The German agricultural worker, 1815–1914

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the German agricultural worker from the early nineteenth‐century abolition of serfdom up to 1914. Initially, peasant labour services and the compulsory farm service of peasant youth on Junker farms were replaced by contractually hired farm servants and the cottager system. The latter involved the exchange of labour for an allocation of the land, whereby the worker become a petty commodity producer and also an employer of labour, in the form of the ancillary workers (Hofgänger) he was obliged to provide. Subsequently, from the middle decades of the century, this form of labour was increasingly replaced by confined labourers living in tied cottages, who were virtually landless and paid largely in kind; and were therefore effectively economic objects. At the same time, especially from the 1870s, conditions necessitated increasing reliance upon labourers receiving cash wages. However, this category remained relatively small, and largely impervious to socialist ideology, on account of a growing dependence of German agriculture on foreign (Polish) seasonal migrants.