Zoom-Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/68503202024?pwd=YWZWUkJHb1NTTjBOcVAvcFYzaGNvdz09#success

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Meeting-ID: 685 0320 2024

Kenncode: 477780

The nationwide coal shortage and price surge in 1900 marked a turning point in the history of antimonopoly in Germany before the First World War. During the crisis, the criticism mounting from daily newspapers blamed the monopolistic practices of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, a cartel that controlled nearly 60% of coal provision in Germany during this period, for causing the crisis and triggered the rise of antimonopoly critique against German cartels in the following decades. While previous accounts have rightly captured the crisis's importance for the development of the antimonopoly movement, these works took the responsibility of the Coal Syndicate for the crisis as given. However, recent studies of the discursive histories of economic and financial crises have demonstrated that crisis entails a discursive process of attributing responsibility to a handful of corporate actors, suggesting that analyzing the blaming process leads historians to the previously neglected elements of the crisis dynamic. Building on this approach, this paper traces how major newspapers throughout 1900 constructed the fault of the Coal Syndicate's monopoly in creating the crisis. In addition, using materials from the Coal Syndicate's corporate archive, the paper examines how the cartel responded to the criticism and ended up fueling rather than relieving it. By tracking the blame game between the press and the cartel, this paper argues the following two points: (1) the coal shortage became the target of intensive media discussions in the autumn of 1900, a few months after the Coal Syndicate handled the actual tightening of the coal market, reflecting household consumers fear of the lack of heating fuel in the coming winter; (2) in response to the anxiety, the newspapers developed a simplified narrative that attributes the crisis to the Coal Syndicate and symbolizes the cartel as an immoral exploiter of household consumers.

Shaun Yajima is PhD student at the Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo and visiting Ruhr University Bochum for 2022/23. His PhD dissertation examines a coal monopoly and the impact of consumer protests on its business practice in Imperial Germany (ca. 1880-1920).