Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion reiterates the arguments made in the book. It also looks back at the period before the Thirty Years’ War to highlight some of the historical origins of state formation from below, the role of local courts, and the interactions between the small states of the region and rural society. Developments in the century after 1650 had longer impacts, influencing the development of the larger states in the nineteenth century and a unified Germany after 1871. Honor disputes and slander suits, for example, were an ongoing aspect of the judicial system of Bismarck’s empire. Of course, it is impossible to draw a direct line from the popular participation in and support for state institutions in the century after the Thirty Years’ War to the wide German respect for administrative efficiency and bureaucratic centralization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the connections are suggestive.