ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that Germany's high and sustained rate of industrial growth was the dominant feature of the European economic landscape throughout the period 1871-1914. It also explains on the eve of the First World War Germany produced two-thirds of European steel, and 20 per cent more electrical energy than Britain, France and Italy combined. Industrial raw materials had increasingly to be imported, although the Empire was well provided with the basics of coal and iron ore. The increase in population, together with the migration of large numbers of people from one part of Germany to another, was one of the greatest strains on Wilhelmine society. From the early 1880s, large numbers of east European Jews, driven out of tsarist Russia, began flooding into Germany. It was partly their presence which, during the First World War, helped spread anti-Semitism.
