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Industrial Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Robert A. Brady
Robert A. Brady
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, California
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Extract

German imperial expansion, begun under Bismarck, swiftly unfolded with the aid of industrial technology along lines that adapted it ideally for the organization, not of a national state, but of a continent or even the world. In this fact lies a major contrast between the neo-mercantilism which followed 1879 and the cameralism borrowed from the Burgundians by the German princes in the sixteenth century. The system extolled by Becher was designed to meet the power needs of dwarf states perpetually torn, by a mule-and-the-two-haystacks dilemma, between the fractioning particularism of the lay princes on the one hand, and the centrifugal pull of a meaningless imperial universalism on the other. The ‘new age’ for which, as Schulze- Gavaernitz once remarked, Bismarck played the role of ‘obstetrician,’ employed a machinery for internal unification that fitted the national—in particular the German—state almost as badly as it did the political fractions of which it was compounded.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 3 , Supplement S1 , 1943 , pp. 108 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1943

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References

1 “… in Europe there are two great, irreconcilable opposing forces, two great nations who would make the whole world their province, and who would levy from it the tribute of commerce. England, with her long history of successful aggression … and Germany, bone of the same bone, blood of the. same blood…. A million petty disputes build up the greatest cause of war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extinguished tomorrow, the day after tomorrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be the richer. Nations have fought for years over a city or a right of succession; must they not fight for two hundred and fifty million pounds of yearly commerce?” Saturday Review, Sept. 11, 1897, quoted by Hoffman, R. J. S., Great Britain and the German Trade Rivalry, 1875–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933), 281.Google Scholar

2 Friedrich List, “Uber ein sächisches Eisenbahnsystem als Grundlage eines allgemeinen deutschen Eisenbahnsystems,” Werke, Band III, 155–188.

3 Friedrich List, “Das deutsche Eisenbahnsystem (III) als Mittel zu Verollkomung der deutschen Industrie, des deutschen Zollvereins, und des deutschen Nationalverbandes,” ibid., 347.

4 An earlier scheme had been sketched out by the Belgians. List's scheme, however, was the first plan for a national railway system within a major industrial country.

5 See, in particular, Wagenführ, Horst, Kartelle in Deutschland (Nürnberg, 1931).Google Scholar

6 Particularly in Thorstein Veblen's Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.

7 In particular this “Deutschlands $$ in $$,” Werbe, Band III, $$–$$

8 See in particular, Oswald Schneider, “Bismarcks Finanz- und Wirtschaftspolitik” in Staats- und Social-wissenschaftliche Forschungen, vol. 165, and W. F. Bruck, Social and Economic History of Germany from William II to Hitler, 1888–1918, ch. ii.

9 Liefmann, Robert, International Cartels, Combines and Trusts (London: Europa Publishing Company, 1927), 32–33.Google Scholar

10 Only in the case of the unification of railroads did he appear fully to grasp the fact that the newer methods of industrial and business organization were ideally adapted for the program of conquest which lay directly ahead.

11 Wiedenfeld, Kurt, Kapitalismus und Beamtentum(Berlin, 1932), in which he argues that the attitudes of the bureaucrats and businessmen are fundamentally opposed, a position which will not stand examination, and which he was quick to repudiate when the Nazis found him a job he liked.Google Scholar

12 Neumann, Franz, Behemoth (New York, 1943).Google Scholar

13 M. J. Bonn, Das Schicksal des deulschen Kapitalismus.

14 See in particular, Zielenzigcr, Kurt, Die alten dcutschen Kameralislen (Jena, 1914); also that famous classic, James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire.Google Scholar