ABSTRACT
As historians compile and analyse the statistical data of the period, the picture of the Great Depression becomes ever more differentiated, complex and contradictory, to the point where it has been seriously suggested that the term ‘Great Depression’ is without any analytical value. The years of the depression marked the triumph of big industry. It speeded up a process which had begun in the boom years when the joint-stock company, supported and sustained by joint-stock banks, became the characteristic form of industrial organisation. If Bismarck began to think of the socialists as murderous communards he did not altogether abandon the carrot in favour of exclusive use of the stick. The aim of his social policy was to undo some of the harm done by the anti-socialist laws, to relieve some of the immediate hardship caused by the depression, and last but not least to take much of the wind out of the socialists’ sails.
