1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.
Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.
English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”
Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.
Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.
English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”