many at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries:—
Six big German banks had:24
| In the years |
Branches in Germany |
Savings Bank and Exchange Offices |
Participation in other banks (by shares) |
Total No. of Establishments | |
| 1895 | ... | 16 | 14 | 1 | 42 |
| 1900 | ... | 21 | 40 | 8 | 80 |
| 1911 | ... | 104 | 276 | 63 | 450 |
We thus see the rapid extension of the network of financial canals which cover the whole country, centralising all capital and all sources of revenue, transforming hundreds of scattered economic enterprises into a national capitalist unity, then into an international capitalist unity. The decentralisation that Schulze-Gaevernitz speaks of in the passage previously quoted (this author being an exponent of bourgeois political economy), consists in the subordination to one single centre of an increasing number of enterprises which were formerly autonomous or rather of a strictly local importance. In reality there is centralisation, an increase in the importance and power of the monopolies.
In the older capitalist countries this "banking network" is still more fine in mesh. In Britain (including Ireland), in 1910, there were 7,151 branches of banks. Four big banks had each more than 400 of these (from 447 to 689); four had more than 200 branches; and eleven more than 100.
In France, the three most important banks (the Crédit Lyonnais, the Comptoir Nationale d'Escompte and the Société Générale), extended their operations and their network of establishments in the following manner.25
