In the history of enterprise, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen as German economist (1818–1888).
Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen was born at Hamm in 1818. His recorded nationality is Germany.
Industrialisation changed the scale of everything: factories, railways, joint-stock capital and the first modern corporations.
He worked as banker, politician and economist.
Business reputations are unusually sensitive to the decade in which they were made.
That the business was built from Germany shaped it: capital, regulation and market size differ by country, and they decide what is even attemptable.
Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen died in 1888, aged 70. What remains is the enterprise and its consequences, which is the only durable measure of a commercial life.
