By Roger Chickering, this is so far the best book I have read this year, and I knew that within the first fifty pages (or less). It is everything one could want from a book on this very important country and time period. Likely I will report more on it as I read more, for the moment here is one excerpt:
Together, the new smelting techniques had driven the price of crude steel in Europe down nearly 90 percent by the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, the results of this trend registered in a thirty-fold increase in the annual production of steel between 1879 and 1913. Thanks in great part to the iron fields of Lorraine, German output overtook British annual production in 1893; by 1913, German mills produced more steel than their British, French, and Russian counterparts combined. Much of this steel was poured into the German railways. Rail networks were extended; primarily at the insistence of the army, trunk lines were enlarged to two, in some cases four tracks. Iron rails were replaced with more durable steel. Wheels, axles, couplings, and wagons were modernized into steel, as were bridges. These substitutions not only made railroads faster but also increased their capacity. Meanwhile, palaces of rail travel emerged out of metal and glass as the great train stations of Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Germany’s other main cities. Late in the century travel along the steel rails also expanded in the form of tramways onto the streets of the cities themselves.
It is wonderful on the politics of the time as well, for instance tracing out the rise of Bismarck, or how the rivalries between Prussia and Austria shaped so many issues at the time. You can buy the book here.
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