As a historical period, as well as a subfield of European history, early modernity has a serious problem. No one quite knows when it begins, when it ends, or what its defining characteristics might be. (See, for instance, Jack Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 [1998]: 249–84; and Randolph Starn, “The Early Modern Muddle.” Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 3 [2002]: 296–307.) Economic and social historians working in the postwar period perhaps created the problem because they found that the old categories of Medieval, Renaissance/Reformation, and Modern, did not sit well with the new chronologies emerging out of their analyses of long swings in price and population movements. For them, the defining episode of the newly discovered early modern period became the so-called crisis of the seventeenth century, understood initially as the log-jam in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and only belatedly found to have ramifications in the cultural, intellectual, and political realms as well. Yet, as a growing chorus of scholarship suggests, this book most certainly included, the real crisis may just turn out to be that of a historical period in search of an identity.

There has been no shortage of monographs over the past three decades probing for evidence of the crisis in a multiplicity of specific locales, often with an eye towards adding coherence to the larger story of a European transition to the modern growth economies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet that larger story remains elusive at best. Even though some peasants starved, others did not; growth rates varied across both time and space simultaneously and could easily reverse; and the decline of one region, or branch of production, might well redound to the benefit of others. In the midst of this plurality of experience it is hard to sustain compelling narratives about larger processes of social change, be they Marxist, Malthusian, Weberian, or world-systemic. That such change occurred seems obvious, at least in hindsight. Nonetheless, an unbridgeable gap persists between the local monographs and the treatises driven by theories of broad social, demographic, or economic change.

Govind Sreenivasan begins his decidedly monographic study of peasant economy and society in the south-German Swabian region of Ottobeuren with a provocative and wide-ranging discussion of the historiographical problems. Despite its intrinsic interest, the survey nonetheless feels like the introduction to another book, perhaps one the author already has in mind. For once past it, the book overwhelmingly focuses on the particular. It is archivally dense, only surfacing periodically from the minutest details of individual experience to the intermediate plane of local demographic, price, agricultural yield, or land sales statistics. Even less often are the broad themes of the introduction revisited. Not surprisingly then, it is hard for the reader to follow the traces of any high-level argument across the long, and sometimes meandering, substantive chapters. Those whose intellectual training is social scientific in nature, rather than historical per se, are likely to find this frustrating.

Not that the book is without merit, far from it. The richness of the material consulted, the intimate details of family life, farm maintenance, and land transfer revealed, and the impressive length of time (two and a half centuries) subjected to coherent analysis, all make this a remarkable achievement of historical scholarship. Sreenivasan successfully demonstrates that social change (even demographic change) can be forthcoming in an environment ruled by relatively stable Malthusian constraints (p. 6). In particular, he demonstrates that the population of Ottobeuren ceased to grow again until far into the industrial age after its halt in the last third of the sixteenth century, even after agricultural surpluses began to grow again at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War (p. 123). Some new “structural constraint” had come into play, but it was hardly the “traditional production crisis” of the normative story told about this period (p. 145). His rejection of the crisis mode of analysis, so central to both neo-Malthusian and Marxist scholarship of early modern Europe, is well supported by both the richness of detail and the duration of data about actual peasant experience with food production, demographic reproduction, and entitlement to resources (pp. 132–33). Finally, his claim that the fragility of individual lives “was more than made up for by the robustness of the institutions [of] marriage, inheritance, and property holding” is persuasive (p. 314), even if it left this reader with the nagging feeling that in our own lives that would not be an acceptable trade-off.

Nonetheless, it is not sure that the book brings us any closer to solving the problem of the true nature and scope of early modernity. Indeed, monographs such as this one are most successful precisely in highlighting those problems. What can we really know about the larger forces at work in Europe, or in the world for that matter, based on the experience of peasants in the lower alpine fastnesses of the Allgau? Can we find parallels to the incredible control of property Sreenivasan finds at work in this community in others? And if so, should we expect similar social, demographic, and economic outcomes to proceed from it? How did the property relations of this community contribute to, or hinder, the transition of Europe more generally to a situation of modern economic growth? Most importantly, what was the impact on other regions, or even other continents, of all the displaced individuals (noninheriting young people mostly) forced out of this community by the very robustness of its institutions? Displaced people are precisely the ones we most expect to take the lead in sweeping changes in economy and society, a point which brings us back full circle to where we began. It may well be that this and other regions' steady-state export of human surplus helped sustain more dynamic processes elsewhere. Even locally compelling stories do not materialize in a vacuum.