Ludwig Knoop
Baron Johann Ludwig von Knoop (15 May 1821, in Bremen – 14 August 1894, in Bremen) was a cotton merchant and entrepreneur from the city-state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, who became one of the richest entrepreneurs in his time. He was created a Baron by Alexander II of Russia in 1877. Early life He was born as son of Gerhard Knoop (1782-1862) and Anna Rebecca Frerichs (1793-1878). He had three sisters and five brothers. Life He studied in Bremen, and learned the cotton business at Manchester with the Bremen-born cotton exporter Johan Frerichs's company De Jersey & Co. He went to Moscow as assistant to the firm's agent Franz Holzhauer in 1840. That year he established the first power-driven cotton mill in Russia. In 1842, the British ban on the export of cotton machinery, imposed in 1775 to protect the country's head start in technology, was lifted, allowing the manufacture of cotton to expand in Russia. Knoop used English credit to build and fit out mills with English equipment. The commissioning in 1847 of Savva Vasilyevich Morozov's Nikolskoye mill at Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Knoop's sixth, was seen as a landmark in the industry's development in Russia. In 1852, he founded L