ABSTRACT
Fritz Redlich, whose influence is quite apparent in German business history, had for many years been a leading personality in the Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University, a group led by Arthur H. Cole, professor and librarian of the Baker Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. The Gras-Schmoller type of academic research can be characterized as collecting as many examples that seem vaguely valid to understanding the business and the economic background of a society and then constructing a reasonable edifice with the bricks thus made available. Business history seen in this way increasingly claims for itself the title of micro-economic history that can inform on the broad role that business enterprises in general are responsible for in our modern industrial or even post-industrial societies. Banks that operated as joint stock companies with limited liability appeared quite early in Austria’s drive for industrialization.
