This collection of essays explores the impact that nationalism, capitalism and socialism had on economics during the first half of the twentieth century.

List of contributors; Introduction: business in the age of extremes in Central Europe Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka and Dieter Ziegler; Part I. From the Late Wilhelmine Empire to the Great Depression: 1. The Kaiser and his ship-owner: Albert Ballin, the HAPAG Shipping Company, and the relationship between industry and politics in imperial Germany and the Early Weimar Republic Gerhard A. Ritter; 2. Carl Duisberg, the end of World War I, and the birth of social partnership from the spirit of defeat Werner Plumpe; 3. Austrian reconstruction, 1920-1: a matter for private business or the League of Nations? Philip L. Cottrell; 4. Rudolf Sieghart and the Austrian land credit institution: a case study of the Austrian banking crisis of the 1920s and 1930s Peter Eigner; 5. Populism and political entrepreneurship: the universalization of German savings banks and the decline of American savings banks, 1908-34 Jeffrey Fear and R. Daniel Wadhwani; 6. The 1931 Central European Banking Crisis revisited Harold James; Part II. National Socialism, War, and the Holocaust: 7. Science and science policy during the Nazi era: the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft and the Deutsche Forzschungsgemeinschaft Reinhard Rürup; 8. 'A regulated market economy': new perspectives on the nature of the economic order of the Third Reich, 1933-9 Dieter Ziegler; 9. The personal factor in business under National Socialism: the case of Paul Reusch and Friedrich Flick Johannes Bähr; 10. Business as usual? Aryanization in practice, 1933-8 Ingo Köhler; 11. The dispossession of the Jews and the Europeanization of the Holocaust Constantin Goschler; 12. Managing the assets of the enemy in occupied France: the electrical industry Heidrun Homburg; Appendix: the historian Gerald D. Feldman, 1937-2007: a tribute Jürgen Kocka; Bibliography: the publications of Gerald D. Feldman; Index.