The argument here is that German industry and finance were preprogrammed to participate in the murder of the Jews by decisions made before the war that could not be reversed. Big business thus collaborated fully in the process, becoming “bagmen” and “fences” for stolen Jewish property and providers of goods and services to death camps.

This short summary chapter recalls the “arc of corruption” that the book depicts, the caricatures of German corporate behavior that the Nuremberg trials fostered, and their consequences for historical interpretation. The book concludes by recentering the consequences of business leaders’ actions, rather than the pragmatic motivations that produced these actions, in any judgment of their conduct.

This chapter explains why and how the Nazi regime created a mixed economy in which property remained private but profits were largely controlled by government policy. As Germany became a monopsony, an economy dominated by a single buyer, in this case the German state, large firms adapted their business to serving the state’s desires and demands, thus becoming agents and servants of them.

The chapter argues that Germany’s major corporate leaders largely agreed between 1918 and 1932 on a self-serving analysis of Germany’s economic problems and an unpopular approach to dealing with them (the Consensus) but splintered and dithered in identifying an appropriate political vehicle for these views (the Dissensus). As a result, they neither defended the Republic nor brought Hitler to power.

This chapter examines the rapid mobilization and almost complete militarization of the German economy long before Goebbels called for total war, and even before Albert Speer arrived on the economic scene to engage in the mythification that long has surrounded studies of Germany’s economic war effort. Just as the insufficiency of the nation’s resources made achieving Hitler’s territorial aspirations ultimately impossible, that insufficiency drove production efforts that increasingly alienated executives but also induced them to participate in crazed and costly schemes to save themselves and their firms.

This chapter dissects the defects of both the prosecution and defense cases at postwar trials of German big business figures, and then the role of German corporations in creating and propagating a legend of corporate “decency” under compulsion during the Third Reich for decades thereafter, while also concealing the surviving corporate records that would have undermined this legend.

Chapter 3 focuses on notarial credit. Because notaries drafted various kinds of contracts related to individuals, families, and household wealth, scholars have emphasized the exceptional access they had to a vast array of information. With such information, especially regarding creditworthiness, notaries could overcome asymmetric information, lower transaction costs, and match lenders and borrowers effectively, precluding the role of banks until the nineteenth century. Recent historiography highlights, therefore, their role as intermediaries between investors and borrowers. In rural areas, where most individuals knew each other, were related to each other, and conducted business on a daily basis with each other, this brokerage role bore another meaning. This chapter look closely at the various types of notarial contracts and their characteristics.

This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

In 2008, the American housing bubble unexpectedly burst sending property values plummeting. Thousands of American families had ceased refinancing their household loans. Their adjustable-rate mortgages far outpaced the value of their homes, causing a wave of foreclosures across the country. An estimated nine million households lost their homes because the subprime loans they had subscribed to were subject to speculation on the stock market and to predatory lending, making them incredibly toxic. In the meantime, banks and insurance companies, which had neither anticipated the bubble nor the high number of failed payments, faced huge difficulties. Real estate is not only the largest single form of wealth, it is also the most important form of collateral for borrowing.

The evolution of banking regulation and banking crises are highly intertwined. The post–World War Two period was marked the globalisation of banking and increased banking instability. This initiated a trend towards harmonised frameworks for banking regulation, leading to a common framework for measuring capital adequacy in 1988 (Basel I). The path towards the Basel framework in 1988 was very different in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. When statutory capital requirements were introduced in Switzerland in 1935, most banks were indifferent. This indifference changed towards the end of the 1950s, when capital regulation became a bottleneck for growth. The United Kingdom lacked the experience of a solvency crisis during the 1930s, resulting in capital in banking becoming an almost irrelevant topic. It took until the secondary banking crisis in 1973/4 for banks’ regulation to be reconsidered. The United States did experience a deep banking crisis in the 1930s but introduced statutory capital requirements only in the 1980s, following increased domestic banking instability and the threat of potentially high losses from the Latin American debt crisis.