This is the long-awaited English-language edition of Professor Borchardt's brilliant and controversial essays on German economic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays are nontechnical in character, and thus should be accessible to a wide range of historians. In particular they reinforce and illustrate the sheer usefulness of economic history for political historians and indeed for anyone interested in how detailed historical evidence can be brought to bear on apparently intractable problems. The essays deal in the main with three topics: the determinants of economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany; the major patterns of Germany's economic growth in the longer term up to the present day; and the structural crisis of the Weimar Republic before the slump of the 1930s, and the total absence of any economic "miracle weapon" against Hitler's seizure of power. In particular, Professor Borchardt's controversial interpretations of the economic history of the interwar period have already triggered a lively debate which will be enhanced by the appearance of an English edition.