The Migrant's Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands

by Benjamin P. Hein

When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the "capitalist spirit."

Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country's burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other "news from America," the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the "limited liability partnership" (LLP), or "G.m.b.H." in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany's particularly robust small-business economy.

While addressing global trends, The Migrant's Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany's path to industrial modernity.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published December 11, 2025

Reviews

[Alison]

This new monograph is intended for and most suitable for an academic audience. Although it is beautifully written and contains numerous stories about the adventures of Germans living in the United States, it is driven by an explanatory framework that is likely to appeal to historians of Germany. This must be the reason why neither "United States" nor "America" appears anywhere in the title, although more than half of the action, so to speak, takes place in the US. Hein's concern is with the millions (or at least a sampling of a particularly 'industrious' subset of the millions) of German-speaking migrants who moved to the United States in the nineteenth century. An almost entirely literate group, they maintained close contact (relatively close contact) with their birth families back in the German states of Central Europe. Ideas, cultural norms, and business practices moved back and forth.

It is commonplace to read about the ways the UK was a model for Germany's explosive economy in the nineteenth century. Tara Zahra wrote a wonderful book, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, about emigrants from Central Europe to the United States not long ago, so that story is also already available. I had not yet read an argument like this one, however, that places the United States squarely in the center of a kind of socio-cultural-intellectual history of Germany's rapid industrialization.

Although for some readers any mention of industry will imply a dry read, Hein's prose is anything but. I can't wait to see more from this promising young scholar.