Ordinary Prussians

Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500 1840
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-0-521-81558-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 712 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1221 g

Reihe: New Studies in European History

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 documentation on women's condition, rights and social roles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hagen, William W.

Baldwin, Peter

Clark, Christopher

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie Historische Geographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historische Geographie, Landkarten & Atlanten
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Volkswirtschaftslehre Allgemein Geschichte der VWL

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Hagen, William W.
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.