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State Support for the German Cooperative Movement, 1860–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2012

Timothy W. Guinnane
Timothy W. Guinnane
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Germany's cooperative movement grew and thrived from its inception in the late 1840s to World War I and beyond. Cooperatives were divided along several lines, and perhaps the most serious point of contention concerned the role of the state in the movement. Cooperative leaders in the two decades before World War I especially debated whether they should accept direct grants and subsidized credit from the Reich and the Länder. The several parts of the cooperative movement construed the question differently; much internecine conflict turned on the answers. The cooperative movement's historiography has largely framed the question as did Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and other cooperative leaders opposed to state assistance. To him, the issue was whether cooperatives would be based on “self-help” or “state help.”

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Central European History , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 208 - 232
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2012

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References

1 Faust, Helmut, Geschichte der Genossenschaftsbewegung, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Knapp, 1977)Google Scholar, is the standard history of the German cooperative movement. He pays relatively little attention to the specific organizational questions emphasized here. The account of the cooperative movement's history in Fairbairn, Brett, “History from the Ecological Perspective: Gaia Theory and the Problem of Cooperatives in Turn-of-the-Century Germany,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1203–1239CrossRefGoogle Scholar, although brief, is the best recent overview available. Kluge, Arnd Holger, Geschichte der deutschen Bankgenossenschaften. Zur Entwicklung mitgliederorientierter Unternehmen (Frankfurt am Main: Knapp, 1991)Google Scholar, focuses on the credit cooperatives. This unusual dissertation is the best recent, detailed discussion of those cooperatives. This article is part of a larger project that focuses on the logic and operations of the credit cooperatives as banking institutions. Guinnane, Timothy W., “Cooperatives as Information Machines: German Rural Credit Cooperatives, 1883–1914,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 2 (2001): 366–389CrossRefGoogle Scholar, uses manuscript sources to explore the operations of local credit cooperatives. Guinnane, Timothy W., “Regional Organizations in the German Cooperative Banking System in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Ricerche Economiche 51, no. 3 (1997): 251–274Google Scholar, and Guinnane, Timothy W., “A ‘Friend and Advisor’: External Auditing and Confidence in Germany's Credit Cooperatives, 1889-1914,” Business History Review 77 (2003): 235–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provide more detail on the regional auditing associations and central cooperative banks, while Timothy W. Guinnane, “New Law for New Enterprises: The Development of Cooperative Law in Germany, 1867–1889,” a working paper from 2010, explores the development of cooperative law before World War I, situating it in the context of larger developments in enterprise law. Guinnane, Timothy W., “Delegated Monitors, Large and Small: Germany's Banking System, 1800–1914,” Journal of Economic Literature XL (2003): 73–124Google Scholar, traces the development of the banking system as a whole, attempting to correct the historiography's overemphasis on the Great Banks.

2 Busche, Manfred, Öffentliche Förderung deutscher Genossenschaften vor 1914 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963)Google Scholar emphasizes “state policy for cooperatives” as opposed to “state support for cooperatives.” His notion has greatly influenced the argument of this paper. The most important recent references are Peal, David, “Self-Help and the State: Rural Cooperatives in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 21(1988): 244–266CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farr, Ian, “Farmers' Cooperatives in Bavaria, 1880–1914: ‘State Help’ and ‘Self Help’ in Imperial Germany,” Rural History 18, no. 2 (2007): 163–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brett Fairbairn, “Success of the Prussian Model? The State and the Expansion of the German Co-operative Movement, 1889–1914,” unpublished paper from 2000. Fairbairn kindly provided a copy of his unpublished paper.

3 Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, 2 vols., vol. 2: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 1992), 577CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Fairbairn, “History from the Ecological Perspective,” 1215. Given the incomplete cooperative reporting, this is probably an underestimate.

5 It is symptomatic that in Sheehan's influential work on German liberalism, the cooperatives appear only in a two-page discussion of Schulze-Delitzsch's views on workers and urban cooperatives; Sheehan, James J., German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 92–94Google Scholar. It is symptomatic in a different way that Shulamit Volkov, in The Rise of Popular Antisemitism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1873–1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 156Google Scholar, dismisses the cooperatives with the inaccurate claim that “In the late 1870s, the movement rapidly lost its appeal and practical significance.”

6 Most observers agreed that something like one-third of the members of Schulze-Delitzsch credit cooperatives were agriculturalists. See, for example, von Rheinhaben's remarks in the Sachverständigen meeting during the drafting of the law establishing the Preußenkasse. The Protokoll for this meeting held on May 18, 1895, is reproduced in Zur Vorgeschichte der Preussischen Central-Genossenschafts-Kasse, with an introduction by Walter Hamm (Frankfurt: Knapp, 1995). Von Rheinhaben also repeats a common misperception, that all members of Raiffeisen cooperatives were agriculturalists.

7 The DGSP collapsed in 1904 and was absorbed by the Dresdner Bank. This entity was organized as a partnership with tradable shares (Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien). Alwin Sörgel and Ludolf Parisius, close associates of Schulze-Delitzsch, were general partners. The modern DG-Bank (now the DZ-Bank) is the descendent of the Prussian State Cooperative Central Bank, not the DGSP.

8 Such loans forced a single credit cooperative to bear all the risk of the other cooperative's failure, and tied up much of the credit cooperative's assets in a single illiquid loan. If the borrower ran into financial difficulties, the lender might not be able to meets its obligations. And if the lender needed its cash unexpectedly, it faced the unpalatable prospect of causing difficulty for another cooperative by calling in a loan early.

9 See Guinnane, “Regional Organizations,” and Jost, Hugo, “Probleme der genossenschaftlichen Kreditorganisation. Genossenschaftliche Zentralkassen,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 37, no. 4 (1913): 329–419Google Scholar. Peal's discussion of the problems facing the Raiffeisen and Haas groups at the end of the nineteenth century is difficult to square with some aspects of their actual history. Peal stresses that the two groups were fundamentally different, with the Haas group “specialized” in commodity cooperatives, and therefore dependent on noncooperative sources of finance; Peal, “Self-Help and the State,” 254 and 251. Neither claim is accurate. In its report for 1914, the Reichsverband (Haas's group at the time) claimed 12,305 member cooperatives, of which 9,745 were credit cooperatives. More importantly, the Haas credit cooperatives actually generated more excess cash than their Raiffeisen counterparts did. This latter point is made clear in Jost, which, puzzlingly, is Peal's main source for the financial condition of the cooperatives. The table on page 401 of Jost's article shows that collectively, the Haas credit cooperatives in 1911 had a net deposit of 77 million marks on deposit at the centrals. The figure for the Raiffeisen cooperatives was 20 million marks. On page 373, Jost claimed that most noncredit cooperatives in the Haas group did not belong to a central at all, they simply borrowed from their local credit cooperative. This is a strong claim for which he presented no evidence. But to the extent it is accurate, his claim strengthens the observation that the Haas credit cooperatives generally had more excess deposits.

10 Schulze-Delitzsch was a founder of the Fortschrittspartei and sometime member of the Prussian Landtag and the Reichstag. Hans Crüger, who later led the Schulze-Delitzsch group, was a member of the Reichstag, the Prussian Landtag, and the Charlottenburg city council. Haas was a longtime member of the Hessian Diet (at one point, its leader) and a Reichstag deputy. Raiffeisen himself never held elective office, but many leaders in his organization did.

11 See Ledford, Kenneth F., From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878–1933 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar and note 25; and Sheehan, German Liberalism, 92.

12 Wolfgang Klein recounts a telling incident; Wolfgang Klein, Schulze-Delitzschs Kampf um die Anerkennung der Erwerbs- und Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften als Rechtssubjekt vor dem Hintergrund der politischen Verhältnisse in Preußen mit einer vergleichenden Darstellung der englischen und französischen Entwicklung (Ph.D. diss., University of Heidelberg, 1972), 75. In a letter to finance minister Bodelschwingh dated February 27, 1866, Bismarck supported granting a loan of 5,000 Thaler to a cooperative in Berlin that had run into financial trouble. Bismarck acknowledged the cooperative's weakness and noted that it could only offer poor security for the loan, but he stressed the political benefits of such a loan: this was a Schulze-Delitzsch cooperative, and a loan would embarrass Schulze-Delitzsch.

13 We discuss the legal status of the cooperatives below.

14 See von Broich, Friedrich Arnold Carl Maria, Sozialreform und Genossenschaftswesen. Zum Zweck der Begründung und Ausgestaltung eines sozialreformischen Genossenschaftswesens (Berlin: Pionier, 1890)Google Scholar. Hans Crüger provides a partisan overview of the various cooperative groups that had stressed a role for the state; Crüger, Hans, Grundriß des deutschen Genossenschaftswesens (Leipzig: Glockner, 1908), 82–100Google Scholar. Von Broich's was not the first.

15 Crüger's, Hans article “Der Staat und das Genossenschaftswesen,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 36 (1912)Google Scholar, begins “Richtig ist hiervon, daß die staatliche finanzielle Förderung, deren das Genossenschaftswesen sich seit der Mitte der neunziger Jahre zu erfreuen hat, auf den Wunsch der Regierung zurückzuführen ist, Einfluß auf die Genossenschaften zu gewinnen.” Much of the text of this article was aimed at the favored cooperatives advocated by von Broich. But Crüger is quick to equate this new enemy with the Raiffeisen or Haas group, even when the comparison is inaccurate.

16 Kölnische Zeitung, July 3, 1901. From the Pressearchiv of the Bund der Landwirte, Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R/8034/II 769, vol. 5.

17 See Peal, “Self-Help and the State,” 249–250.

18 If the state could count on its money being repaid, then the only real cost in providing credit (which is not equal to the subsidy noted in the text) was the difference between what it charged the cooperatives and what it had to pay to borrow itself.

19 Banks per se apparently saw cooperatives as too small and unrelated to their own business to pose a threat. I know of no organized banking objections to the state assistance to cooperatives. Cooperatives and Sparkassen, on the other hand, sometimes competed for the same business (especially savers). The Sparkassen's role in the Preußenkasse bothered some in the cooperative movement for this reason.

20 Each Land had its own tax law in this period; in addition, there were several changes in the relevant Einkommensteuer and Gewerbesteuer systems in this period. See Spiekermann, Uwe, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft. Enstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland 1850–1914 (Munich: Beck, 1999)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the consumer cooperatives and Prussian tax policy.

21 Much of the later growth in its capital reflects the accumulation of new responsibilities, including the obligation to work with savings banks (Sparkassen).

22 Peal, “Self-Help and the State,” 252–253, refers to this sum as “operating capital.” This translation is correct, but the term may convey the impression that the bank was lending to cooperatives only the money invested by the state. The government investment was analogous to equity, and enabled the Preußenkasse to borrow more from other entities. That borrowing constituted the bulk of its lending to centrals. In Table 1 we see that in 1896, for example, two-thirds of the bank's liabilities were loans from centrals and other financial institutions. Peal does not mention that the Preußenkasse had to pay the government for its capital. Eduard Wagon reported that on average German banks in 1900 earned a net profit equal to 7.4 percent of capital plus reserves (Table XXXII); Eduard Wagon, Die finanzielle Entwicklung deutscher Aktiengesellschaften von 1870–1900 und die Gesellschaften mit beschränkter Haftung im Jahre 1900, Sammlung nationalökonomischer und statistischer Abhandlungen des staatswissenschaftlichen Seminars zu Halle a.d.S., vol. 39 (Jena: Fischer, 1900). The Preußenkasse was at first required by law (§6) to put half its profits into a reserve fund. The law also anticipated that eventually the Preußenkasse would turn over excess profits to the Prussian State. See Preußische Central-Genossenschaftskasse Law No. 30 (No. 9770), Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preußischen Staaten (Berlin: Königliches Staatsministerium, 1895), 310.

23 “Die Agrarkonferenz vom 28. Mai bis 21. Juni 1894 . . . ” in Landwirtschaftliche Jahrbücher XXIII Ergänzungsband II (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1894)Google Scholar. Fairbairn provides more detail on the political motivations underlying the Preußenkasse's creation; Fairbairn, “Success.”

24 Haus der Abgeordneten 77. Sitzung, June 18, 1895, 2416, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten (hereafter StBerHa) (Berlin: Königliches Staatsministerium, 1895).

25 Manfred Busche discusses the Reichsbank and these earlier proposals in Busche, Manfred, “Zur Gründungsgeschichte der preußischen Zentralgenossenschaftskasse,” Tradition. Zeitschrift für Firmengeschichte und Unternehmerbiographie 1 (1968): 81–89Google Scholar, here 82–86. Formally the Preußenkasse was more similar to the Seehandlung, another Prussian state financial institution, but the Reichsbank was larger and more prominent, and its operations more obviously benefited business. Miquel makes explicit the use of the Seehandlung as an institutional model in the debate over the first reading of the law in the Haus der Abgeordneten 77. Sitzung, June 18, 1895, 2412–2413, StBerHa.

26 Miquel's remarks were to the House of Deputies during the 1897 debate over the Preußenkasse budget. Quoted in Busche, “Zur Gründungsgeschichte,” 89.

27 This is a common theme in Crüger's attacks on the Preußenkasse. See, for example, Crüger, “Der Staat und das Genossenschaftswesen,” 25. For centrals prior to the Preußenkasse, see the 1914 annual report of the Reichsverband der deutschen landwirtschtaftlichen Genossenschaften: Jahrbuch des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen landwirtschaftlichen Genossenschaften, vol. 20 (Berlin: Reichsverband der Deutschen landwirtschaftlichen Genossenschaften, 1914)Google Scholar. The centrals in question are Wormditt (1892), Neisse (1890), Halle (1893), Hannover (1890), Münster (1884), Cassel (1893), Wiesbaden (1894), Bonn (1892), Cologne (1892), and Munich (1893). Counts of local rural credit cooperatives such as reported in Kluge, Geschichte der deutschen Bankgenossenschaften, Table 4, show a sharp jump in the number of cooperatives after the 1889 Reich Cooperatives Act and prior to the Preußenkasse. His avowedly rough figures suggest a doubling from 1879 (1,729 cooperatives) to 1894 (3,850 cooperatives). Most discussions centered on the rapid growth of cooperatives in Prussia's eastern provinces. The number of local cooperatives in East and West Prussia grew at an average annual rate of 9.7 percent per year from 1890 to 1895. That is a very healthy growth rate by the standards of the cooperatives as a whole. The growth rate then jumped to 28 percent per year from 1895 to 1897. The provinces of Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia had similar experiences; calculated from Die Preussiche Central-Genossenschafts-Kasse vom 1895 bis 1905 (Berlin: C. Heymanns, 1905)Google Scholar, Table 18b.

28 Table 1 combines deposits from cooperatives with those from Sparkassen because of a lacuna in the Preußenkasse's balance sheets. The balance sheets always distinguish the bank's outstanding loans by type of borrower (cooperative, Sparkasse, etc.). But they at first do not make the same distinction for deposits; all deposits from whatever source are lumped together. In the years when the information is available, after 1904, the Sparkassen provided fifty to sixty percent of the deposits held by the Preußenkasse. But this fact does not contradict the argument. In 1914, for example, cooperative loans accounted for about twenty-nine percent of all Preußenkasse assets but much less of the institute's liabilities. Thus, the Preußenkasse was borrowing from Sparkassen to lend to cooperatives. The Preußenkasse was still an intermediary, not a grantor. The literature on the Preußenkasse has usually ignored this aspect of its operations. The savings banks were increasingly worried about competition from credit cooperatives, especially the urban cooperatives, and when the 1895 law was discussed, some Sparkassen wanted either their own analogous state-backed apex bank or to be added to the purview of the Preußenkasse. In the debate in the Chamber of Deputies, one deputy stressed the savings banks' role in providing personal credit. Miquel responded that he doubted the Sparkassen were capable of filling that role, implying that the new Prussian bank should not deal with savings banks. Some savings-bank leaders thought that dealing with the Preußenkasse was a bad idea for a different reason. At the Posen Provincial Sparkassen meeting on November 26, 1898, one of the leaders stated, “Wir stärken unsere Konkurrenz unbedingt, und es wäre von der Selbstlosigkeit der Sparkassen doch etwas zuviel verlangt, wenn sie ihre Depositen, zumal ohne bessere Verzinsung als anderswo, der Konkurrenz überlassen sollten.” Quoted in Erich Schwendemann, Die Entwicklung des Wettbewerbsverhältnisses zwischen Kreditgenossenschaften und öffentlich-rechtlichen Sparkassen in Deutschland (Ph.D. diss., Frankfurt am Main, 1938), 82, note 288. Miquel rejected a role for Sparkassen in personal credit in his reply to Gamp's suggestion in the Haus der Abgeordneten 77. Sitzung, June 18, 1895, 2421, StBerHa. Other objections turned on the possibility that a banking crisis could force the Sparkassen to withdraw funds they had on deposit at the Preußenkasse. This issue is discussed in more depth in Timothy W. Guinnane, “Die Anfänge des überregionalen genossenschaftlichen Zentralbankwesens zwischen Selbsthilfe und staatlichem Förderauftrag,” in Geschichte der DZ Bank AG (forthcoming).

29 All figures in this and the preceding paragraph are calculated from the annual reports of the Haas federation, Reichsverband der deutschen landwirtschaftlichen Genossenschaften.

30 There were actually two different exclusivity agreements, one for assets and one for liabilities. One example of these agreements can be found in “Bestimmungen der preussischen Zentralgenossenschaftskasse für den Geschäftsverkehr 1901,” (Muster K and L), Geheimes Staatsarchiv Dahlem, Signature I. HA Rep 151, IC, 10340.

31 Most regional centrals required affiliated local cooperatives to sign a similar declaration. Failure to adhere to the terms of this policy was a frequent source of complaint among rural centrals. During a crisis, a credit cooperative with excess deposits could invest them in safe, private outlets for much more than the central would pay. So the incentive to be “uncooperative” was strong. Hillringhaus, who had worked at the Preußenkasse, put it as follows: “Diese Bestimmung war um deswillen nötig geworden, weil die Preussische Zentralkasse die Erfahrung hatte machen müsse, daß verschiedentlich ihre billigen Kredite in Anspruch genommen worden waren, nicht, um sie zum Zwecke der Gütererzeugung der Landwirtschaft und dem städtischen Mittelstand zur Verfügung zu stellen, sondern um der um durch Anlauf von Wertpapier oder Wechseln Gewinne zu erzielen”; Hillringhaus, August, Die Preussische Zentralgenossenschaftskasse. Ihre Aufgaben und ihr Wirken aus 25 jähriger Tätigkeit (Berlin: C. Heymann, 1922), 41Google Scholar.

32 Faust, Helmut, Die Zentralbank der deutschen Genossenschaften. Vorgeschichte, Aufbau, und Entwicklung der Deutschen Genossenschaftskasse (Frankfurt: Deutsche Genossenschaftskasse, 1967), 34–35Google Scholar.

33 Pressearchiv of the Bund der Landwirte, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, R/8034/II 769, vol. 5, 47–48.

34 This anger was on full display at the Haas group's 1898 annual meeting in Karlsruhe. Most of it concerned the sudden increase in interest rates, but many other comments refer to the Preußenkasse's logic and operations. More than one refers to new cooperatives as “Pumpkassen,” created solely as a vehicle for subsidized loans. One speaker (a Rechtsanwalt Eschenbach) complained that “die Leiter dieser Kasse Neulinge im Genossenschaftswesen sein, daß sie sich in die innersten Verhältnisse der Einzelpersonen, die einer Genossenschaft angehören, einmischen; die Bedingungen und die geschäftlichen Grundsätze der Zentralgenossenschaftskasse seie wirtschaftspolitische Daumschrauben, die lediglich dazu dienen, jeden einzelnen Genossenschafter auf Gnade und Ungnade der preußischen Zentralkasse auszuliefern.” Vossische Zeitung, Sept. 1, 1898. From the Pressearchiv of the Bund der Landwirte, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin, R/8034/II 769.

35 Busche, “Zur Gründungsgeschichte,” 99.

36 The meeting memo is in Staatsarchiv Dahlem, Signature I. HA Rep 151, IC, 10327, Geschäftsbetrieb der preussischen Zentralgenossenschaftskasse Band 6. I discuss the issue and the Preußenkasse's reaction in Guinnane, “Die Anfänge.”

37 More precisely, the Preußenkasse's total lending to cooperatives was small relative to the cooperatives' other liabilities. Consider the Haas group in 1913. Their centrals collectively had total liabilities of about 312 million marks, of which 30 million were owed to the Preußenkasse. (These centrals also had about 3 million marks on deposit at the Preußenkasse; the net debt was 27 million marks.) Total deposits at centrals from cooperative institutions in that year totaled 203 million marks. The centrals' owners' paid-in capital was some 29 million marks. Thus ownership stakes in the centrals were larger than the net debt to the Preußenkasse. Ten of the twenty-four centrals had no debt outstanding with the Preußenkasse. Only two centrals, in Wormditt and Posen, owed the Prussian bank more than they did their own depositors.

38 Busche, Öffentliche Förderung, 14, notes that by framing the question this way, Crüger and others could ignore the ways the state had assisted their own efforts.

39 Klein, Schulze-Delitzschs Kampf, deals with the legal issues solved by the 1867 Act. Guinnane, “New Law,” traces the development of cooperative law in detail and places it in the broader context of German enterprise law in the same period. That paper also contains more detail on the cooperative's legal status prior to 1867; Crüger, Hans, “Die Zulassung von Genossenschaften mit beschränkter Haftpflicht durch das Genossenschaftsgesetz vom 1. Mai 1889,” Archiv für öffentliches Recht 9, no. 3 (1894): 389–455Google Scholar, contains more detail on state-level cooperative law.

40 Guinnane, “‘A Friend and Advisor,’” discusses the auditing requirement and how it worked in practice.

41 The Preußenkasse's not-quite-complete tally of cooperatives as of January 1, 1904, counts, for Prussia and Bavaria combined, 15,398 cooperatives with unlimited liability and 6,581 with limited liability. In that same year, 1,578 of the 1,741 Konsumvereine had limited liability. “Jahr- und Adreßbuch der Erwerbs- und Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften im Deutschen Reiche 1904,” ed. Preußischen Central-Genossenschafts-Kasse, Table I.

42 The 1884 Corporations Act made it much harder to form a corporation. The 1889 Cooperatives Act also allowed a third liability structure, “unbeschränkte Nachschußpflicht,” that was a variant on unlimited liability and rarely used. Guinnane, “New Law,” notes that a major problem with unlimited liability prior to 1889 was not such unlimited liability itself as the way bankruptcy proceedings treated cooperative members; this problem was fixed in the 1889 Act, making unlimited liability more useful than it had been prior to 1889.

43 Timothy W. Guinnane and Susana Martínez Rodríguez note that only the United Kingdom and Germany treated cooperatives as distinct legal creatures; Guinnane, Timothy W. and Rodríguez, Susana Martínez, “Cooperatives before Cooperative Law: Business Law and Cooperatives in Spain, 1869–1931,” Revista de Historia Económica-Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 29, no. 1 (2011): 67–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The 1867 cooperative law drew heavily on language and legal concepts that were already contained in the 1862 Allgemeine Deutsche Handelsgesetzbuch.

44 The legal forms of enterprise and the introduction of the GmbH in 1892 are discussed in Guinnane, Timothy W., Harris, Ron, Lamoreaux, Naomi, and Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, “Putting the Corporation in its Place, 2007,” Enterprise and Society 8, no. 3 (2007): 687–729CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hans Crüger stresses the connection between the 1889 cooperatives law and the introduction of the GmbH; Crüger, Hans, “Haftpflicht und Kredit,” Jarhrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 72 (1899): 661–670, here 664–666Google Scholar.

45 The estimate of the sum transferred via the tariff relies on the “compromise figure” for 1907 German net national product reported by Burhop, Carsten and Wolff, Guntram B. in “A Compromise Estimate of German Net National Product, 1851–1913, and its Implications for Growth and Business Cycles,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 3 (2005): 613–657CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Appendix Table 2, as well as Steven Webb's estimates of the amount transferred to rural producers in Webb, Steven B., “Agricultural Production in Wilhelminian Germany: Forging an Empire with Pork and Rye,” Journal of Economic History 42, no. 2 (1982): 309–326, here 324–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.