Economic Changes in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe
In 1873, Europe’s economy tilted sharply downward – prices, interest rates, and profits all fell, and remained low in many regions until the mid-1890s. Contemporaries referred to this as the Great Depression in Trade and Agriculture. In hindsight, “great depression” may seem an inaccurate label for a period that saw a continuing rise in world production and growing levels of foreign investment in new industrial economies, but to many Europeans living in these decades, this depression seemed depressing indeed. Both agriculture and business were hit hard. By the 1890s, the price of wheat had fallen to only one-third of what it had been in the 1860s. Business owners found that their profit margins were squeezed as the prices of finished products fell, often by as much as 50 percent, while labor and production costs tended to remain much more static.
