#37
The Rapid Growth of Germany, 1872-1914
The growth of pig iron output was dramatic.
Britain went from 1.3 million tons in 1840 to 6.7 million in 1870 and 10.4 in 1913.
The US started behind, but grew faster, with .32 million tons in 1870, 1,74 million in 1870, and 31.5 in 1913.
Germany went from .19 million tons in 1850 to 1.56 in 1871 and 19.3 in 1913.
France, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, combined, went from 2.2 million tons in 1870 to 14.1 million tons in 1913, on the eve of the World War.
Industrial Revolution
Before 1850 Germany lagged behind the leaders in industrial development, Britain, France and Belgium.
By midcentury, however, the German states were catching up, and by 1900 Germany was a world leader in industrialization, along with Britain and the United States.
In 1800, Germany's social structure was poorly suited to any kind of social or industrial development.
Domination by France during the era of the French Revolution (1790s to 1815), produced important institutional reforms, including the abolition of feudal restrictions on the sale of large landed estates, the reduction of the power of the guilds in the cities, and the introduction of a new, more efficient commercial law.
Nevertheless, traditionalism remained strong in most of Germany.
Until midcentury, the guilds, the landed aristocracy, the churches, and the government bureaucracies had so many rules and restrictions that entrepreneurship was held in low esteem, and given little opportunity to develop.
From the 1830s and 1840s, Prussia, Saxony, and other states reorganized agriculture, introducing sugar beets, turnips, and potatoes, yielding a higher level of food production that enabled a surplus rural population to move to industrial areas.
The beginnings of the industrial revolution in Germany came in the textile industry, and was facilitated by eliminating tariff barriers through the
Zollverein, starting in 1834.
The takeoff stage of economic development came with the railroad revolution in the 1840s, which opened up new markets for local products, created a pool of middle manager, increased the demand for engineers, architects and skilled machinists and stimulated investments in coal and iron.
The political decisions about the economy of Prussia (and after 1871 all Germany) were largely controlled by a coalition of "rye and iron", that is the Junker landowners of the east and the heavy industry of the west.
Regions
The north German states were for the most part richer in natural resources than the southern states.
They had vast agricultural tracts from
Schleswig-Holstein in the west through Prussia in the east.
They also had coal and iron in the
Ruhr Valley.
Through the practice of
primogeniture, widely followed in northern Germany, large estates and fortunes grew.
So did close relations between their owners and local as well as national governments.
The south German states were relatively poor in natural resources and those Germans therefore engaged more often in small economic enterprises.
They also had no primogeniture rule but subdivided the land among several offspring, leading those offspring to remain in their native towns but not fully able to support themselves from their small parcels of land.
The south German states, therefore, fostered
cottage industries, crafts, and a more independent and self-reliant spirit less closely linked to the government.
Coal
Historical coalfields of Western Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Northern France
The first important mines appeared in the 1750s, in the valleys of the rivers Ruhr, Inde and Wurm where coal seams outcropped and horizontal mining was possible.
In 1782 the
Krupp family began operations near
Essen.
After 1815 entrepreneurs in the
Ruhr Area, which then became part of
Prussia took advantage of the tariff zone (
Zollverein) to open new mines and associated
iron smelters.
New railroads were built by British engineers around 1850.
Numerous small industrial centres sprang up, focused on
ironworks, using local coal.
The iron and
steel works typically bought mines, and erected
coking ovens to supply their own requirements in
coke and gas.
These integrated coal-iron firms ("Huettenzechen") became numerous after 1854; after 1900 they became mixed firms called "Konzern.
"
The average output of a mine in 1850 was about 8,500 short tons; its employment about 64.
By 1900, the average mine's output had risen to 280,000 and the employment to about 1,400.
Total
Ruhr coal output rose from 2.0 million short tons in 1850 to 22 in 1880, 60 in 1900, and 114 in 1913, on the verge of war.
In 1932 output was down to 73 million short tons, growing to 130 in 1940. Output peaked in 1957 (at 123 million), declining to 78 million short tons in 1974.
End of 2010 five coal mines were producing in Germany.
The miners in the Ruhr region were divided by ethnicity (with Germans and Poles) and religion (Protestants and Catholics).
Mobility in and out of the mining camps to nearby industrial areas was high. The miners split into several unions, with an affiliation to a political party. As a result the socialist union (affiliated with the Social Democratic Party) competed with Catholic and Communist unions until 1933, when the Nazis took over all of them.
After 1945 the socialists came to the fore.
Banks and Cartels
German banks played central roles in financing German industry.
Different banks formed cartels in different industries.
Cartel contracts were accepted as legal and binding by German courts although they were held to be illegal in Britain and the United States.
The process of cartelization began slowly, but the cartel movement took hold after 1873 in the economic depression that followed the post unification speculative bubble.
It began in heavy industry and spread throughout other industries.
By 1900 there were 275 cartels in operation; by 1908, over 500.
By some estimates, different cartel arrangements may have numbered in the thousands at different times, but many German companies stayed outside the cartels because they did not welcome the restrictions that membership imposed.
The government played a powerful role in the industrialization of the
German Empire founded by
Otto von Bismarck in 1871 during a period known as the
Second Industrial Revolution.
It supported not only heavy industry but also crafts and trades because it wanted to maintain prosperity in all parts of the empire.
Even where the national government did not act, the highly autonomous regional and local governments supported their own industries.
Each state tried to be as self-sufficient as possible.
Despite the several ups and downs of prosperity and depression that marked the first decades of the German Empire, the ultimate wealth of the empire proved immense.
German aristocrats, landowners, bankers, and producers created what might be termed the first German economic miracle, the turn-of-the-century surge in German industry and commerce during which bankers, industrialists, mercantilists, the military, and the monarchy joined forces.
Class and the Welfare State
Germany's middle class, based in the cities, grew exponentially, but it never gained the political power it had in France, Britain or the United States.
The Association of German Women's Organizations (BDF) was established in 1894 to encompass the proliferating women's organizations that had sprung up since the 1860s.
From the beginning the BDF was a bourgeois organization, its members working toward equality with men in such areas as education, financial opportunities, and political life.
Working-class women were not welcome; they were organized by the Socialists.
Bismarck built on a tradition of welfare programs in Prussia and Saxony that began as early as in the 1840s.
In the 1880s he introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance that formed the basis of the modern
European welfare state.
His paternalistic programs won the support of German industry because its goals were to win the support of the working classes for the Empire and reduce the outflow of immigrants to America, where wages were higher, but welfare did not exist.
Bismarck further won the support of both industry and skilled workers by his high tariff policies, which protected profits and wages from American competition, although they alienated the liberal intellectuals who wanted free trade.
Railways
Political disunity of three dozen states and a pervasive conservatism made it difficult to build railways in the 1830s.
However, by the 1840s, trunk lines did link the major cities; each German state was responsible for the lines within its own borders.
Economist
Friedrich List summed up the advantages to be derived from the development of the railway system in 1841:
- as a means of national defense, it facilitates the concentration, distribution and direction of the army.
- It is a means to the improvement of the culture of the nation…. It brings talent, knowledge and skill of every kind readily to market.
- It secures the community against dearth and famine, and against excessive fluctuation in the prices of the necessaries of life.
- It promotes the spirit of the nation, as it has a tendency to destroy the Philistine spirit arising from isolation and provincial prejudice and vanity. It binds nations by ligaments, and promotes an interchange of food and of commodities, thus making it feel to be a unit. The iron rails become a nerve system, which, on the one hand, strengthens public opinion, and, on the other hand, strengthens the power of the state for police and governmental purposes.
Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways.
In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by 1850, Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry.
Observers found that even as late as 1890, their engineering was inferior to Britain’s.
However, German unification in 1870 stimulated consolidation, nationalization into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth.
Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialization, and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts, and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen.
By 1880, Germany had 9,400 locomotives pulling 43,000 passengers and 30,000 tons of freight, and pulled ahead of France.
Agriculture
Perkins (1981) argues that more important than Bismarck's new tariff on imported grain was the introduction of the sugar beet as a primary crop. Farmers quickly abandoned traditional, inefficient practices for modern new methods, including use of new fertilizers and new tools.
The knowledge and tools gained from the intensive farming of sugar and other root crops made Germany the most efficient agricultural producer in Europe by 1914.
Even so farms were small in size, and women did much of the field work. An unintended consequence was the increased dependence on migratory, especially foreign, labor.
Chemicals
The economy continued to industrialize and urbanize, with heavy industry (coal and steel especially) becoming important in the Ruhr, and manufacturing growing in the cities, the Ruhr, and Silesia.
Based on its leadership in chemical research in the universities and industrial laboratories, Germany became dominant in the world's chemical industry in the late 19th century.
Big businesses such as
BASF and
Bayer led the way in their production and distribution of artificial dyes and pharmaceuticals during the Wilhelmine era, leading to the German monopolisation of the global chemicals market at 90 percent of the entire share of international volumes of trade in chemical products by 1914.
Steel
Germany became Europe's leading steel-producing nations in the late 19th century, thanks in large part to the protection from American and British competition afforded by tariffs and cartels.
The leading firm was "Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp" run by the
Krupp family The "German Steel Federation" was established in 1874.
20th century
The merger of four major firms into the
Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works) in 1926 was modeled on the
U.S. Steel corporation in the U.S. The goal was to move beyond the limitations of the old cartel system by incorporating advances simultaneously inside a single corporation.
The new company emphasized rationalization of management structures and modernization of the technology; it employed a multi-divisional structure and used return on investment as its measure of success.
By 1913 American and German exports dominated the world steel market, as Britain slipped to third place.
In machinery, iron and steel and other industries, German firms avoided cut-throat competition and instead relied on trade associations.
Germany was a world leader because of its prevailing "corporatist mentality", its strong bureaucratic tradition, and the encouragement of the government.
These associations regulated competition and allowed small firms to function in the shadow of much larger companies.
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