Water, Politics, and Disease: The Diffusion of Water Supply Infrastructure in Urban Germany, 1850-1913

This article examines the causes and consequences of the diffusion of modern water supplies in Germany during the period from 1850 to 1913. It offers a comprehensive view of sanitary investments with a newly digitized dataset on water supply infrastructure construction dates for almost three hundred urban settlements. The diffusion of these investments was rather slow until the 1870s and then accelerated in subsequent decades, mostly because of financial constraints and then increasing demand for water. Regressing water supply infrastructure with mortality indicators shows that water supply improvements are associated with declines in mortality, but that their effect is small. In the absence of efficient systems of sewage disposal, water supply improvements had a limited impact on mortality rates.