Introduction: a new perspective on modern German history

Abstract

Heinrich Winkler’s two volume history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth century is titled Der lange Weg nach Westen. For him, ‘nach Westen’ means becoming a Western democracy, like England, France and the US. How did they do it? Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, in their book Violence and Social Orders: a Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (2009), take up the question of how countries make such a transition. The framework is that of limited and open access orders (LAO/OAO), as explained in Steven Webb’s article in this issue. Although they intend the framework for universal application, most of the North, Wallis, and Weingast book focuses on the economic and political history of England, the US, and France from early modern times up to the end of the nineteenth century—the times when these three countries became Western capitalist democracies as we think of them today. Violence and Social Orders does not discuss the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or the cases of Germany and Russia, the other big players in modern European history. The articles here apply the limited and OAO framework to the history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for two purposes. First, they shed new light on the German political and economic history by looking through a comparative lens. Was Germany’s evolution so unique—a Sonderweg—or was it a later variant on similar themes? Second, the articles show how the framework needs augmenting to take account of an important case like that of Germany. For instance, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while it was still a limited access order, the German economy was able to grow as fast or faster than the main OAO economies of the time and to surpass them on many technological frontiers, which is contrary to the prediction implicit in Violence and Social Orders. Also, the