ABSTRACT
The Potsdam Agreement and the subsequent partition of Germany into East and West made it certain that, as the western rump recovered from the effects of the war, her industrial and commercial structure would take on a greater and greater resemblance to that of the United Kingdom. The area east of the Oder-Neisse, representing a quarter of prewar Germany’s agricultural land, has been lost to Poland and no longer sends its surplus of food to the west. The population of Western Germany, swollen by an influx of nine million refugees, is equal to Britain’s in size and much the same in density. The two countries are alike in the slenderness of their agricultural resources, the lack of indigenous raw materials, the abundance of coal, and the wide range of traditional skills. In such circumstances, the pattern of their trade is likely to be similar also. Not only is Western Germany bound to become more heavily dependent on an exchange of manufactures for food and raw materials: the more her trade is swept by political currents away from Eastern Europe, the more strongly it must set towards markets overseas and the more Germany and Britain come into competition with one another.
