Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SpoilsofWAR (Spoils of War: The Economic Consequences of the Great War in Central Europe)
Période du rapport: 2022-01-01 au 2023-06-30
SpoilsofWAR investigates how the Great War affected regional economic development and industrial concentration in the Habsburg Empire and its main successor states. It transcends the boundaries between economic and business history and integrates the analytical tools of both disciplines. We use historical censuses to identify the spatial distribution of industrial activity in the Habsburg lands before the Great War. We also reconstruct employment and sales war-induced spending within the war economy by industry and region, using fully comprehensive confidential wartime statistics on army contractors. Subsequently, we build on this information to detect the legacies of the war on the development of national industries and industrial clusters in the successor states, controlling for wartime casualties and post-war border effects. We also use quantitative methods to assess the complex border legacies that the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution created, examining potential legacies of both former imperial borders and border institutions for regional development and market integration in post-war economies. We conduct an in-depth examination into the role that key enterprises and business networks played in the main clusters of modern industry in Austria-Hungary and the role they played in the war economy and in the successor states after 1918. Finally, we trace the evolution of urban real wages and wage structures in the most prominent cities and centres of modern industry in Central Europe over a period that transcends the Great War.