Emil Lederer · 1911
Emil Lederer’s short review of the tenth Jahrbuch für den Oberbergamtsbezirk Dortmund, covering 1909/1910, combines an assessment of its documentary value with an account of the industrial concentration that makes this edition especially timely. Its central judgment is that detailed mining statistics provide evidence not merely about one industry but about Germany’s overall economic situation.
The review first surveys the yearbook’s coverage: enterprises, ownership, production facilities, output, employment and wages, alongside mining organizations, syndicate participation, and compulsory employment placement. Lederer emphasizes the official statistical sources and the inclusion of economically connected iron and steel production. Comprehensive coverage and regularly published data distinguish this material from information about other industries, much of which remains confidential or appears only intermittently. The yearbook’s importance thus lies in making industrial organization and economic performance unusually accessible to analysis.
Lederer then turns from the reference work’s general utility to the mergers of collieries and ironworks recorded in this particular edition. Concentration creates a problem for the very associations that organize collective industrial action:
Diese Tendenz zur fortschreitenden Konzentration der Betriebe in immer wenigeren Händen gefährdet auch die Verbandserneuerung, die 1912 für den Stahlwerksverband, 1915 für das Kohlensyndikat erfolgen müßte.
English translation: This tendency toward the progressive concentration of enterprises in ever fewer hands also endangers the renewal of the associations, which would have to take place in 1912 for the Steelworks Association and in 1915 for the Coal Syndicate.
The key distinction is between the concentration of ownership and the maintenance of agreements among producers: fewer independent owners do not necessarily mean more secure collective coordination. Lederer reports Baedeker’s position on the threatened renewals without explicitly making that position his own:
Der Verfasser des Jahrbuchs selbst tritt für die Verlängerung der Syndikatsverträge ein und sagt für den Fall des Scheiterns der Verhandlungen vernichtende Preiskämpfe voraus.
English translation: The author of the yearbook himself advocates the extension of the syndicate contracts and predicts devastating price wars should the negotiations fail.
The concluding paragraph reads the yearbook’s opening biography of Reinhard Effertz in light of this concern. Effertz’s role, alongside Kirdorf, Kleine, Muser and others, in organizing Rhenish-Westphalian mining during the 1890s supplies an example intended to strengthen solidarity among producers. Lederer thereby identifies two connected functions of the yearbook: it documents the industry with exceptional statistical breadth, while its commemorative framing supports the preservation of syndicate cooperation against renewed destructive competition.
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