Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840

by William W. Hagen

Overview

This book is about ordinary villagers and landlords (Junkers) in the Prussian-German countryside, from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century. It is distinguished by its concentration on first-person testimony, and focus on the lives and fortunes of ordinary people during the era of the rise of capitalism and the modern state. The book is a major contribution to fundamental debates in German history on the origins of modern political authoritarianism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521815581
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2002
Series:	New Studies in European History
Pages:	712
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.29(h) x 1.89(d)

About the Author

William W. Hagen was born in 1942, and has taught at UC Davis since 1970. He is the author of Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980). Ordinary Prussians is the culmination of his research over the past two decades, including two years in the Prussian State archive.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Currencies, weights and measures employed in the text; Introduction: grand narratives, ordinary Prussians; 1. After the deluge: a noble lordship's sixteenth-century ascent and seventeenth-century crisis; 2. The Prussianization of the countryside? Noble lordship under early absolutism, 1648–1728; 3. Village identities in social practice and law; 4. Daily bread: village farm incomes, living standards and lifespans; 5. The Kleists' good fortune: family strategies and estate management in an eighteenth-century noble lineage; 6. Noble lordship's servitors and clients: estate managers, artisans, clergymen, domestic servants; 7. Farm servants, young and old: landless labourers in the villages and at the manor; 8. Policing crime and the moral order, 1700–1760: seigneurial court, village mayors, church, state and army; 9. Policing seigneurial rent: the Kleists' battle with their subjects' insubordination and the villagers' appeals to royal justice, 1727–1806; 10. Seigneurial bond severed: from subject farmers to freeholders, from compulsory estate labourers to free, 1806–1840; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...a richly nuanced, highly informative, revisionist, and thoroughly readable discussion of Brandenburg society. ...indispensable to any discussion of early modern rural Prussia and its place in German history." Canadian Journal of History

"...a powerful, evocative, and much-needed account." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"...with its rich mines of data and insight on rural political, economic, gender and social history, this will be an essential text for years to come." H-Net Review

"This first intensive study of Prussian landowning is pathbreaking in scope. Essential." Choice

"Hagen's masterpiece deserves to become the definitive English-language work of social history." Eric Kurlander, German Studies Review

"This work is a major achievement that not only revises conventional interpretations of Prussia and modern Germany, but also challenges the conventional agrarian dualism that distinguishes sharply between an increasingly free rural population in the west, and enserfed villagers in the east." Journal of Social History

" Ordinary Prussians is a major study, of the sort that comes along perhaps once every decade; it deserves to be read by every historian of modern Germany and by all students of the early modern era."

"Ordinary Prussians should be of great interest to anyone studying agrarian society or early modern social or everyday history. Given the book's revolutionary implications for Prussian and German political/cultural history, the book should be required reading for anyone in the field." Comitatus

"...this is an excellent, thought provoking book...Each chapter brims with compelling stories about local experience while making a larger point about the transition to modernity. All in all, this is a model study and fruitful ground for future comparative work." Sixteenth Century Journal John Theibault, voorhes, New Jersey

From the Publisher