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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]

As an important fuel, hard coal shaped industrialisation. Due to its specific materiality, coal established different options for intertwining industry and resource. This paper concentrates on the one hand on the specific properties of coal and, on the other, on the economic and technological operations with coal. Using the example of the different material properties of coal from the coal districts of Inde and Wurm, these interrelations are examined and illustrate how a space of resource extraction could be arranged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the major flows of gold in early 20th century offers new perspectives on the various and often overlapping political, sociocultural and economic spaces that are linked to the production, transport, marketing and consumption of gold around the world. A material, but not materialistic, biography of gold helps to overcome the narrow 'centrist' logic that still dominates many narratives of globalization as well as the historiography on gold. The paper studies different spatial impacts such as the geology and geographical conditions of the places where gold was found, the newly built infrastructures for energy and water with far-reaching effects, the political segregation of different ethnic groups, the systems of migrant work across national and imperial boundaries, work in mines on the surface and underground, channels of transport, the informal arrangements to direct the international flow of gold towards London, strategies of workers and unionists, the difficult conditions of peasant families in India as well as in South African reserves, and the important question of by whom and from where the global commodity chain of gold may have been directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War was not only a military conflict but also an economic war. In all belligerent countries, labour and resources were shifted from civil production to military production. Factory workers, miners and farmers produced a steady flow of supplies for the frontlines. Financial mobilization provided the money for arms, ammunition, and other supplies. In contemporary understanding 'financial mobilization' comprised all fiscal and monetary instruments that were necessary to finance the war. The aim of this paper is to discuss the interaction between the government and the central bank in Germany in financing the First World War. Aspects include the pre-war plans for financial mobilization, the fiscal and monetary policies of the war years and their inflationary consequences, the financing of foreign trade and financial demobilization during the transition from war to peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, warfare became more totalitarian and was backed by an economic conflict waged with increasingly harsh methods. In the combatant nations munitions rapidly became an essential 'raw material', with the increasing demand being met either by the expanding domestic arms industry or by munitions imports from neutral countries. The Swiss watch, metal and engineering industries enjoyed a strong international reputation and had a strong focus on exports: by the end of 1914 they began manufacturing precision detonators for artillery projectiles, and rising quantities of these products were sold to both sides. This paper examines what volume Swiss munitions exports assumed during the First World War, how this was compatible with Swiss neutrality and looks at the arguments used to criticise or justify this trade over the course of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As most other industrialized countries, Germany experienced three major changes in its energy mix in the last two centuries, namely the respective transitions to coal, oil, and nuclear power. This paper discusses the reasons and consequences of these changes with respect to energy consumption, energy prices, and growth. One major finding is that each energy transition led to a devaluation of traditional locational advantages such as the existence of local sources of water power or coal beds. Another important observation is that most of the energy transitions were accompanied by significant government subsidies aiming at either promoting new energy sources or reducing the social hardship associated with the decline of traditional power industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During World War II an increasing share of the industrial output of Germany and the Nazi-ruled European economies was converted for use in the German war effort. In order to steer this conversion, information gathering and processing were crucial. This paper examines the institutions and instruments of the German system of information gathering and processing and tries to identify its successes and failures. It will be shown that the origins of the system stemmed predominately from specific bottlenecks Germany faced during the pre-war period, which necessitated a more active role of the state given the aims of the Nazi regime. The ad-hoc character of some of the measures implemented in order to improve the information basis of the German economic administration produced a system which was ill-coordinated and incomplete. During the war, the information needs further increased and several reforms considerably improved the information basis of the state. Nevertheless, some fundamental problems stemming from the private-property based economic order in Germany and the specific industrial structure remained unresolved even after Speer had become armaments minister. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historiography of the last decade, there has been a boom in research which attempts from a transnational perspective to break the dominance of the “methodological nationalism” in history. Although economic history has dealt for a long time with cross-border phenomena such as foreign trade and capital movements, the “national economy” is still by and far the most important object of investigation. The position of East Central Europe in the European economy of the 19th Century is usually analyzed using the assumptions of either dependence or modernization theory. The paper provides a critical revision of the results of these analyses. The external influences on the formation and development of the Galician oil industry are to be discussed, as is the importance of integration into the Customs Union of the Habsburg monarchy for industrialization of Hungary, the development of an industrialization type that is based on the food industry as a result of globalization and agrarian crisis, and changes in foreign trade structures of the Habsburg Monarchy. The article argues for an economic entanglement history in a very broad sense. Besides the treatment of the “classical” topics, such as foreign trade and cross-border movement of capital, we shall deal with the transfers of technology, migration and trans-national operating companies history, with commodity chains and of course with the concrete actors that made these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast Europe’s economic backwardness and very slow industrialization prior to 1945 continues, even in recent research, to be attributed to an unproductive peasant economy and traditional peasant society. However, the radical paradigm shift in the view of peasants as agents of economic growth and of their ability to adjust to modern growth after 1960 has surprisingly never been highlighted in economic history research on the Balkan-states (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece). Interpreting agricultural development as a mainly demand-driven process this paper argues that the potential for agricultural growth was much more restricted in the Southeast than the Northwest of Europe but that Balkan peasants seem to have exploited their growth potential as far as possible. There is a lot of evidence that the reasons for sluggish industrialization before 1940 were definitely not rooted in 'peasant traditionalism' as often claimed by Balkan elites and many scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The law & finance literature often assumes that financial institutions in Germany, especially in the stock market, were less workable than for example in the U.S. or Great Britain due to extensive state regulation. This article analyses the regulation and admission to listing practices for (initial) public offerings in Germany from 1870 to 1932. It argues, by contrast, that state regulation in the German stock market largely enabled self-regulation and that a closer look at market practices indicates that the written law only offered a framework and left the stock exchanges great scope for manoeuvre. In the end, the German regulatory system came close to what law & finance literature describes as a most efficient market order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI) has become an important tool for measuring and comparing living standards between countries and regions. However, the HDI has also attracted a fair share of conceptual criticism. Starting from Andrea Wagner's historical estimations of a HDI for Germany in the interwar and early postwar period, we take up part of that criticism by implementing three essential modifications to the mode of calculation. We test how far they alter our picture of the relative living standard in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic of Germany. First, we replace the arithmetic mean by the geometric mean, which is said to solve the problem of perfect substitutability; second, we extend the HDI by an additional fourth dimension measuring economic and political freedom -- an important, though neglected, dimension; and third, as the perhaps most crucial conceptual intervention, we develop weighting schemes for the partial indices that are theoretically backed by happiness economic research. Thus, we challenge the common, but arbitrary fundamental assumption that all partial indices receive equal weights. Our results show that the HDI for Germany reacts very sensitively to conceptual interventions, making it difficult to use it for the intertemporal and international comparison of living standards. We also find that the proposed modified HDIs allow for a re-evaluation of the living standard in interwar Germany; and in contrast to what the reference estimations on the HDI for Germany say, there is a profound discontinuity between the Third Reich and post-war Germany in terms of living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cow traction was a major source of energy in the agriculture of various European countries deep into the 1950s. As the losses in milk yields were by far outstripped by energy gains, a great number of continental smallholders preferred cows to horses and oxen regardless of a negative impact on labour productivity. However, the triple use of cows (milk, meat and traction) became widespread only after 1800 in accordance with an increasing availability of fodder resources. In this sense the expansion of cow traction can be considered as that part of the agricultural revolution which contributed to the protracted survival of smallholder economies in countries like Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany and Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A table of contents for the May 2016 issue of the economic history periodical "Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte" is presented on topics including competition in the limestone mining industry around the turn of the 20th century, mining in Asbestos, Canada, and mining in the topographic description of the early modern period. Publisher information for the periodical is presented along with a list of editors.

In the spring of 1917 the United States entered the First World War. Switzerland and the other neutral European countries came under increasing pressure as the US wanted to embargo their economies. Switzerland had to adapt quickly to the new political order and sent a diplomatic mission to the United States to secure its food and commodity supply. Even though an agreement with the US authorities could be concluded, the policy outcome was strongly influenced by the economic and political agenda of the belligerents. Thus the scope for Swiss foreign policy was limited. The Swiss case shows the increasing influence of the United States and sheds light on the politics of neutrality during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study concentrates on the problems of political changes (breaks) after WWI and after WWII in Central Europe, taking the example of traffic relations in railway and Elbe Shipping between German and Czechoslovakia. Although the situation after 1918 and 1945 brought with it real territorial shifts, and the disruption of trade and tariffs, at the same time it demonstrates how this problem was overcome. Czechoslovak-German traffic and tariff relations overcame the challenges surrounding the 1918 and 1945 breaks and the political and ideological changes by means of rational, pragmatic and serious relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]