Industrialization in Germany
Industrialization in Germany was the phase of the breakthrough of industrialization in Germany, beginning at the time from around 1815 to 1835. This period was preceded by the periods of pre-industrialization and early industrialization. In general, the decades between the 1830s and 1873 are considered the phase of industrial take off. The Industrial Revolution was followed by the phase of high industrialization during the German Empire. The Industrial Revolution in Germany differed from that of the pioneering country of Great Britain in that the key industries became not the textile industry but coal production, steel production and railroad construction.
Another characteristic was the regional character of industrialization. Partly against the background of older traditions, partly because of favorable locations or for other reasons, the Industrial Revolution was concentrated in a few regional concentration zones. In some older industrial areas, where adaptation to the new era was not successful, processes of economic decline occurred. Initially, industrial development was too weak to create significant new jobs for a growing population. On the contrary, industrial competition initially exacerbated the crisis in crafts and many traditional trades. This was one of the causes of the pauperism of the Vormärz. Only with the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution did new job opportunities arise on a larger scale. As it progressed, the social question shifted away from the rural lower classes and toward the growing working population with its poor working conditions and often low wages.
Pre-, early- and proto-industrialization
The initial situation for an Industrial Revolution was significantly worse in Germany than in the country of origin of industrialization, Great Britain. This included the lack of a single market, the large number of customs duties and currencies and the territorial fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, which had collapsed in 1806. In terms of infrastructure, the empire was significantly less developed than England, and there was also a lack of overseas trade and colonial expansion. The gap to Great Britain was also evident in Germany's much larger agricultural sector. Moreover, no comparable "agricultural revolution" had yet taken place in this sector at the beginning of the 19th century. There were still strong feudal elements and, with the exception of East Elbia, numerous low-performing small farms, many of which still operated using old methods and were barely connected to the market as subsistence farms. There were also other aspects. Despite mercantilism in the 18th century, for example, the guilds and corporations in the crafts sector held on to old instruments of economic regulation.But there had also been preparatory developments in the German states since the early modern period. Werner Conze narrowed down a preparatory phase to roughly the period between 1770 and 1850. This included stronger population growth that began in the middle of the 18th century. This increased demand and enlarged the potential labor force.
Protoindustry and cottage industry
Although the guild crafts were in crisis around 1800, there were not only stagnant developments in the commercial sector either. In the manufactories with a workforce of about 100,000, there was already a kind of mass production with division of labor to a certain extent. The putting-out system had already emerged in some regions in the late Middle Ages and especially in the early modern period. For example, the land-poor classes in eastern Westphalia and other areas specialized in the cottage industry production of linen, which was bought up by merchants and marketed on the national market. It is estimated that as many as one million people were employed in this sector around 1800.These and other developments, including in the iron and metal trades and other areas, had already given rise to various regional centers of commercial concentration. In the western Prussian provinces of the Rhineland and Westphalia, for example, these were Bergisches Land, the County of Mark and the Siegerland region with spurs into the Sauerland. Similar contexts existed in the Rhineland, where iron from the Eifel region was processed between Aachen, Eschweiler, Stolberg and Düren. Above all, however, brass, zinc and lead production was concentrated in this area. In Upper Silesia, mining and processing were run partly by the state and partly by large landowners. These included the Counts of Donnersmarck or the Princes of Hohenlohe. In the Kingdom of Saxony, a highly differentiated trade existed, ranging from rural and urban crafts to cottage industries, manufactories, mining and, soon, the first factories. Large parts of Saxony – here above all the Chemnitz region, which was later also called Saxon Manchester – were even among the most growth-intensive regions in Europe, as was the northern Rhineland, according to Hahn. Rhenish manufacturing also benefitted from the Napoleonic Wars as French rule brought the abolition of old guild restrictions as well as access to the large market of the French Empire and its military, whose blockade of Britain also removed competition from British goods.
In connection with manufactories and publishing houses, trading capital accumulated in the various landscapes, which was later used to finance the first large factories. However, these early trade landscapes were not always a direct precursor to industrial development. In some cases, such as in parts of Hesse or in Lower Silesia, the connection to industrialization was not successful and in the areas of rural trade there were processes of economic decline.
Early industrialization
Approaches to industrial expansion thus existed at the latest since the beginning of the 19th century. Nevertheless, it makes sense to let the early industrialization in the sense of immediate prehistory of the Industrial Revolution in Germany begin approximately with the year 1815. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the lifting of the Continental Blockade, trade barriers fell on the one hand, and on the other, the German economy was now exposed to direct competition with British industry. This significantly increased the pressure to adapt. In addition, the territorial upheaval following the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss led to the disappearance of numerous micro-territories and the emergence of a number of medium-sized states. But there was still no unified economic area. An important institutional factor for commercial development was the founding of the German customs union in 1834, which enabled the duty-free exchange of goods within the treaty area. This was a key prerequisite for the integration of previously regionally related markets into a larger context. However, Zollverein's direct support for industrial development was limited. Although industrial development was facilitated by it, no decisive growth impulses emanated from it. Saxony's industrial growth relied on overseas markets such as North America, and avoided direct British competition by focusing on niches in the market where Saxony could leverage its low-cost labour. Equally important were numerous other reforms in the areas of state, society, and economy. Particularly well known are the Prussian reforms, which had similarly taken place in other states. These included the liberation of peasants and reforms in trade legislation. Depending on the state, however, implementation dragged on well into the middle of the century.As early as the end of the 18th century, the first modern factories emerged in Germany, in addition to cottage industries and manufactories. In 1784, for example, the first mechanical cotton spinning mill, the Cromford textile factory, went into operation in Ratingen, and a year later the first steam engine in the mining industry went into operation in Hettstedt. In 1796, the first continuously producing coke oven was built at the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in Gleiwitz. In 1798, C. F. Bernhardt's spinning mill was founded in Chemnitz-Harthau. Among other things, it cleared the way for industrial development in the region. In the years that followed, countless spinning mills based on Bernhardt's pattern were built in Chemnitz and the surrounding area. However, these early beginnings did not achieve a broad impact, but remained isolated.
Most of the factory-like operations were relatively simple, not yet using steam power. Spinning machines for yarn production, in particular, made the start; mechanical looms were added in the textile production sector from the 1830s onward. On the whole, the early industrialization approaches were based on the production of simple consumer goods and the processing of agricultural products. Relatively early on, some larger spinning mills were established in Baden, such as the spinning mills in St. Blasien with 28,000 spindles or the similarly large Ettlinger Spinnerei AG. A largely new branch of the textile industry in the early 19th century was cotton processing. Saxony took the leading position, followed by Prussia and Baden. The center in Prussia was the Düsseldorf region and in particular, the Bergisches Land region, which had already been on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 on the basis of small iron and textile industries. In Rheydt and Gladbach alone there were 16 spinning mills in 1836. The textile industry as a whole was one of the first industries to be industrialized. Unlike in England, however, it was not a leading sector of the Industrial Revolution. Its growth was too small for that.
The phase of the early industrial boom that began after 1815 ended as early as the mid-1840s when the agrarian crisis and the effects of the revolution of 1848/49 severely impaired development. This period saw the peak of pre-March pauperism and the last agrarian crisis of the "old-type".