So closely were German banking and industrial enterprises interwoven by this time that some historians have even spoken of ‘organized capitalism’ in which open-market competition became increasingly controlled by large conglomerates, often with close links to the government. Certainly, by 1907 cartelization covered 90 per cent of the German market in paper, 74 per cent in mining, and 50 per cent in crude steel. By 1900 there were 275 cartels in operation in Germany, in all branches of industry, some 200 of them created between the years 1879 and 1890.
