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German Banks, German Growth, and Econometric History

The now aging New Economic History has been rich in revisionism. The economic viability of slavery, the railroads, and the American War of Independence have died a thousand deaths, with unexpected changes in social savings their epitaph. Revisionism can be healthy, of course, and there is no doubt that American economic history has profited from the cliometricians' attacks on traditional idols. For this reason, American economic historiography has become in some respects a model for its European counterparts. European economic history urgently needs more theory and quantitative methods. That is particularly true of the German field. Against this background, a recent cliometric foray into German economic history—more precisely, a revisionist assessment of the role of the "great banks" in German industrialization by Neuburger and Stokes in this JOURNAL—could be heartily welcomed. Our reading of their "reassessment" enjoins us from extending that welcome, however. Not only do they fail to present any new substantive information on German banks and German growth, but their very approach—a resort to modern production theory using aggregate time series data—hinders them from doing so. Unfortunately, German economic historians could be tempted to see in ventures like these further grounds for rejecting the use of theory and quantitative methods in their work. This note aims, therefore, at (a) pointing out some methodological and empirical defects in the Neuburger-Stokes argument, and (b) suggesting some alternative approaches to the same issue.