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The following issue arose from a section at the Congress for Economic and Social History in Regensburg in March 2019 and focuses on fiscal conflicts in Europe from the early modern period until today. Distributive fiscal conflicts are seen here as a probe into the past which can increase our understanding of historical social structures. Fiscal history is analysed as a central arena of the modern state. The introduction provides an overview of current research into fiscal history in Germany and of the contributions presented in this focus issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is difficult to find information on the financing of the Council of Basel, due to the almost total loss of its account books. Therefore, the few studies of its financial history are based on the big source collections, such as the Council's protocols. To counter-balance this, local and regional sources offer insights just as important. The most important fund-raising action of the Council was the indulgence to finance the union with the Greek Church, proclaimed on 14 April 1436. In this context, the archival holdings of the archbishopric of Salzburg fortunately provide a wealth of material, proving the very modest impact in the early phases, when the money collected remained in the offertory boxes, only to be used in the 1440ies to strengthen the Council in its controversy with Pope Eugene IV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of over 1,000 initial public offerings (IPOs) on the Berlin stock exchange from German unification to the eve of World War II draws attention to the importance of regulation and deepens our understanding of German stock market development. An increasingly exacting regulatory environment from the early 1880s to 1914 made a vital contribution to the higher likelihood of firms going public surviving. In the inhospitable regulatory setting of the 1930s, IPO activity drew to a halt and the development in the German stock market over the preceding decades reversed. As a complement to our analysis of the impact of regulation, we document the increased involvement of leading universal banks (D-banks) in the IPO market over the whole period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we review the state of the art of stock market history in Germany and preview the main findings of the articles published in this special issue. In Germany, scholars have long focused on institutional aspects of stock market history. Yet, starting in the late 1990s, quantitative work also started to take-off. Some of the articles published in this special issue go further down this road. Moreover, several of the following papers deal with the history of German stock markets during the interwar period, a period so far neglected by research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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