OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION President, William R. Thayer, Cambridge. First Vice-President, Edward Channing, Cambridge. Second Vice-President, Jean Jules Jusserand, Washington. Secretary, Waldo G. Leland, 1140 Woodward Building, Washington. Treasurer, Charles Moore, Detroit.1 Secretary of the Council, Evarts B. Greene, Urbana, Ill. Executive Council (in addition to the above-named officers): apr 16,1919 21941 George L. Burr, 1438 Worthington C. Ford,2 Herbert E. Bolton, 1953 Henry E. Bourne, 1946 William E. Dodd, 1940 Walter L. Fleming, 1932 1927 Samuel B. Harding, AMR 54:479 Committee on Programme for the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting: Elbert J. Benton, Western Reserve University, chairman; A. E. R. Boak, Henry E. Bourne, William E. Dodd, Dana C. Munro. Committee on Local Arrangements: Myron T. Herrick, chairman; Wallace H. Cathcart, vice-chairman; Samuel B. Platner, secretary, 1961 Ford Drive, Cleveland; Elroy M. Avery, Elbert J. 1 For the present, and for purposes of routine business at all times, the treasurer may be addressed at 1140 Woodward Building, Washington, D. C. 2 The names from that of Mr. Schouler to that of Mr. Ford are those of ex-presidents. Benton, C. W. Bingham, Henry E. Bourne, A. S. Chisholm, Committee on Nominations: Charles H. Ambler, University of West Virginia, chairman; Christopher B. Coleman, Carl R. Fish, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Victor H. Paltsits. Editors of the American Historical Review: Edward P. Cheyney, Committee on the Justin Winsor Prize: Frederic L. Paxson, Army Committee on the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize: Ruth Putnam, 2025 Conference of Historical Societies: Augustus H. Shearer, Grosvenor Advisory Board of the Historical Outlook: Henry Johnson, Teachers College, Columbia University, chairman; Frederic Duncalf, Fred M. Fling, Margaret McGill, James Sullivan, Oscar H. Williams. Special Committee on Policy: Charles H. Haskins, Harvard University, chairman; Carl Becker, William E. Dodd, Guy S. Ford, Dana C. Munro. Special Committee on the Historical Congress at Rio de Janeiro: Bernard Moses, University of California, chairman; Julius Klein, 1824 Belmont Road, Washington, secretary; Charles L. Chandler, Charles H. Cunningham, Percy A. Martin. Special Committee on American Educational and Scientific Enterprises in the Ottoman Empire: Edward C. Moore, Harvard Uni- . versity, chairman; James H. Breasted, Albert H. Lybyer. THE PRUSSIAN PEASANTRY BEFORE 18071 ONE of the things which contributed to the tragedy of 1914 was the fact that Prussians had written and studied their own history overmuch and the rest of the world had studied and described it far too little. The world outside the Hohenzollern monarchy knew something of Bismarck and Frederick the Great and their military and political triumphs, but very little of the consistent political-military, social, and economic organization of the state they typified. A complete picture of this anomalous, semimodernized, medieval creation as it was preserved and projected into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has yet to be written in any language other than German. The following article attempts nothing more than a description of agricultural conditions in Prussia at the opening of the nineteenth century. Its value lies less in its being the first attempt to do this in English than in the fact that the feudal agriculturalism it presents remained a persistent force in the social and political organization of the Prussia which in the last fifty years entered into the larger field of German and then of European and world history. Its essential preservation far into the democratized age of the Industrial Revolution is basic to an understanding of the political philosophy of a dominant Prussian feudal agrarian caste devoted to militarism and monarchy by divine grace. The task of describing accurately the condition of the peasantry in Brandenburg-Prussia before 1809 is a difficult one. The land we call Prussia was a patchwork of many territorial conquests and inheritances. Some of the provinces had but recently come under Hohenzollern rule. Each territorial unit had a long historic past differing perhaps from that of every other accretion. It is not surprising therefore if variety, rather than uniformity, is the rule in agrarian tenures and conditions. Few general statements will cover accurately the areas east and west of the Elbe, and apply with equal force to the Rhine provinces, Westphalia, Silesia, the Mark of Brandenburg, Prussia, and the Polish annexations, and to the 1 This paper was prepared, essentially as it is, before the existence of war between the United States and Germany, as part of a larger study of Prussian conditions during the Reform Period. 2 The official designation until after the Reform Period was not Prussia but "all the provinces and lands of his royal majesty ", the King of Prussia. peasants in all areas whether on private estates or the royal domains. Such generalizations if correct are not only few in number, but must be carefully worded. The peasantry in Brandenburg-Prussia were either free or servile. The number of free peasants was very small and many of these migrated into the cities. Of the free peasants still remaining on the land, the most considerable class was that of the so-called Cölmer, chiefly in East Prussia. They were descendants or successors of peasant farmers brought in as settlers by the Teutonic Knights, or of colonists introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and given special privileges as free, non-noble landowners under the law of the city of Culm. Similar small groups in other parts of the monarchy under different names formed striking exceptions to the great mass of the peasantry, who were in some way attached to the soil and burdened with services that originally sprang from the agricultural tenures and customs and inhered in the land but threatened frequently to become personal obligations. If thus transformed and increased at the will of the lord they would reduce the peasant to something like the slavery found in Russia under Catherine II. The characteristic and predominant condition was the division of the land into large holdings called estates. Their size varied. Those in the east and northeast were usually larger than those west of the Elbe, exceeding in some cases ten thousand acres. These estates or large farms were of two kinds: I, the private estates, owned chiefly by nobles, including also those held by corporations, ecclesiastical foundations, and municipalities, and, 2, those formed by leasing the land in the royal domains. These domain lands comprised about one-fifth of the entire area of the kingdom and were 3 General summaries with bibliographies will be found under the titles Bauern, Bauernbefreiung, etc., in L. Elster, ed., Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft (second ed., Jena, 1906), and in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena, 1891 ff.). The best brief account is K. J. Fuchs, Die Epochen der Deutschen Agrargeschichte und Agrarpolitik (Jena, 1898). This address is translated with moderate success in T. N. Carver, Selected Readings in Rural Economics (Boston, 1916), Pp. 223-253. An excellent review of the literature up to 1900 is given in Conrad's Jahrbücher, LXXV. 337-368, 478-514. 4 W. von Brünneck contends that the development into an allodial holding was gradual and was finished by 1685. Zur Geschichte des Grundeigentums in Ost- und Westpreussen, pt. I., Die Kölmischen Güter (Berlin, 1891). It is well to remember that the Cölmer, though they could sell their land, had to have the consent of the lord when their holding lay within his estate. Cf. Hans Plehn in Forschungen zur Brand.-Preuss. Geschichte, XVII. 111 ff. 5 Cölmer was, however, the usual name applied to all free peasants by whatever right the status was obtained. leased out for long terms. The general conditions upon them conformed to the customs of the region as to services and payments from the peasant, but were subject to modification by the terms laid down in the lease by the royal will. These royal domains were so entirely in the king's control that up to 1807 the chief efforts at reform by royal decree had been in improving peasant conditions on them and trusting to the influence of such a good example on the neighboring private noble landowners, but with little practical result. The lands in these two types of estates were divided between the small holdings of various kinds assigned to the peasants and the land retained directly by the lord and cultivated for him, chiefly by the forced labor of these same peasants. These labor services were of two kinds: farm labor in tilling the fields and gathering the crops, and compulsory domestic service, which was often extended. to include agricultural day labor. This so-called domestic service was exacted of the minor children of the peasants, usually for a period of three years, but the term was generally extensible to the time when they married and settled down. There was frequently a small payment that might be called wages, but the institution was justifiable only as a sort of apprentice training in the tasks the younger peasants might have to perform later for themselves. As the obligation to render up the young men and women for this service sprang from obligations attaching to the soil, it might even be required by one peasant of another in certain cases, or the superfluous services of this type would be assigned by the lord to some peasant who could utilize them. The evident advantage of this system was that it held the minor children to the estate at the age when they were most likely to break away. This was a real gain to the landlord in an agricultural state, where the problem of farm labor is always uppermost, and it served also the purposes of a military state which under the "canton system" assigned a certain number of households as the recruiting ground for a royal regiment. It may be added that this particular institution of forced domestic service (Gesindedienst) as it existed in BrandenburgPrussia was of comparatively recent origin, having developed, evidently, since the end of the Thirty Years' War. This assigning to the lord the services of the most capable of the peasant's half-grown children was often a subject of just and bitter complaint. The small wages, not sufficient to clothe the housemaid, 6 For an interesting study of this institution in the Mark of Brandenburg, cf. E. Lennhoff, Das Ländliche Gesindewesen in der Kurmark Brandenburg vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Breslau, 1906-Heft 79 in Gierke's Untersuchungen, etc.). |