Government Activity and Industrialization in Germany (1815–70)

It is often said that industrialization on the Continent was not initiated by private enterprise alone as in the British Isles, but was essentially assisted by government activity. ‘On the Continent the State played a much more active part in fostering economic progress than was customary in England or Scotland in the early nineteenth century’, writes W. O. Henderson, one of the foremost experts in the comparative economic history of Europe in the nineteenth century.1 ‘To a Frenchman, or a German, the economic activities of the government in Ireland were normal while the laissez-faire attitude of the government in England was abnormal.’