German industrialization has been the subject of heated debates among historians. During the so-called Sonderweg debate in the 1980s—which scrutinized the long-term structural developments that enabled the rise of National Socialism and attempted to explain the peculiar German path into modernity—the patterns of German industrialization and its entanglements with politics and culture ranked high on the agenda of historians. Attention to the topic has recently faded as German historiography, in the pointed words of Paul Nolte, said “farewell to the nineteenth century.” Yet economic and social historians continued to compile new econometric evidence, researched regional patterns of development, and questioned some of the assumptions that earlier historiography had taken for granted.This book encapsulates this historiographical trajectory. It provides a synthesis between two elements. One consists of a book that Richard H. Tilly published in German in 1990, Vom Zollverein zum Industriestaat; the other element presents new research tracing the roots of German industrialization back to the eighteenth century and offering new evidence on its regionally diverse evolution in the nineteenth century. Tilly's coauthor, Michael Kopsidis, is among those historians who have decisively contributed to this new perspective. The result of this synthesis is a concise, yet highly differentiated and insightful narrative of the making of the German industrial economy that connects industrialization to agriculture, state formation, the emergence of a modernizing bureaucracy, public and social policy, scientific knowledge and technology, migration and demography, and the change in financial institutions.Compared to other accounts that stress the suddenness of Germany's breakthrough to industrialization, Tilly and Kopsidis emphasize a drawn-out transition that proceeded gradually. They begin by examining the interplay between demographic change, agricultural reform, protoindustrialization, and institutional change in the eighteenth century. The spread of rural industries and protoindustrial structures contributed to a partial integration of the German economy into the flourishing Atlantic economy, yet regional differences remained important. Indeed, German industrialization was essentially an insular phenomenon. The state and a reform-minded bureaucracy played an important role, Prussia being the most striking example of a reform from above, creating a capable yet authoritarian modernizing bureaucracy that promoted a rapid transition to the market economy as a response to the challenges of the French Revolution and Napoleonic hegemony.Part 2 offers an account of early German industrialization covering the period from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Revolution of 1848. Tilly and Kopsidis emphasize the role of the Zollverein, the German customs union established in 1834, as a crucial institutional precondition for integrating and widening markets. Moreover, state-supported investment in transport systems contributed to the development of closer interconnections between different regions and sectors of the economy and foreshadowed the importance of railroads as a driving force of industrialization. Out of the crises of the 1840s emerged two changes with far-reaching consequences for German industrialization: the political economy of public finance altered decisively; and the revolution, despite its ultimate failure, pushed the nonaristocratic bourgeoisie into the ruling center of power at the cost of blocking democratization.The interdependencies of steam power technology; railroads; the iron, steel, and machine industries; and coal mining had important effects on the overall economy in the 1850s and 1860s, pulling a growing share of agricultural and artisanal producers into capitalist markets and commercializing economic relationships. These developments were not without tensions. Farm families lost their subsistence and the gathering of craftsmen in centralized workshops promoted class consciousness, while economic and social inequality visibly increased.Part 4 discusses Germany's emergence as an industrial power from 1871 to 1914. This period was shaped by a more self-conscious and interventionist economic policy of the Kaiserreich; the formation of “organized capitalism” in the form of business associations, cartels, and unions; the rise of large-scale industrial businesses especially in the chemistry and electrotechnical sectors where the interplay between science and industrial production was most intense; the emergence of a new financial and monetary system with massive concentration processes in the banking sector; the rapid urbanization of the population; and a growing yet conflict-prone integration of the German economy into the world economy.In sum, Tilly and Kopsidis offer a rich and fascinating economic history of German industrialization that is, in their words, a combination of “economic history with a bit of social history” (vii). Indeed, some readers might wish to have more than just a “bit” of social history in such a narrative. The experiences, interpretations, and suffering of those who went through these fundamental changes are pushed out of sight due to an approach that favors econometric evidence, the mathematic charm of tables and graphs, and an abstract language borrowed from economic theory. One wonders, for instance, what family relationships and the gendered division of work looked like in the protoindustrial family economies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How did Polish and Russian seasonal laborers experience their integration into the East Elbian estate farms in the late nineteenth century? And what meaning did artisans and craftsmen give to the forces of industrial capitalism that threatened their economic existence and their way of life? Despite all its differentiated and judicious arguments on the structural development of German industrialization, the book remains strangely silent on questions like these. These reservations aside, Tilly's and Kopsidis's book is without doubt an important contribution to the history of German industrialization in the long nineteenth century.