Project Title: Spoils of war: The economic consequences of the Great War in Central Europe
Source: ERC Starting Grant, €1.49 million
Spoils of WAR will set a new standard in the economic history of the world wars. It aims to measure systematically how World War I affected (i) industrial structure, (ii) business performance and (iii) living standards in the regions of the Habsburg Empire. We can directly account for the impact of the war on industrial development, independent from the outcomes of postwar disintegration, using abundant, yet understudied, primary data on war spending in the Habsburg Empire. We can detect how the wartime reallocation of resources affected changes in economic conditions (i-iii) and their regional variation. Case studies on key industries can help to demonstrate how they perceived these changes and what strategies they developed to address them. The project will break through traditional boundaries between economic and business history and integrate the analytical tools of both disciplines. It will shift focus in the recent economic history of the wars from the Second to the First World War and use newly developed methods in both historical economic geography and comparative business history.