractor Louis Favre did not live to see his work completed either: he died during an inspection in the tunnel in 1879. The Gotthardbahn opened in 1882. At the time, the tunnel was the longest in the world and made Switzerland an important transit country between northern and southern Europe.

Progress had a darker side. In factories, working days of twelve hours or more were common – six days a week, amid noise, dust and dangerous machines. Children, too, worked in spinning and weaving mills, often at the expense of their schooling: they were cheap labour. At the same time, more and more families moved from the countryside to growing industrial towns and cities (urbanisation), where they often lived in cramped, unhealthy housing. How should society deal with this new poverty and insecurity? This debate was known as the social question.

Switzerland responded earlier than most countries:

• In 1864, the Landsgemeinde, the citizens' assembly of the canton of Glarus, passed a factory act that was the first in Europe to limit working hours for adult workers too (a twelve-hour day). Glarus had already banned factory work for children under twelve in 1856.
• In 1877, Swiss voters narrowly approved the Federal Factory Act. It limited factory work to eleven hours per working day, banned factory work for children under 14, protected women who had recently given birth and made factory owners liable for accidents. State factory inspectors checked that the rules were followed. This made Switzerland one of the international pioneers of worker protection.

At the same time, workers began to organise themselves: the Schweizerische Gewerkschaftsbund was founded in 1880, and the Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz in 1888. The world of work changed fundamentally: within just a few generations, Switzerland had gone from an agricultural country to an industrial society – more and more people earned their living in factories, workshops and offices rather than on farms.