ABSTRACT
The international framework of Germany's economic development during the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century is evident in the analysis of the impact of British exports on the modernisation of the German iron industry at the beginning of this period, in the important re-appraisal of the role of German inflation in 1920 and 1921 in facilitating international economic recovery, and in the critical assessment of the wider foreign policy considerations behind British man-power policy in the Ruhr mines between 1945 and 1947. Tariff policy was also a central area for state involvement in economic affairs. An equally entrenched assumption concerning the character of German industrialisation relates to the positive role of the banking mechanism in the direct promotion of industrial growth. Germany, as a relative late-comer in the development of modern industry, on the basis of Gerschenkron's general hypothesis, depended far more on banks for investible funds and entrepreneurial initiative than the earlier industrialising countries such as Britain and Belgium.
