The archive.

Can economic independence be secured through dependence on distant colonies? In this 1917 article, Richard Thurnwald argues that Germany’s essential supplies must be protected from potentially hostile world markets, while less consequential commerce can remain international. His case turns on concrete connections: tropical oilseeds sustain livestock at home, and an Ottoman route toward East Africa promises access to colonial resources. Yet the security he envisages requires more than transport and agricultural investment. Compulsory indigenous labor and racially ordered schemes of supervision underpin his projected expansion of production. Read together, these proposals expose the tension within his program: reducing Germany’s vulnerability means extending control over other territories and peoples. The article offers a specific view of how wartime supply anxieties could become an argument for colonial coercion.

When the Clam ministry fell in the summer of 1917, most read its collapse as proof that parliamentary government in Austria was impossible; Schumpeter drew the opposite lesson. His memorandum to the cabinet fuses peace policy, national compromise, and fiscal stabilization into a single strategy for saving the monarchy. Peace, he argues, is not a sentimental demand but a condition of state survival: passivity will leave Austria a German satellite, powerless at the eventual settlement. The nationalities question becomes an international one, answerable only by a federalizing autonomy for Bohemia and the South Slavs that preserves the dynasty. He warns against a customs union with Berlin, rejects rule by bureaucratic evasion, and demands a ministry of politically gifted men able to command court, parliament, and press.

Sonst wird Österreich zerrissen und willenlos auf der Friedenskonferenz eine jämmerliche Rolle spielen.

English translation: “Otherwise Austria will play a wretched role at the peace conference, torn and without a will of its own.”

A coherent city cannot be designed into existence while land and credit reward fragmented, speculative building: this is the tension at the centre of Karl Pribram’s 1917 essay. He approaches urban planning through housing economics, asking what power municipalities need to turn architectural intentions into durable provision. Garden cities interest him not simply for their greenery, but for communal control of land; building regulations expose the limits of policing separate properties without directing their relationships. His distinctive concern is the gap between a unified plan and the institutions capable of sustaining it. Readers can discover how mortgage finance, ownership rights, and knowledge of rents and migration enter the making of urban form—and why Pribram seeks collective coordination without wholly sacrificing individual initiative.

How could readers navigate the accumulating mass of wartime legislation? In this brief 1917 review of the second edition of H. Jünger’s Kriegsgesetze, Emil Lederer judges the handbook by its practical organization: chronological listings, subject groupings and an alphabetical index. His praise identifies a concrete problem—the need to find one’s way through state regulation of the economy alongside changes in private and public law. He also marks the collection’s limits: coverage ends on 1 July 1916, and legislation from individual states is confined to Prussian decrees. The review offers a compact example of Lederer’s attention to the usability, scope and boundaries of a legal reference work.

How could readers find their way through Austria’s accumulating wartime economic regulations? In this brief 1917 review, Emil Lederer assesses the second edition of a directory issued by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry. His interest lies in practical access rather than policy judgement: chronological listings, explanations where decree titles are insufficient, and a dated survey of regulated prices. He especially welcomes an appendix documenting wartime economic organizations—their purposes, internal arrangements, capital and, occasionally, financial results. The review offers a compact view of what Lederer valued in economic documentation: not merely a register of rules, but accessible information about the bodies administering the wartime economy.

Technique is never self-legitimating: it is a means, and its social form depends on the purposes that command it. That claim organizes this expanded 1918 essay, which runs from prehistoric tool use to modern industry and the cultural crisis of efficiency. Schwiedland distinguishes older empirical craft from scientific technique — mastery of nature attained through knowledge — and, borrowing Sombart's stages, shows how inherited recipes are reorganized by experiment and systematic control of forces. Within the firm the technician is the oarsman, the economist the helmsman: the best process counts for nothing unless it can be financed, sold, and scaled. The century's real engine, he argues, was not sudden genius but cheaper transport and wider markets, which made every technical advantage urgent. Efficiency thus develops its own technique and comes to dominate — a rule before which culture must assert itself.

Kultur ist Selbstentfaltung und Beherrschung der Umwelt.

English translation: “Culture is self-unfolding and mastery of the environment.”

How can dearer fodder explain both falling cattle prices and rising pork prices? Karl Schlesinger makes this puzzle in wartime price analysis a test of what counts as a causal explanation in economic history. In this 1917 article, he argues that listing costs, supplies, and demand is not enough: historians must establish how these factors interact and when their effects occur. His defence of deduction rests on observed economic behaviour, not on premises insulated from experience. Yet theory is no finished toolkit: historical inquiry must help it account for adjustment over time, intervention, and monopoly. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish competing explanations of the same evidence—and shows why a change in causal ordering can change a prediction.

Behind the wartime surge in prices, Rosenberg locates not scarcity, speculation, or blocked imports but the money itself — the mass issue of irredeemable paper with which governments financed the war. Drawing the quantity theory from Bodin, Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Mill, and Fisher, and setting Menger's account of money as a generally accepted medium of exchange against Knapp's state theory, he assembles the cautionary record: Austrian paper money, the French assignats, and Confederate currency, all ending in depreciation. His sharpest pages are distributional. Inflation quietly plunders the holders of fixed money claims — bondholders, savers, pensioners, widows and orphans bound by trust funds — while enriching debtors and owners of real assets, and the law, honoring nominal value, offers the dispossessed creditor no remedy at all.

Die Rechtswissenschaft läßt hier die Gläubiger vollständig im Stiche.

English translation: “Jurisprudence here leaves creditors entirely in the lurch.”

A fixed bread price can conceal worsening scarcity, poorer flour, and a household forced to eat differently. In this 1917 article, Karl Pribram asks what food-price statistics can actually tell us when war transforms both markets and the goods being measured. Comparing chiefly Germany and Austria, he combines evidence of steep inflation with scrutiny of official ceilings, rationing, and the widening margins between grain, flour, and bread. His distinctive concern is that regulation changes not only prices but their meaning as evidence: an administered quotation cannot simply continue a free-market series. Readers can discover why a fixed basket may cease to describe household expenditure, and why, in Pribram’s account, effective price policy must reach the linked stages of production and trade rather than stop at the shop counter.

Either a theory of money folds into the general theory of exchange, or it explains nothing—this is the fault line Mises draws between catallactic and acatallactic doctrines. Acatallactic theories ground money in metal, in state command, or in analogies to blood, language, and law; catallactic theories integrate it into price formation and subjective value. From that standpoint he prosecutes Knapp's state theory of money for producing formal histories of laws and decrees while saying nothing of purchasing power, wages, or prices. He corrects the polemical label metallism, denying that Smith and Ricardo were naive metallists—Smith defended replacing gold with paper, Ricardo proposed removing coin from domestic circulation—and faults Wieser and Philippovich for absorbing Knapp's errors into the history of monetary thought.

Eine bis zu Ende gedachte Geldtheorie muß in eine Verkehrstheorie münden, sie hört damit auf akatallaktisch zu sein.

English translation: “A monetary theory thought through to the end must issue in a theory of exchange; therewith it ceases to be acatallactic.”

A monopoly designed to cheapen Vienna’s meat supply failed when Hungarian cattle suppliers boycotted its market. In this 1918 review of Karl von Peez’s study of the Landsverleger-Compagnia (1622–1624), Eugen Peter Schwiedland reads archival business history through the pressures of First World War provisioning. He singles out currency depreciation, price ceilings and dependence on external producers as points of comparison, while praising Peez’s use of company accounts and official scrutiny. The tension is concrete: imperial privilege and a sovereign’s share in the profits could not secure control over supply. This brief review offers a focused encounter with Schwiedland’s economic-historical judgement—particularly his attention to the constraints that cross-border trade placed on wartime price regulation.

Property, in this second edition of 1918, is an institution 'of overriding, all-dominating effect' whose usefulness is inseparable from its dangers — dependency, class power, and duty. Schwiedland separates factual possession from socially recognized right, then follows the tacit proviso that binds ownership — Paulsen's clause that the community may dispose otherwise where welfare requires — through agrarian history: from village use-rights, Flurzwang, and Allmende to the conquest-born great estate that concentrates power and hardens social ranks. Urban land becomes speculative capital, movable wealth becomes securities and industrial enterprise, and inheritance law carries wealth and position to descendants. Surveying personality, legal, labour, and utility theories, he finds each partial and settles on social usefulness as the only decisive ground, defending rent limits, inheritance restrictions, and expropriation where ownership threatens the common welfare.

Der Großbesitz ist der Ausdruck, aber auch ein Anreger der gesellschaftlichen Klassenscheidung.

English translation: “Large property is the expression, but also an instigator, of class division in society.”