REVIEWS 173 Eddie, S. A. Freedom’s Price: Serfdom, Subjection, and Reform in Prussia, 1648– 1848. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xx + 356 pp. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index. £65.00. This is a book on Brandenburg-Prussia’s agrarian economy at the cusp of the modern age. The first section considers the long-term effects of the Thirty Years’ War, then concentrates on the reign of Frederick II and leads up to the Prussian defeat by Napoleon in 1806 and the October Edict of 1807, which granted personal freedom to subjects on the land. The second part focuses on the consequences of peasant liberation and agrarian reform in Prussia until 1821.After1648theHohenzollerndynastysteadilyexpanded,mostsignificantly through the conquest of Silesia (1740–56), the illegal seizure of Polish Prussia and other parts of Western Poland (1772–93) and the acquisition of the Rhineland (1815). Most economic historians have focused on micro-historical case studies spanning over several centuries, such as William Hagen’s study of the Stavenow estates or Hartmut Harnisch’s work on Boitzenburg. S. A. Eddie’s goal appears daunting in a different way: it aims at the relationship of lords, peasants and government across all of Brandenburg-Prussia’s provinces during two centuries. Moreover he aspires to replace a traditional, moralizing approach to peasant poverty, first championed in the 1880s by Georg Knapp’s influential work on peasant liberation, with a revisionist analysis of the distribution of capital and the effect of reform during a period of fundamental economic and demographic change. Such revisionism is not new. Almost a decade ago Hagen’s masterly study, Ordinary Prussians (Cambridge, 2007) set the tone by pointing out that peasants were anything but an amorphous, oppressed and passive mass of eternally suffering chattels. It owes much to the pioneering work by former East German social historians, whom Eddie’s book at times unjustly chastizes for not being what they never could have been under the constraints of a Marxist dictatorship. Eddie’s polemic against other historians who, despite enjoying full intellectual freedom, would not depart from the orthodox view that only the nobility, and never the peasantry, gained from manorialism and the Prussian reforms of 1807 and 1811, is refreshing at first. There is, however, an unnecessary relentlessness in Eddie’s polemical tone, when the book’s hard-headed analysis actually would do more to further his revisionist cause. Moreover, it is odd that another recent revisionist work, Markus Cerman’s Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2012), was left unmentioned altogether. In the first part Eddie pays particular attention to Konservation, the duty of the landowner to protect subjects on his land in a mutual feudal relationship. Konservation, as a system of contractual insurance against inflation, natural catastrophes and penury, Eddie argues, must not be dismissed as cynical SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 174 noble paternalism. It particularly benefitted tenants with less secure rights and tenures such as Laß-peasants (on temporary leases to be cancelled at any time). Subjects with more secure hereditary rights to their property, larger plots and greater capital were happy to commute labour dues, employing labour themselves, lending money not least to struggling landlords and engaging in free trade. In fact, in the later eighteenth century, peasants’ income rose making many subjects wealthy, while fixed rent income mounted pressure on the noble economy. Here Eddie adds an important perspective. In contrast to more conventional approaches to lord-subject relations, his analysis focuses on capital as the most important driver of change from the second half of the eighteenth century. At the turn of the eighteenth century, over 80 per cent of tenants in East Prussia, for example, had secure (hereditary) tenure. Yet evidence also suggests that less secure tenure (e.g. common in Silesia) benefitted some peasants who had fallen on hard times but wanted to maintain flexibility through temporary leases. Voluntary ‘opting into serfdom’ was not unheard of. Life was ‘not a bed of roses, but neither a bed of nails’ (p. 89). Such seems the emphasis at times on the well-being of peasants that the author felt the need to dedicate a whole chapter on peasant...
Read full abstract
Oct 9, 2024
Miroslav Radivojević 
Open Access
