ABSTRACT
The initial economic experience of the age was the crash. Vigorous economic expansion in the late 1860s and part of the 1870s was accompanied by the formation of new financial, industrial and railway corporations whose shares were eagerly purchased by an investing public. The shockwaves from the crash moved out of the financial sector into the producing economy, and it was plunged into recession. This sort of crash was a pan-European event, occurring in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1873, in the UK in 1878, in France in 1882, and in Italy in 1893. One of the ways historians have often understood the economic situation in the 1870s and 1880s is through use of the phrase the Great Depression of the nineteenth century. This was, obviously, not a term contemporaries used, but a linguistic retrofitting, developed by analogy with a twentieth-century event, the Great Depression of 192939, a decade-long period of worldwide economic crisis.
