r (1870), its industrial base recovered fairly quickly (239). On the other hand, France's heavy industry failed to recover from a recession starting in 1882 because of complex factors that hit at about the same time: "disastrous diseases, which seriously affected the wine and silk industries for almost two decades . . . bankrupt railways; the worldwide return to protectionism . . . French tariffs . . . and a bitter commercial war with Italy" (Cameron 239). These conditions were not present in England at the time.
As an early industrializer, Germany was the latest, or as Cameron says, almost a laggard (242). The residue of feudalism, agrarianism, and disunited statelets in the early third of the 19th century retarded industrial development in ways unlike the British case. Germany's industry was marked by the large size of the enterprises, in comparison to France and England. There was also the factor of nationalism, initially in the creation of the Zollverein, a kind of European Econom
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