Since so much of what distinguishes Germany's social-economic development from that of other advanced capitalist societies derives from the prominence of the handicrafts (Handwerk) and their institutional legacy, it is regrettable that artisan sightings have become so rare in recent central European scholarship.Footnote 1 It is especially so because disparaging postwar historiographic portrayals of “backward” late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans leave us without a way to understand the emergence of a prosperous Mittelstand of small and medium-sized craft producers in the postwar years. Moreover, inasmuch as the existence of a vibrant, legally distinct class of handicraft firms constitutes one of the most striking features of the modern German political economy, we need an account of how it evolved and why.Footnote 2 Furthermore, without this, we have no way to explain several other distinctive “peculiarities” of German institutional arrangements: an educational system that directs a majority of young Germans to practically oriented, work-based apprenticeships supplemented by part-time schooling instead of academically oriented, full-time secondary schools; a labor market that effectively professionalized all occupations and limited the creation of mere “jobs”; and a training system that, as it diffused from the craft to the industrial and service sectors, reinforced Germany's historic manufacturing preference for producing diversified, high-quality goods and services.Footnote 3 In short, no history of modern German economic, social, or political development can afford to dispense with artisans or their institutions.
Why, then, the current paucity of interest in artisans? Two forces bear most of the responsibility: a “linguistic turn” that eschewed social, labor, and economic questions that had once focused attention on the crafts; and a social-scientific literature that portrayed artisans as outmoded petty producers destined by industrialization to the dustbin of history. According to this, unable to earn at market a place in modern society, they turned to inherited political strategies to rescue themselves from extinction.Footnote 4 This literature proved especially important in Sonderweg accounts of Germany's path to modernization, one supposedly distinguished from the west (particularly Britain, France, and the United States) by the persistence of “premodern” social structures and norms. Sonderweg historians alleged that conservative elites in the late Second Empire exchanged legal protection for political support by transforming guilds and other craft associations into “illiberal” public-law corporations that raised prices by limiting entry into the trades. Given a new, artificial lease on life, this vulnerable, status-obsessed class subsequently proved crucial to the rise of National Socialism when the economic and political crises of late Weimar threatened it anew.Footnote 5
Three decades of subsequent scholarship have shown, however, that the Nazis owed their rise to power to broad electoral support, not just fearful artisans and shopkeepers—a finding that weakened historiographic interest in both groups and their fate.Footnote 6 As artisans and the logic of economic development became less central to mainline historiographic concerns, old assumptions endured. This explains why David Blackbourn, a pioneering critic of the Sonderweg thesis, summarized the flurry of Wilhelmine craft legislation that transformed and modernized the crafts as “an exercise in rhetoric, not a policy designed to succeed.”Footnote 7 Reflecting the intellectual legacies of Marxism, postwar neoliberal economic theory, and a lack of recent scholarship, this judgment ignores the market-affirming, self-help thrust of much of this legislation, particularly the centerpiece of the imperial bureaucracy's efforts to uplift and modernize the crafts: the Handicraft Law (Gewerbeordnung) of 1897. The legal cornerstone of modern Handwerk, this legislation served the “modernization” of the crafts by diffusing market-oriented, education-based trades promotion policies from their place of origin in the German southwest to Prussia and, subsequently, other parts of the Empire.Footnote 8
A comprehensive account of the evolution of the crafts and its impact on education, professionalization, labor relations, and industrial strategy exceeds the scope of a single article. What I propose to do here instead is to place the origins of Wilhelmine Germany's modernizing trades promotion policies in the specific social geography of the German southwest, and explain how and why educational uplift and craft corporatism of a specific kind lay at the heart of these initiatives. I contend that the diffusion of ideas, market information, technology, production skills and design, business methods, and so on that underlay industrialization was slowed or blocked by the southwest's remoteness from large urban centers; its dispersed settlement patterns; its profusion of small, craft-oriented producers with limited financial resources; and its dependence on diffuse, renewable energy and material resources that reinforced geographic dispersion.Footnote 9 In response, the southwestern states—Baden and Württemberg in particular—built formal, educationally oriented, self-help institutions to disseminate information, technology, and skill, thereby compensating local producers for the economic disadvantages of their regional social geography.
This institution building was not easy, rapid, or cheap. And though a rich experience with guild-based, corporatist ideas and practices shaped the process, the path to modern craft corporatism had nothing to do with the “survival” of outmoded institutional “residues” that, according to Sonderweg historians, distorted and delayed Germany's political-economic development. On the contrary, industrial associations (Gewerbevereine), established as voluntary self-help organizations in the 1830s, had replaced compulsory guilds throughout the southwest as the predominant form of city and large-town craft organization by the 1860s. Liberal in orientation, they worked closely with state bureaucrats in articulating and implementing handicraft bootstrapping initiatives. As the cost and the need for regulatory oversight of these programs grew, however, so did pressures to distribute the financial and regulatory burdens fairly. As we shall see, since many artisans refused to contribute to these collective undertakings voluntarily as long as they could get a “free ride,” industrial associations began to push for the creation of public law corporations with mandatory membership, fees, and duties. In contrast to traditional guilds, however, these corporatist arrangements grew out of collective institutional initiatives designed to prepare craft producers for market, not shield them from it.Footnote 10
This article addresses several issues at once. First, it contests Sonderweg history in a new way by arguing that Wilhelmine craft legislation had a liberal, market-oriented, “modernizing” thrust, and traces this to the education-based trades promotion policies of the German southwest.Footnote 11 Second, it contests conventional Marxist and neoliberal theories of economic and political development, concepts upon which Sonderweg historians built. Instead, it construes the evolution of Germany's corporately organized craft sector as an imaginative, perfectly logical response to the challenges of industrialization. Rather than an anachronistic throwback, Germany's developmental trajectory led to an influential “variety” of contemporary capitalism, one that differs in important respects from its “liberal” Anglo-Saxon counterparts.Footnote 12 Finally, the article traces Germany's modern “dual system” of education and training—particularly the school component that accompanies firm-based apprenticeships—to the southwest's trade and continuation trade schools, which proved the most original and effective of its trades promotion initiatives.
I begin with a discussion of dispersed urbanization in the southwestern German states and how it differed from the most dynamic areas of nineteenth-century urban-industrial development. This is a necessary background for understanding how the southwest's distinctive social geography influenced its craft uplift policy initiatives, mostly educational undertakings, which the second section explores in detail. Then I turn to the region's industrial associations, voluntary organizations that played a key role in coordinating these activities and functioned as an intermediary between state officials and the craft community. Finally, I conclude by sketching the diffusion of these institutional practices to other parts of the Empire, especially via the Handicraft Law of 1897.
Dispersed Urbanization and its Place in the Social Geography of German Development
Urban and industrial growth formed a synergistic partnership throughout the nineteenth century. Migration into cities stimulated the demand for manufactured goods by transforming new arrivals into consumers. Cities not only forced new residents to turn to markets for food, water, heating fuel, clothing, and the like by limiting their capacity to provide these for themselves, but urban life also aroused desire by exposing newcomers to a range of material and cultural goods previously beyond their ken. Reciprocally, growing urban populations provided the labor that produced the goods and services new arrivals sought.Footnote 13
While not all industrial growth took place in towns and cities, industrialization was predominately both an urban-centered dynamic and a city-building process. Several forces beyond the demand created by urbanization were at work. Cities established markets, enjoyed agglomeration effects, fostered specialization and competition, formed spatially clustered industrial districts, and so on. Moreover, they contributed to industrialization as repositories and clearinghouses of material and social culture. They brought large numbers of people together into regular, often institutionalized contact with one another. As market, manufacturing, and social sites, they facilitated the production and exchange of knowledge, information, technologies, and skills. While some of this activity was formalized and intentional, carried out through schools, technical museums, libraries, and so forth, cities also contained a variety of places of interaction that worked informally, ranging from shops, factories, and offices to trade associations, social clubs, churches, coffeehouses, cafes, and pubs.Footnote 14 By concentrating human capital in the form of large numbers of knowledgeable, specialized, skilled people, cities fostered a level and caliber of communication, exchange, and learning that could be found nowhere else.Footnote 15 Moreover, these information and knowledge flows were not only internal to a given city, but they were also interurban and, in metropolitan areas, international as well. Further, they provided life-cycle employment and human-capital acquisition ladders, which smaller cities, towns, and villages lacked.Footnote 16
This form of big city urban-industrial development—I call it metropolitan urbanization—promoted industry above all by bringing people together in settings that facilitated the creation and exchange of the information, knowledge, and know-how that underlay economic growth. It also created diverse, highly competitive markets for supplies, services, and skills, while rising population densities promoted infrastructural investment, especially in transport and communications. Further, big-city urbanization reconfigured the surrounding countryside by creating an economically dependent hinterland. As country producers increasingly specialized in the market-oriented production of perishable, high-value foods, grains, wood, stone, and minerals for urban dwellers, they grew increasingly dependent upon cities for goods and services. Geographic specialization, in turn, accelerated the migration of people, manufacturing, services, and learning sites to cities, while deindustrializing the surrounding countryside.Footnote 17
These forces drove the lion's share of nineteenth-century growth in large metropolitan centers such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden. They guaranteed that the larger a city, the faster its expansion, especially before 1870.Footnote 18 Yet, two other patterns of urban-industrial growth began to gather momentum in these years, phenomena that accelerated after the establishment of the Second Empire.Footnote 19 Internal derived demand—the demand for market goods and services stimulated by rural-urban migration—mattered as much to these regions as it did to metropolitan areas. They differed, though, in how their distinctive social geographies limited the information flows, technological diffusion, and learning opportunities that flourished in big cities. Each had to address these shortcomings to promote growth in the long run. Due to their divergent social geographies, they did so in strikingly different ways.
Industrial urbanization constituted a second pattern of industry-driven urban growth, one closely identified with technological innovation, high capital investment, and large-scale industrial firms. Unlike its metropolitan counterpart, industrial urbanization appeared where people and capital were drawn to energy and natural resources, especially water and coal, or to transportation hubs near strategic resources that quickly turned to manufacturing. This pattern of development characterized places such as Bochum, Essen, and Gelsenkirchen, cities closely associated with the “second industrial revolution.” In contrast to metropolitan urbanization, where the social, institutional, and infrastructural advantages of prior development and high population densities counted most, classic industrial urbanization depended far more upon the geologic attributes of place—such as year-round water supplies to drive the looms of Bielefeld or the huge coal reserves needed to fire the blasting furnaces of Gelsenkirchen and Essen. Cheap water transport weighed heavily as well. Consequently, industrial urbanization typically appeared in predominately rural areas where prior development, infrastructural investment, and organized labor were weak or absent. Indeed, in view of the cheapness of land at such sites and the dearth of strongly entrenched interests, low levels of prior development often proved especially attractive to well-capitalized firms.Footnote 20
Also in contrast to metropolitan centers—where shared infrastructure and cooperative production chains allowed small, specialized producers to start up a business with little capital—the isolation of firms in areas of industrial urbanization compelled them to start up big and to operate autarkically. In the absence of established infrastructure and other social resources to supply their needs, entrepreneurs in such areas had little choice but to supply these for themselves. This meant setting up and coordinating everything from transportation, supplies, a workforce, and work training to product distribution and sales. In view of the complexity and costs of the functions involved, organizational autarky forced firms in these regions to be well capitalized from the outset. Consequently, the joint stock company proved a convenient, commonplace means of raising the necessary funds.Footnote 21
Capital was, however, only one of several elements necessary for the establishment and operation of autarkic firms. Knowledge, information, technology, skills, and business practice were just as important to success in these areas as they were in large, urban centers. Technology and know-how proved particularly important, inasmuch as they determined the timing of development in these areas. After all, it was the string of mostly British technological innovations harnessing inanimate energy sources such as water and coal that drew these industries to the countryside in the first place. Water, minerals, and fossil fuels were useless until a means was devised to exploit them.Footnote 22
Lacking the informal information flows, technological diffusion, and skill development sites of metropolitan centers, firms in these areas had to import engineers, managers, clerical staff, and workers from outside. Due to British technological leadership in the industries in which these areas specialized—particularly mechanical spinning, iron puddling, mining techniques, steam engine construction, and railroad building—industrial urbanization relied heavily upon the importation of skilled English workmen and engineers. Far more than machines, blueprints, and ideas, however, personal expertise and face-to-face contacts proved essential for the communication of know-how, organization, and technique. Note that these were precisely the types of contacts in which metropolitan centers excelled.Footnote 23 Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, German states built indigenous research, development, and training institutions—especially universities with world-class strengths in the natural and engineering sciences, along with practically oriented technical high schools (Hochschulen)—upon which firms in all regions came to rely.Footnote 24
The central point for our purposes is that firms in regions of industrial urbanization compensated for the disadvantages of their social geography by operating autarkically, internalizing the acquisition of information, technology, know-how, business practice, and so on. Initially, this compensation proceeded primarily through the recruitment of experienced people from abroad. Later, as German industry grew and Germans expanded their technical schools and universities, these firms recruited increasingly from within the Empire itself. The size, assets, networks of social contacts, and other resources these firms commanded made this costly internalization strategy economically feasible. Such proprietary policies, however, reinforced the already uncongenial character of these regions for small, poorly capitalized firms since they lacked the wherewithal to compete. Nowhere did technologically and commercially challenged handicraft firms appear more backward and outmoded than in regions of industrial urbanization.Footnote 25
The situation was quite different in areas of dispersed urbanization, a third type of industry-driven urban growth, one typical of the southwestern German states. Small firms in the country-craft and domestic-outwork traditions predominated in these regions.Footnote 26 Partible inheritance, fixed land rents, and tenancy seem to have encouraged the development of dispersed but comparatively dense settlements of agriculturists by tying families to small plots of land incapable of supporting entire households. As population grew and the average size of family plots declined, a time came when small-scale manufacturing overtook agriculture as the primary source of regional income.Footnote 27
In Baden, for instance, only ten percent of all agricultural holdings surpassed twenty acres in 1900, with most of the rest far smaller still. As late as 1910, fully forty-two percent of its population still resided in communities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, and only twenty-seven percent lived in cities exceeding 20,000 people. Just two cities in the same year, Karlsruhe and Mannheim, had populations of more than 100,000, and this by a slim margin. Rather than concentrating people in a few large cities as happened in Westphalia and the Rhineland, Baden's dispersed urbanization drew people to clusters of villages and towns that surrounded its principal cities. Thus, industrial activity attracted people not only to Karlsruhe, but to its satellite towns of Ettlingen, Durlach, and Daxladen, and to a series of smaller settlements as well. This pattern of development accounts for the large numbers of the Grand Duchy's people residing in small and mid-sized towns.Footnote 28 Also, in contrast to industrial and metropolitan urbanization, extra-regional immigration played little role in the development of these areas. Thus, industrial growth and urbanization tended to proceed in a gradual, steady fashion, though a few regional centers expanded rapidly between 1890 and 1913.Footnote 29
Industry in Baden began with the household production of textiles, wooden clocks and toys, baskets, hats, brushes, and tobacco processing. These branches proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By 1860, textile production and tobacco processing had become the leading branches of non-agricultural employment, while leatherworking, the building trades, and woodwork provided other important sources of work.Footnote 30 Despite steady growth throughout the early nineteenth century, however, the principal period of industrial expansion occurred only after 1876. In conjunction with the revolution in iron and steel that brought low-cost metals to the southwest from areas of industrial urbanization in the 1890s, machine building and metalworking rapidly overtook textiles as the Grand Duchy's leading sources of industrial employment.Footnote 31
Lacking the concentrated mineral deposits and extensive hinterland markets that fostered large-scale industry in other regions, dispersed industrializers excelled in manufacturing activities, such as those enumerated above, in which start-up costs were modest and the economies of administrative centralization limited. Generally organized as sole proprietorships or partnerships, producers achieved a high degree of proficiency through specialization. As was typical of metropolitan areas, however, intense small-shop specialization was viable only in the presence of dense concentrations of similar and complementary firms. Specialization required high levels of interdependence among producers in particular areas. Thus, specialized regional manufacturing clusters arose to coordinate and complete finished products since each firm focused on just one part of the production process.Footnote 32
Human capital accumulation proved far more essential to this approach to manufacturing than investments in structures and heavy machinery. In fact, much like the dense, single-trade-dominated districts of major metropolitan cities, the presence of skilled workers, suppliers, and service providers represented the primary locational advantage of these regions. Whereas large cities facilitated the production and exchange of information, knowledge, and skill in highly informal ways, geographic isolation and population dispersion made this far more difficult in these regions. While they brought specialized producers within a single branch together, they were slow to profit from innovations in other industries, had limited contact with customers in export markets, and found it hard to keep abreast of what their competitors elsewhere were up to, all because they lacked the “natural” commercial and cultural links that made metropolitan areas so dynamic.
Consequently, access to critical commercial and technical information, new technologies, shifting marketing and business practices, political currents, legal developments, and the like were far harder and more expensive to come by in dispersed regions than in metropolitan centers, where much of this information was “in the air.”Footnote 33 Thus, these relatively remote, dispersed industrial settlements lacked opportunities for the casual but intensive exchange of information, ideas, strategies, tips, and the like that occurred in the workplaces, banks, professional associations, newspapers, journals, cafes, and clubs of large metropolitan areas. Nor could the small, capital-poor producers that typified these areas afford to internalize these activities as big firms in regions of industrial urbanization did. In view of the indispensability of information, know-how, technology, and skill to industrial development, this deficiency presented a social-geographic challenge of the highest order.
Education and Training as Trades Promotion and Self-Help
To address these shortcomings, Baden and Württemberg moved in stepwise fashion to establish and elaborate collective institutional practices—especially schools—designed to gather and disseminate information, produce and diffuse knowledge, engender and upgrade skills, and expose local producers to new technologies, materials, and designs.Footnote 34 Moreover, because the management of capital, credit, and inventory proved so crucial to the success of small firms, commercial education that had comparatively little significance for skilled employees grew indispensable to craft and small shop employers. Baden's Grand Ducal trades surveys of Mannheim and Adelsheim in 1885 clearly showed that small-town handicraft shops labored under higher capital costs than city firms. This derived from their steep levels of customer credit, slow payment cycles, low utilization of shop capacity, general-use as opposed to more specialized machines, and far lower sales-to-capital ratios.Footnote 35 As a result, rural, generalist firms required more operating capital than specialized metropolitan ones of similar size. In order to survive, small shop employers needed to understand the price of money; the importance of rationalizing the purchase of supplies; the costs of inventory, credit, and unused capacity; and so on. Moreover, in order to qualify for credit, they had to have a reputation for personal integrity (no heavy drinkers needed apply), be able to demonstrate a command of their business, and possess the capacity to document their plans through their books. In this way, even credit was transformed into an educational issue, for increasingly bookkeeping was a competence no independent producer could afford to do without.Footnote 36
A multiplicity of educational and other institutions, such as industrial associations, marketing cooperatives, and savings banks, distinguished the trades promotion policies of the southwestern German states. Similar, if less elaborate, institutional practices appeared on a regional basis in centers of dispersed urban-industrial development across Europe.Footnote 37 In effect, trades promotion policies compensated dispersed urbanizers for the economic disadvantages of smallness, low agglomeration densities, and geographic isolation. Since these initiatives were perforce collective, government at some level—state, regional, or municipal—played a central, instrumental role in either creating them or empowering organized producer groups to do so. This was because only the state possessed the capacity to overcome the free rider and other problems endemic to all voluntary collective action, especially in the presence of large numbers of actors with modest resources. Moderate rates of economic and population growth produced a high degree of social-political stability, which facilitated governmental action.Footnote 38
In view of this social geography, it is not surprising that modern handicraft training arose in its most coherent and systematic form in the mid-sized, diffusely settled states of Baden, Württemberg, and—to a lesser degree—Hesse. In contrast to the autarkic character of corporation schools that emerged in the big firms of the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Greater Berlin, the southwestern pattern of training was a collective undertaking in which, it bears repeating, the state played a key facilitating role. Although apprenticeship continued to be practiced informally in small shop settings, the institutions that grew up around it to promote industry and the trades gradually supplemented and regulated it. The southwest's distinctive contribution to Germany's modern “dual system” of vocational education and training—a training condominium that stressed regulated workplace apprenticeships in private firms supplemented by part-time public schooling—was the development of statewide systems of public trade and industrial schools, attendance at which Baden made compulsory very early on.
Of the three core southwestern states, Baden is of special interest for two reasons: its early leadership in the development of state-supported trade and industrial continuation schools; and its role in redrafting the Handicraft Law of 1897, legislation that diffused southwestern education and training practices within the crafts throughout Germany. In effect, Baden was the first German state to develop a “dual system” of vocational education and training, an outgrowth of its enormous investment in public part-time vocational and continuation schools. Its earliest efforts to stimulate employment through educational initiatives targeted economically depressed areas.Footnote 39 Although the government liberally granted industrial concessions, often in the face of resistance from guilds, its economic stimulation efforts focused on domestic industry and the crafts. These initiatives expanded palpably in the wake of the social-political crisis of the 1840s, one unleashed by a series of bad harvests, rising unemployment, and falling buying power after a prolonged period of population growth. Hunger, emigration, and revolt ensued.Footnote 40
By taking an active role in boosting employment in response to these disruptions, Baden's government sought to reinforce its legitimacy and stabilize the regime. Trades promotion sought particularly to shore up the middle classes—farmers, craftsmen, shop owners, and the like—and to fortify their position in society.Footnote 41 State officials linked the welfare of this middling class to that of the state. They also began to see economic backwardness as a political liability in relation to other German powers, particularly a rapidly industrializing Prussia. They focused on small business because of its prominence on the social-political landscape. There is also some evidence that the Interior Ministry—the agency that oversaw trades promotion—feared private concentrations of economic power that might challenge state authority. Southwestern liberalism espied in large industrial enterprise a threat to “the public interest,” a view that Badenese officials shared.Footnote 42 Thus, the state steered clear of policies encouraging industrial concentrations of the sort associated with laissez-faire capitalism.Footnote 43
It was above all the accountability of the state for its people, especially the costs of public provision for the poor, that gradually drew it into economic policy. Even so, it moved hesitantly, as often as not at the behest of the people for whom the policies were designed. This was largely because state officials were themselves divided over optimal economic policy.Footnote 44 Consequently, mature, well-articulated trades promotion policies emerged gradually, as experience was gained through trial and error and continual consultation with the Grand Duchy's industrial associations. These emphasized education, technical advancement, credit availability, and local autonomy rather than direct state intervention in the economy. As it emerged in Baden, liberal economic policy embraced competition, yet looked to the state to impose order upon it. Above all, it strove to create conditions in which collective self-help could flourish. Since small firms needed legal-institutional help in organizing and implementing collective undertakings, government had a critical role to play. The trick, however, was to provide state support in a way that minimized direct dependence upon the state.Footnote 45
On the whole, Baden eschewed political prophylactics such as tariffs, trades restrictions, and subsidies that could not provide protection from competition, except in the short term. Such traditional guild strategies had no answers for the problem of external competition, the spread of industry, or an increasingly significant export market. Nor did political protection prove of much assistance in upgrading their members' skills or enhancing their competitiveness. Consequently, by the time “trades freedom” became official policy in 1862, guild influence had grown quite weak throughout the southwest in general, and in Baden in particular.Footnote 46 As will become apparent below, this created an opening for the growth of the “progressive” industrial associations within the crafts.
Baden's trades promotion policies explicitly recognized that small producers operating in dispersed settings had little chance of becoming more competitive without collective institutions designed to boost productivity through research and development, education and training, and the collection and dissemination of information, technology, and better business practices. Southwestern liberals believed that competitiveness could be learned, but small producers needed help in acquiring the necessary information, knowledge, and skill. In a very real sense, they undertook to do for artisans what poorhouses had originally intended to do for the needy: teach industry and self-help. Over time, Baden built educational institutions for virtually every level of society, from bureaucrats, managers, and engineers to weavers of straw, cotton, and silk. In comparison with the rest of Germany, however, what most distinguished the southwest was the number and quality of the educational resources it made available to its middling and laboring classes.
At the high end, Baden operated two of the oldest German universities: Heidelberg and Freiburg. These institutions prepared men for public service and the learned professions. In 1825, it added a polytechnic in Karlsruhe, a school that grew into one of the most influential technical universities in Germany. Modeled after École Polytechnique in Paris, it initially produced civil engineers for public projects. The school's responsibilities were extended in 1833 to the education and training of the “higher” grade of tradesman. Soon thereafter it began offering programs in agriculture, forestry, architecture, and the military arts as well.Footnote 47
By 1860, the polytechnic had established a national reputation in machine building. Ferdinand Radtenbacher, the father of German mechanical engineering, joined the school in 1841. Over the next several decades, he trained large numbers of machine builders and tirelessly promoted a scientific approach to the subject. Along with the school's other instructors, Radtenbacher worked closely with local business leaders and government officials. The school encouraged the teaching staff to serve as a resource for local business, in return for which local firms made expensive equipment and workspace—which the polytechnic could not afford—available for technical research and experimentation. Instructors and employers traded information, discussed technical plans, exchanged advice, and took active roles in Karlsruhe's industrial association. These interactions stimulated machine building and other forms of metalworking, sectors that subsequently became leading providers of industrial employment in the Grand Duchy.
At about the same time, the polytechnic built an outstanding program in industrial chemistry. This began with the search for better fertilizers in the aftermath of the famines of the 1840s that provoked political ferment and an armed uprising. Karlsruhe, joined by the University of Heidelberg after 1870, became a center of chemical innovation.Footnote 48 Their efforts began to pay big dividends in the 1880s as the Thomas process used in steelmaking produced a phosphate-rich slag that proved a cheap source of fertilizer. Research in inorganic chemistry led to major breakthroughs, particularly in the development of tar-derived dyes. As a result of these discoveries and the training of chemists in Heidelberg, nearby Mannheim developed a world-class chemical industry with BSAF at its core. These economic returns to chemistry enhanced university-industry links, drew money to chemical research, and greatly increased the prestige of the discipline within the academic community. Moreover, it proved a seductive model for other natural sciences as they struggled to overcome their subordination to the humanities within the German academy. Of particular note was physics, which made major contributions to the development of electricity and electrical engineering, another discipline in which Baden excelled. These educational investments accelerated the coal-poor, water-abundant Duchy's turn to hydroelectricity after 1900. Combined with the electric motor, hydroelectricity proved of special significance to the dispersed, craft-rich economy of Baden, for electricity constituted an ideal power source for dispersed small-scale industry.Footnote 49
While these investments in practical, basic research had a palpable impact on Baden's industrial development, other German states made significant investments in elite technical education as well. What most distinguished the educational thrust of Baden's industrial policies were its systematic investments in mid- and lower-level vocational schools. Karl Frederich Nebenius, a young liberal bureaucrat who promoted the schools, believed that full-time trade schooling only made sense where there was insufficient practical experience and knowledge to build on.Footnote 50 He focused, therefore, on part-time trade schools designed to supplement apprenticeships with technical and business instruction of a type apprentices rarely received at work. In 1834, Nebenius arranged for seed money to aid local start-ups, but left it up to localities to build and finance the schools. Accompanying legislation made instruction of at least eight hours per week mandatory in those areas where schools existed. This was because, Nebenius observed, neither parents nor masters could be counted on to ensure that apprentices attended without compulsion. Both had powerful economic incentives to privilege their own interests above those of their charges, in view of the value of the latter's labor.Footnote 51
None of Nebenius' ideas was, by itself, breathtakingly inventive, but the overall design of trade schooling in Baden was highly original. Several elements made it so. First, there was the technical, frankly utilitarian character of the schools. Instruction consisted of free drawing, arithmetic, basic algebra, geometry, bookkeeping, mechanics, and an elective involving training in a particular trade. This contrasted sharply with Württemberg and Prussia, where continuation schooling retained a strong political-cultural orientation that grew out of its origins in Sunday schools. The practical orientation of the schools gave them a status that continuation schools elsewhere generally lacked, particularly among masters and parents. Second, whereas virtually all other German states made schooling voluntary beyond age fourteen, Baden's compulsory attendance laws extended to age 18, giving its trade schools a reach and impact unequaled elsewhere. Third, Baden did not hire culturally oriented elementary school teachers to give continuation instruction on Sundays, as happened in Prussia. Rather it recruited instructors with practical experience in the trades they taught. Finally, Baden declined to link its part-time trade schools to higher learning.Footnote 52
Combined with the recruitment of a practically trained staff, the disjunction between trades instruction and further schooling had a beneficial, long-term effect upon the schools. These mutually reinforcing policies disposed Baden's lower- and middle-level schools to remain true to their initial calling by continuing to serve young men entering local crafts and industry. The frankly utilitarian character of the schools made it possible for them to appoint instructors on the basis of their practical training and experience rather than their academic certificates. At the same time, the socialization of the staff within the trades minimized internal pressures to transform the schools into academic institutions.
In stark contrast to these outcomes, Prussia's part-time provincial trade schools, established in the 1820s to serve the trades, metamorphosed into elite preparatory schools within two decades of their founding.Footnote 53 Several considerations quickly drew Prussia's trade schools down this “primrose path” to elimination: the system of privileges that attached to academic schooling (especially with respect to military service); the social and cultural cachet associated with non-utilitarian, humanistic learning that was especially pronounced among Germans; the collusion of the higher schools that sought to ensure an orderly flow of properly prepared students from below; and the growing ambition of provincial elites to create local preparatory schools as stepping stones to professional careers for their sons. Most important of all, however, were the academic backgrounds and status aspirations of the schools' academically trained teachers and administrators, who persistently strove to “upgrade” their schools to enhance their own status and be able to teach academically oriented subjects that better reflected their own intellectual interests and educational values. Consequently, Prussia was forced to start from scratch when it decided in the late 1870s that something should be done about technical and commercial education for its artisans. In actual fact, little was done until Prussian officials began to adopt the southwestern model after 1897.Footnote 54
The Furtwangen Clockmakers' School
One of the best documented and most influential of Baden's early educational initiatives was the Clockmakers' School of Furtwangen. The domestic production of wooden clocks in the Black Forest began in the eighteenth century. By the 1840s, however, it was in serious trouble. A steep international demand for clocks in the 1830s had watered down average skill levels in the trade, since local firms managed to expand output only by attracting rural recruits from distant areas with little exposure to clockmaking. So as British, Swiss, French, and especially American producers began to respond to this demand in the 1840s, Baden's Black Forest clockmakers found themselves squeezed by competition and subject to falling prices. This tended to degrade production practices further. When recession and famine hit at the end of the decade, the bottom fell out of the market for Black Forest clocks. Desperation aroused the Furtwangen clockmakers' association to approach the government in 1850 for assistance. Industry in the region was so depressed that the state felt it had no alternative but to act. It refused to subsidize producers as other states had begun to do, but it agreed to build a school designed to improve clock manufacturing and to stimulate the production of newly popular brass pocket watches.Footnote 55
The Furtwangen Clockmakers' School was the first trade school of its kind in the German states. Its initial costs were carried entirely by the state, since in view of the crisis, the region lacked the funds to organize and finance self-help on its own. The clockmakers' association agreed with the government that the optimal strategy was to develop the knowledge and skill necessary to manufacture clocks and watches of appealing design and taste. Rather than targeting luxury items, a market the French dominated, they aimed to produce clocks and watches of broad appeal. Upgrading technical and artistic skill was crucial, though government cooperation in a number of other areas proved indispensable as well. In particular, Baden's watch and clockmakers were utterly dependent upon their cross-border Swiss rivals for sheet brass, a supply that their competitors easily, frequently, and strategically disrupted. The government quickly recognized the need to set up a brass foundry to ensure reliable supplies; however, it had first to create new markets for brass, since efficient production required a scale that exceeded the needs of the Black Forest watch and clock industry. This took organizational capacities beyond those possessed by the clockmakers themselves. The diffusion of modern business practices was another area in which, it quickly became clear, the state had an important role to play. Few of the region's small-scale manufacturers understood bookkeeping, marketing, or inventory and supply management. Thus, business and commercial education was quickly integrated into the school's curriculum as well.Footnote 56
The state made a real commitment to the success of the school. It began by appointing a highly respected engineer as director, a move that drew broad support within the industry and reassured it that the government meant business. Instructors at Karlruhe's polytechnic became involved in the project. Training workshops for both pocket watches and clocks were established. The school outfitted a machine shop with the latest water-powered machine tools, many imported from England and Switzerland. Thus students were able to work with modern machines as well as the traditional hand tools that still largely dominated the industry. Moreover, thanks to its innovative use of modern equipment and business practices, the school quickly came to double as a model workshop for the entire industry.
The school focused on improving the attractiveness of the region's wares. It was widely understood that cabinets, casings, and faces mattered more to the average consumer than technical excellence in keeping time. To aid in this upgrading, the school assembled an extensive collection of the latest clocks and watches from Baden's competitors in Europe and the United States. This served as a source of information, inspiration, and imitation. Within a couple of years, the school had established such a reputation for quality that not-yet-finished students found it increasingly easy and tempting to search out well-paid employment in a neighboring state, particularly Württemberg. In response, the school began to require its students to sign a formal contract promising to spend at least three years at work in the local industry after completion of their training.
The extent to which the school managed to improve the quality and attractiveness of local production within a very short period of time astounded visiting state officials from Karlsruhe. As a result of these efforts, by 1853–54, Baden's clock industry experienced a rise in demand that far outpaced general economic recovery. By the 1860s, the industry was booming. In response, and despite resistance from the industry itself (which faced growing shortages of skilled labor), the state resolved in 1864 to withdraw subsidies to the school. It felt that it could no longer justify the expenditure, in view of the general health of the local economy. Over a fifteen-year period, however, the Clockmakers' School gave a visible fillip to an industry that was in a far better position to engage in self-help, and to pass on its newly acquired capacities in more traditional ways.Footnote 57
The school's long-term effects were several. First, it persuaded both state officials and local artisans that investments in training and technical upgrading could have a tangible impact upon economic growth. This was a lesson that would be reinforced over the next half century throughout the southwest. Second, the experience and skills acquired in working with brass transferred easily to other forms of metalworking, especially the production of fine machinery. Third, the school and its elaborately outfitted workshop fostered production practices and work skills that increasingly relied on modern machine tools. In turn, this stimulated a demand for them, giving rise to a local machine-tool industry. As in the United States, Baden's machine-tool builders played an important role in the diffusion of new techniques and technologies. In comparison with the cumulative effects of the technical educational initiatives undertaken in Baden over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the impact of the machine-tool industry appears secondary.Footnote 58 Americans had nothing to match the institutionalized diffusion of technical knowledge, know-how, and skill that came to characterize southwestern German trades promotion.Footnote 59
Building a System of Specialist Schools
Much as the economic and social crisis of the late 1840s incited the state to underwrite the Clockmakers' School, the economic recession of the 1870s provoked it to build a series of Fachschulen, or specialist schools. Designed to provide mid-level instruction, the first of these full-time institutions appeared in a familiar place: Furtwangen in 1875 in response to renewed recessionary competition in the clock and watch industry, especially from the United States. This turned out to be a permanent institution that soon began offering courses in fine mechanics and electricity. As the school expanded, it supplied local industry with engineers, technicians, and entrepreneurs—not only craftsmen. These graduates played leading roles in the diversification of the local economy beyond clockmaking into fine mechanics, instruments, and electrical machinery.Footnote 60
The real influence of this school, however, had less to do with the numbers of people it trained than with its role as a clearinghouse for information, technological innovations, and commercial practice. Its resources, both human and physical, were made available to everyone with an interest in its work—from domestic and handicraft producers to mid-sized and large manufacturers throughout the region. The school, its director, and its staff continuously engaged in consulting—dispensing technical advice, making referrals, distributing information, and supplying expert opinions. Local producers turned to the school for counsel on workshop and plant additions, machine development and purchases, patent evaluations, start-up planning, and so on. The influence of the school extended throughout the entire region.
A Woodcutting School followed in Furtwangen in 1877. It was intended to upgrade the manufacture of cut wood products in the Black Forest, particularly the casings and cabinets used locally in the assembly of clocks. Instruction in fine cabinetmaking was gradually added to the school. In contrast to the manufacture of clock movements, cabinetmaking for the clock industry continued to be carried out to a considerable extent in small shops and households. Like the Clockmakers' School, the Woodcutting School functioned as a clearinghouse of expertise and information for the industry as a whole, particularly for the many small producers who depended upon it for information on fashion, technical developments, new designs, and business practice. The school worked in conjunction with local producers, primarily through the newly established State Trades Hall in Furtwangen, operated through the local industrial association. This cooperation kept local producers abreast of the latest developments while enhancing the state's ability to make informed policy decisions regarding the industry. Due to its effectiveness and popularity, the school enjoyed steadily augmented financial support from the state. Popular evening programs designed to prepare journeymen for the master's exams were established in 1887. The value of its efforts was signaled by the general acclaim Black Forest products received at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and by the prosperity of the area until the outbreak of the Great War.Footnote 61
Analogous to these initiatives in Furtwangen, a specialist school devoted to the building trades (Baugewerbeschule) opened its doors in Karlsruhe in 1878. Of statewide rather than regional significance, it was established with three distinct purposes in mind. First, it responded to a demand for more mid-level technicians in civil engineering and the building trades. For these students, it led to a terminal degree. Second, for others, it provided an educational bridge between a trade school and the increasingly prestigious polytechnic in Karlsruhe. Finally, it also trained instructors for the Duchy's trade schools—the first technical school to do so. Entrants had to be at least sixteen years old, possess both common and trade-school educations, and have completed at least a two-year apprenticeship.
In 1884, the school added a department of machine engineering. In contrast to the predominately public sector orientation of the school's other departments, the machine-building division was established in response to the rising demand for technically trained machine builders in private industry. Courses were organized around applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, materials, mechanics, machine building, and electricity. Instruction averaged between forty-three and fifty hours per week. The school established a Rail and Mining Division in 1893–94, and another in Electrical Engineering in 1901. These were middle level, essentially secondary courses. Nevertheless, the school grew large, competitive, and successful. Thanks to its rigorous, practical curriculum, its graduates had little trouble finding jobs.Footnote 62
The division for trade-school teachers expanded over time as well. It consisted of a seven-semester program that varied according to concentration. After 1888, students rotated every eight weeks between full-time work and full-time schooling. Work assignments provided practical experience in workshops, factories, and/or offices. Since the object of this work was training rather than production, students received stipends from the government to supplement their private sector wages, which represented only token pay. In 1895, the trade-school teachers of Baden formed an association to represent their interests and those of their schools. It worked hard to expand and diversify the training available to its members. This proved difficult, due to the small numbers of teachers involved; however, when Württemberg concluded an agreement with Baden in 1905 to have its trade-school teachers trained in Karlsruhe, things began to change. By nearly doubling the size of the division, the accord permitted the school to offer both more diverse and more specialized training.Footnote 63
Baden funded several other specialist schools that merit mention. The most influential of these was the School of Applied Art, or Kunstgewerbeschule, established in Karlsruhe in 1878. Its initial objective was the training of drawing teachers—a standard component of trade and continuation schooling throughout Germany. It was also intended to supply uplift to industries dependent upon the applied arts. Instruction consisted of forty-four hours per week and covered the fields of architecture, sculpture, engraving, decoration, ceramics, and drawing. A branch school was established in Pforzheim, the center of jewelry and fine metals production in Baden, one with markets throughout central Europe. More than 600 students were enrolled in the two schools by 1902–03. Other institutions established subsequently included schools for assemblers and foremen in Mannheim and Freiburg, and schools for inland navigation on the Rhine and Neckar rivers.Footnote 64
Baden's Lower-Level Trade and Industrial Continuation Schools
Despite the importance of these higher and middle-level schools to the Grand Duchy's trades promotion efforts, it was its part-time trade and industrial schools that set Baden apart within Germany. Attendance climbed from 2,642 apprentices in 1851–52 to 4,803 in 1861–62. Abruptly, the following year, attendance fell by half in the wake of liberal reforms that abolished compulsory attendance. Only gradually, as towns and cities took advantage of the local right to make continuing education compulsory, did trade-school attendance revive. It inched upward, reaching enrollments of 5,500 to 6,000 apprentices in the mid 1890s.Footnote 65
The industrial associations worked from the late 1880s to reinforce these trends. Due to the revolution in metals that was transforming the demand for labor, employers became convinced of the need for better, more systematic craft training.Footnote 66 By 1900, most of the Duchy's trade schools offered courses in metalworking and the building trades. In 1904, Baden reinstated mandatory part-time education to age eighteen. Enrollments reached 15,000 in 1913.Footnote 67
Since only the larger towns and cities could afford such outlays, just thirty-four percent of Baden's communes of more than 2,000 inhabitants possessed a trade school.Footnote 68 To accommodate smaller towns and villages, officials encouraged the construction of district-wide trade schools. These permitted resource sharing and internal diversification. Between 1891 and 1913, 139 schools of this type came into existence—nearly all at the instigation of local employers. Forced by expansion, technological change, and growing interregional competition to upgrade production methods and business practices, local business and craft groups embraced education and training as the best possible means to ensure a future for themselves.Footnote 69 As early as 1885, the state's trades' survey of the rural district of Adelsheim revealed that masters understood their need for better information, technology, and training.Footnote 70
Several elements contributed to the growth of these schools. First, Baden's trade schools, and to a lesser extent its continuation trade schools, did more than simply provide training to apprentices and young workers. They functioned as clearinghouses, diffusing information, advice, and best practice throughout Baden's highly specialized industrial districts. State officials worked closely with local industrial associations, particularly through the State Trades Office, to foster school-employer interactions. At the prodding of the Interior Ministry, trade-school teachers served as “trades promotion agents,” serving local communities as sources of information, expertise, and advice. At the same time, instructors—most of whom were active members of the local industrial associations—collected data on the state of their trades in their districts, information they passed on to state officials.Footnote 71
Further, though technical training was important, business education mattered, too. Growing competition forced firms, especially small-shop craft producers, to systematize business practice. As already noted, they needed to learn how to calculate costs, limit overhead and capacity, establish and manage credit, advertise, and otherwise market their products. The management of capital and credit was especially crucial to their success.Footnote 72 Consequently, the diffusion of modern business and commercial practices became a major educational objective of Baden's trade and trade continuation schools.
The one area of education and training policy in which the Grand Duchy, as other German regions, continued to struggle was in the supervision of apprenticeship. This was not for a lack of trying. Following the lead of Württemberg in 1882, the Grand Duchy instituted a voluntary journeyman's examination, containing both practical and theoretical components. Few apprentices bothered to take the exam, however.Footnote 73 The irrelevance of certification made it easy for apprentices to disregard them. The handicraft surveys of Mannheim and Adelsheim in 1885 showed that while the majority of apprentices still signed written indentures, the rate of abrogation remained high.Footnote 74 Ultimately, the national system of compulsory craft licensing instituted by the Handicraft Law of 1897 mandated a completed apprenticeship and the passage of a competency exam, stipulations that prevented apprentices from breaking their indentures. Further, mandatory master certification, journeymen's exams, and workshop inspections introduced strictures that forced training firms to instruct and train rather than exploit their apprentices as cheap labor. The story of how this regulatory system evolved is much too intricate to detail here, however.Footnote 75
Industrial Associations: Organs of Liberal Self-Help and Interest Representation in the Crafts
Over the second half of the nineteenth century, industrial associations grew into the preeminent small business and craft associations in the southwest. These bore no relationship to the inherited guild organizations and practices that prevailed in much of Prussia.Footnote 76 Initiated by bureaucrats, professors, engineers, and small industrialists, the early industrial associations were originally associations of forward-looking entrepreneurs and industrialists, not traditional artisans. From the start, they practiced the liberal virtues of voluntarism, self-help, and individual initiative. They sought to enhance their members' individual competitiveness through mutual support and education. Their strongholds lay in the southwestern, southern, and south-central German states, particularly Baden, Württemberg, Hesse, Thuringia, and Bavaria.Footnote 77
The prevalence and influence of industrial associations in Baden and other parts of the German south were largely a function of the belated introduction of chambers of commerce. These first appeared in the Grand Duchy in the 1860s and 1870s, well after their start in Prussia in 1810–11. This delay provided the industrial associations with a “window of opportunity” in the south they did not enjoy in Prussia. From the beginning, they solicited the more prosperous, progressive artisanal masters. Their success initiated a long-term compositional shift that resulted in craft-dominated organizations. As southwestern industrial firms grew in size over the last third of the century, they abandoned industrial associations for the emergent chambers of commerce. Thus, by the mid-1880s, handicraft employers, small industrialists, and an assortment of other interested parties—government officials, trade- and technical-school instructors, and others—dominated these associations.
Organized by region rather than trade, an organizational strategy that broadened their membership and made them easier to finance, industrial associations took root in cities and larger towns. They were particularly successful in Baden. Four associations existed by 1845, a number that expanded to 11 in 1860, 49 in 1882, and 172 in 1899. Membership grew from 3,886 in 1882 and 7,700 in 1897 to 13,300 in 1899. This compares with just 904 members in Baden's marginal voluntary guilds (Innungen) in 1895.Footnote 78 The rapid growth spurt in the last years of the century was a direct result of the Handicraft Law of 1897. The most influential associations were the oldest and largest: Karlsruhe, founded in 1831; Lahr in 1836; Freiburg in 1841; Mannheim in 1842; and Heidelberg in 1857. The Grand Duchy's Gauverbände, or district associations, established the statewide Confederation of Badenese Industrial Associations in 1878.Footnote 79
Given the industrial associations' origins in self-help education, it is hardly surprising that they became early, steadfast advocates of technical and trade schooling, especially of the lower-level trade and continuation schools. Beyond this, they founded a series of institutions—occasionally with the aid of state subsidies—many of which contained important educational components. These included state trades halls to coordinate the collection and dissemination of technical and commercial information; technical collections to aid the diffusion of new technologies, designs, and ideas; industrial expositions to propagate technical innovations and recognize (and thereby encourage) local accomplishment, especially among the young; savings and credit unions to stimulate commercial loans and economic growth; a trades newspaper to publicize information, developments, and activities of concern to industry and the trades; libraries that collected books, journals, and newspapers of interest and relevance to its members; technical courses and talks; factory visits; and group health insurance. Moreover, far less traditional in orientation than the voluntary guilds prevalent in Prussia, the industrial associations moved quickly to provide information and instruction on the most dynamic sectors of the economy—particularly, machine building, metalworking, and the electrical trades.Footnote 80
The industrial associations engaged in “external” as well as “internal” activities. In particular, they managed relations and coordinated their many self-help activities with the state, especially Baden's Ministry of the Interior. In fact, they operated as a semi-official intermediary between the state and its Mittelstand producers, a role that was institutionalized when the State Trades Hall became the State Trades Office in 1905.Footnote 81 They were intimately involved with the conceptualization and evolution of Baden's elaborate system of lower, middle, and even higher technical and vocational schools, since these functioned effectively only insofar as they reflected ongoing developments in the communities of practice for which they trained. Moreover, the industrial associations served as the principal conduit through which schools carried out their secondary role as informational clearinghouses and technical consultation sites for local crafts and other small businesses.
As the influence of the industrial associations in Baden grew, they built bridges to other craft organizations, and to their counterparts in other parts of the German Empire. In particular, Baden's regional and state federations established links to the national Confederation of German Industrial Associations in an effort to counter the surging national influence of the voluntary guild movement centered in Prussia. The general attitude of the Confederation toward the voluntary guilds was tolerance, but it fought their push for protectionist legislation. This was because it believed strongly in a market orientation. This commitment was not, however, classically liberal, for it built on a dense network of collective, state-supported institutions that helped to prepare small and mid-sized firms for market rigors.Footnote 82
The industrial associations' once unwavering “classic liberal” opposition to the compulsory associations advocated by the voluntary guilds began to waver in the 1890s, especially as they came to appreciate the collective action problems facing small producers in less densely settled areas. One advantage that urban, mixed-trade industrial associations had always enjoyed over often small-town, single-trade, guild-derived organizations was numbers. It was far easier to finance a voluntary self-help organization with a large, dues-paying base than a small one. Finances represented a permanent problem for single-trade organizations, since trade-based organization limited potential membership. As Baden's industrial associations spread into more rural areas, financing proved a problem even for them. Further, inasmuch as the industrial associations had evolved from small, informal self-help organizations that organized meetings, lectures, and demonstrations for the mutual benefit of members in attendance into large organizations with highly institutionalized and costly programs that provided public goods, “free rider” problems grew. Consequently, escalating costs forced leaders to warm to the idea of obligatory memberships and compulsory dues.Footnote 83
Baden's Confederation of Industrial Associations of the Palatinate—uniting the Mannheim, Heidelberg, Wiesloch, and Weinheim associations—began pushing hard for compulsory industrial chambers in 1885. Despite their historic liberal commitment to associational voluntarism, Baden's industrial associations now understood its limits, along with the organizational advantages compulsion potentially offered.Footnote 84 The state-sponsored surveys of small business conditions in the cities of Mannheim and Adelsheim in 1885 graphically illustrated this. They revealed serious social dislocations, widespread abuses of apprenticeship, and little interest on the part of small-shop masters in rural towns and villages to organize or tax themselves.Footnote 85
Compared with Baden, however, the industrial associations of Prussia were underdeveloped. This gave Prussia's far less market-friendly voluntary guilds the political upper-hand. Consequently, the Prussian state looked to the voluntary guilds as their preferred vehicle for artisanal self-help. These were, however, more interested in political protection than in self-help initiatives, for they had no history of southwestern-style trades promotion. Their financial instability and other organizational vulnerabilities inclined them to favor quick-fix, short-term remedies.Footnote 86 Several conditions made Prussia an unlikely environment for industrial associations to develop: the kingdom's size, heterogeneous traditions, and diverse interests, which made collective action difficult; massive population growth in many of its major cities, undermining collective action and self-help further; the dominance of large, capital-intensive, autarkic enterprises in Prussia's dynamic centers of industrial urbanization in the Rhineland and Westphalia, firms whose interests overshadowed those of smaller producers with entirely different needs; and, of course, the predominance of small, poorly financed, trade-based craft guilds with a historic tradition of town-based political protections.Footnote 87
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the governments of Baden and Württemberg, and those of their allies, swung into action within the Federal Council in 1893 to prevent the passage of imperial legislation that initially threatened to undermine their self-help initiatives.Footnote 88 This they achieved by subtly but effectively shifting regulatory power from the Prussian-centered voluntary guilds envisioned in the first version of the Handicraft Bill to newly established compulsory craft chambers created by the Handicraft Law of 1897. These entirely new bodies, elected by each state's extant craft organizations, ingeniously permitted Prussia to organize its craft modernization efforts through their voluntary guilds while allowing the southwestern states to keep their far larger, more prosperous, and progressive industrial associations at the center of theirs. Moreover, as a result of the southwest's role in reshaping the final compromise legislation, key Prussian Trade Ministry officials began a resolute policy of building southwestern-style self-help and trades promotion institutions in Prussia. These efforts centered on the construction of a system of trade and commercial continuation schools—an initiative that met stiff resistance from the culturally oriented ministries of Education and War, along with their respective constituencies. But again, this is a story that merits an article-length account of its own.Footnote 89
Concluding Remarks
It should be evident from the foregoing discussion that the centerpiece of the system of trades promotion that developed in Baden was the state's educational infrastructure. Its universities in Heidelberg and Freiburg, along with its polytechnic (later, a technical university) in Karlsruhe, became world-class institutions in the applied and basic sciences. Research and training in these elite institutions was highly practical, an orientation that permitted the sciences to gain power and prestige through their capacity to attract funding. At the middle level, a series of specialist schools served the trades and industry. The Building Trades School, with its comprehensive training program for trades teachers, was particularly influential. Combined with an elaborate system of lower-level trade and trade continuation schools that doubled as craft outreach agencies, Baden institutionalized a system of trades promotion that systematically fostered knowledge, know-how, and skill. This educational edifice was buttressed by supplementary institutions that reinforced its ties to the economy. These included industrial associations; state-subsidized trades halls; technical collections of products, materials, and technologies from around the world; a program of evening adult education; a trades journal; and so on.Footnote 90
These developments elicited the interest of other states, initially neighboring ones. Württemberg, Hesse, Saxony, Bavaria, and eventually Prussia adopted craft uplift practices from Baden. Only Württemberg, however, created a coordinated system of school-based trades promotion that rivaled Baden's in comprehensiveness of design and execution. Indeed, Württemberg's efforts proved so impressive that even Americans took notice. The commission appointed in Wisconsin to study and make recommendations for industrial training for the state observed in its 1911 Report that while the small, hilly, and comparatively poor state of Württemberg in southwestern Germany contained only three-quarters of Wisconsin's population and was only a fraction of its size, it had:
besides its splendid system of elementary and secondary schools, about 250 industrial schools in its towns and villages, 1 knitting school, 3 weaving schools, 2 industrial work shops for actual practice in weaving, 2 technical schools for textile and mechanical work, a large state university, a technical university, a royal building trade school (a trade school for building purposes), a great commercial college, several commercial improvement schools, a great agricultural school, many farming schools, similar to our country agricultural schools here, an art trade school for industrial art, a pure art school and many miscellaneous schools of all kinds for workmen of various grades, evening schools, continuation schools, etc., including schools in domestic economy for women. The tremendous investment made by this little province is far beyond anything of which we, in our prosperity, have thought.Footnote 91
These parallel the conclusions to which Prussian Trade Ministry officials came with respect to their state on the eve of the passage of the Handicraft Law of 1897.
Only in the 1890s did officials within the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry begin to understand the logic of southwestern trades promotion. This caused them to rethink and redouble their efforts to shore up Prussia's politically influential but struggling craft sectors. Critically for the long-term development of Handwerk and vocational education and training in Germany, these selfsame officials, wearing different hats within the Imperial Office of the Interior in Berlin, began sustained cooperation with representatives from the southwest to refashion a guild-friendly initial draft of a national handicraft bill within the Federal Council—the upper house of the German Diet representing Germany's constituent state governments. This cooperation eventually resulted in the final version of the Handicraft Law of 1897, legislation that diffused southwestern experience, self-help policies, associational strategies, and vocational education investments throughout the Empire.Footnote 92
Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to detail these developments here, the Prussian Trade Minister in 1897, Ludwig Brefeld, in a speech before the Diet introducing the bill in its final reading remarked:
Southwestern Germany saw to it that no handicraft controversy existed there. The administrations [of those states] have taken care of their artisans to a greater extent than has been the case in [Prussia]. In fact, it is not to be denied—I am sorry to have to admit—it would have been very desirable if the Prussian state had done something more for the handicrafts; and I hope that in the future that will happen.Footnote 93
It did. Thus, contrary to prevailing, Prussian-centric historiographic views of this legislation as atavistic and backward-looking, or Blackbourn's more recent appraisal of it as an empty, politically expedient “exercise in rhetoric,” more than half a century of the southwest's education-based, market-embracing trades promotion policies had shaped it at its core. This made it “liberal” in the southwestern German use of the term, though hardly in the Anglo-Saxon sense of “liberalism” as governmentally minimalist, associationally voluntarist, or philosophically individualist.
Southwestern German liberals envisioned a society of independent men, each the proprietor of his own small firm.Footnote 94 They, therefore, embraced the “freedom” of the market and its power to spur individuals to industry. As James Sheehan pointed out decades ago, however, “they believed that if nothing was done to preserve and expand the Mittelstand, there would be the steady growth of its antithesis, the group some contemporaries began to call the ‘proletariat.’”Footnote 95 Born into societies in which states were already powerful, they embraced government as necessary to social order, economic regulation, and self-help, especially where this was necessary to overcome “economic backwardness.” Theirs was, I have endeavored to show, a logical, inventive response to the economic disadvantages of dispersed urbanization, not some outdated anti-capitalistic residue inherited from the Middle Ages. As it diffused to other parts of Germany, it addressed some of the most pressing needs of small-shop, craft-style producers everywhere, while providing a model for education and training in the industrial and service sectors, which adopted it subsequently as well.Footnote 96
