Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840

by William W. Hagen

• ISBN13: 9780521037006
• ISBN10: 052103700X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-11-05
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book gives voice, in unusual depth and immediacy, to ordinary villagers and landlords (Junkers) in the Prussian-German countryside, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The trials and fortunes of everyday life come into view - in the family, the workplace, in the private lives of both men and women, in courtroom and jailhouse, and under the gaze of the rising Prussian monarchy's officials and army officers. What emerges is a many-dimensioned, long-term study of a rural society, inviting comparisons on a world-historical level. The book also puts to a test the possibilities of empirical historical knowledge at the microhistorical or 'grass-roots' level. But it also reconceptualizes, on the scale of Prussian-German and European history, the rise of agrarian capitalism, challenging views widespread in the economic history literature on the common people's working standards, and including massive new documentation on women's condition, rights and social roles.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Currencies, weights and measures employed in the text

Introduction: grand narratives, ordinary Prussians

After the deluge: a noble lordship's sixteenth-century ascent and seventeenth-century crisis

The Prussianization of the countryside? Noble lordship under early absolutism, 1648-1728

Village identities in social practice and law

Daily bread: village farm incomes, living standards and lifespans

The Kleists' good fortune: family strategies and estate management in an eighteenth-century noble lineage

Noble lordship's servitors and clients: estate managers, artisans, clergymen, domestic servants

Farm servants, young and old: landless labourers in the villages and at the manor

Policing crime and the moral order, 1700-1760: seigneurial court, village mayors, church, state and army

Policing seigneurial rent: the Kleists' battle with their subjects' insubordination and the villagers' appeals to royal justice, 1727-1806

Seigneurial bond severed: from subject farmers to freeholders, from compulsory estate labourers to free, 1806-1840

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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