Both the real-life experience of Europeans since the early 1990s and a generation of technical work by economists and economic historians has shaken, if not demolished, the myth of Germany’s peculiar economic superiority. The master-narrative of European economic history in the twentieth century, it turns out, was one of progressive convergence around a norm that was defined for most of the period, not by Germany, but by Britain, which in 1900 was already the world’s first fully industrial and urban society.
