The “Coalition of ‘Rye and Iron’” under the Pressure of Globalization: A Reinterpretation of Germany's Political Economy before 1914

Abstract

There has been a good deal of scholarly work on the history of the political economy of the German Empire. This is particularly true for the history of customs and trade policy, which historians identified quite early as a central arena of political conflicts and disputes and to which historians quite often assigned a key role in their competing interpretations of the history of the German Empire.