Industrial Revolution
During the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution transformed the city’s economy. Berlin became Germany’s main rail hub and a center of locomotive manufacturing. The city became a leader in the manufacture of other kinds of machinery as well, and developed an important chemical industry sector. Toward the end of the 19th century, Berlin became a world leader in the then cutting-edge sector of electrical equipment manufacturing. As the de facto center of the German Zollverein, or Customs Union, and later the seat of the Reichsbank, Berlin became Germany’s banking and financial center as well.
Berlin suffered from both the German hyperinflation of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The city’s economy revived as a center of weapons production under the Nazis, but it lost a pool of entrepreneurial talent when the Nazis forced Jewish businessmen to sell their holdings and ultimately massacred most who did not flee Germany.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Berlin
Famous quotes containing the words industrial and/or revolution:
“We agree fully that the mother and unborn child demand special consideration. But so does the soldier and the man maimed in industry. Industrial conditions that are suitable for a stalwart, young, unmarried woman are certainly not equally suitable to the pregnant woman or the mother of young children. Yet “welfare” laws apply to all women alike. Such blanket legislation is as absurd as fixing industrial conditions for men on a basis of their all being wounded soldiers would be.”
—National Woman’s Party, quoted in Everyone Was Brave. As, ch. 8, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
““I suppose with the French Revolution for a father and the Russian Revolution for a mother, you can very well dispense with a family,” he observed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)