On May 9, 1873, the stock exchange in Vienna crashed. The financial carnage in Vienna spread to Berlin, because Germans had helped create the Austrian boom by investing gold that had flowed as reparations from Paris to Berlin following the Franco-Prussian War. Germany suffered when Austria went bust.23 Gold was one commodity circuit; wheat formed another. It connected Vienna to London and ultimately to New York and Chicago and the prairies beyond. The Austro-Hungarian economy depended on its exports of wheat to Britain. Around 1871, however, British grain purchases tilted toward North America
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