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Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland: Regionen als Wachstumsmotoren [Industrial revolution in Germany: Regions as motors of growth]. By Hubert Kiesewetter. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. 307 pp. Bibliography, notes, index. Paper, euro24.00. ISBN: 3-515-08613-7.
This is a lightly revised version of a book originally published in 1988, now updated with some additional material and the citation of more recent publications. It is a summary history of German economic development from the mid-eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. Hubert Kiesewetter's thesis is that although the division of Germany into many small states hindered development before the early nineteenth century, the unification of the country, first through the tariff union (Zollverein) in 1834 and then through political unification, culminating in the foundation of the empire in 1871, unleashed a process of "regional competition." This in turn led to relatively rapid industrialization, at least compared with the rate of industrial progress in other European states (pp. 11, 290-91).
The book was "old" economic history when it was originally published, and it remains so. Economists will note the absence of formal hypotheses. Although Kiesewetter provides a lot of statistics, they are deployed as descriptive evidence, and he does not...