In 1876 259 leading businessmen in Basel founded an association called the “Basel Trade and Industry Association” the primary purpose of which was to represent the diverse economic sectors in Basel. The fifteen-member board of the Trade and Industry Association, called the Basel Chamber of Commerce was drawn from Basel’s business elite. The exceptional number of members at the time of the foundation (259) rising to almost a thousand during the 1920s underlines the attractiveness and importance of such institutions for regional economic actors.

Annually published reports were an important voice of the Basel Chamber of Commerce and at the same time a key source of information for the members of the Trade and Industry Association. These reports were published from 1876 onwards and contain global, national and local information on individual industries, markets, transportation, trade agreements, customs duties and especially member directories. This corpus repository provides digital page imagery of the annual reports via a IIIF service and this has been analysed to extract and check the membership directory sections, which are attached as down-loadable datasets linked to the publications via PIDs.