Finance and Financiers in European History 1880–1960

To discuss the role of banks and bankers in nineteenth-century Germany is to hallow one of that country's historiographical traditions. For the topic is an evergreen, as old as the German consciousness of industrial development as a national achievement itself. Entrepreneurs, and especially bankers, contributed to the literature from the start, but financial journalists, academic economists and even politicians spoke out as well. To point to the fact that many of these writers were engaged in special interest, pleading rather than attempting to write banking history as it ‘really was’, may be logically fallacious as criticism, but nevertheless relevant. That standard work on Germany's large banks, by Jacob Riesser (The German Great Banks and their Concentration), was a response to public criticism of those banks and their power for evil by a director of one of the largest banks, the Bank für Handel und Industrie zu Darmstadt. Heargued for a minimum of government regulation on the grounds that the banks ‘naturally’ operated in the public national interest without compulsion – an important part of his argument built on the belief that competition among banks remained intense, despite growing concentration at the top. About the same time (1909) Rudolf Hilferding's study, Finanz-Kapital appeared, covering some of the same ground as Riesser but focusing on the considerable degree of monopoly power he believed the banks to have over industry and integrating that phenomenon into are vision of Marxist theory (as part of the concept, ‘Organized Capitalism’). More on this question below.