Scholars of German rural politics, agricultural history, or economic history inevitably must deal with the landed estates of East Elbia and the linked history of the decline of the aristocracy. The conventional wisdom has been that, after a “golden age” of high prices and large crops in the mid-nineteenth century, aristocratic estate-owners found themselves unable to compete with North American grain imports, became ever more protectionist during the Kaiserreich, and ultimately founded the Bund der Landwirte, converting their still-potent economic weight into formidable political force. Because these aristocrats owned the bulk of the land, they could dominate local peasants and politics in East Elbia, and could manipulate and mobilize rural populations elsewhere in Germany. Historiography nonetheless also had suggested that many aristocratic owners of economically unviable estates sold out to members of the German high bourgeoisie, for whom the estates served as status symbols. All in all, a picture of aristocratic decline.
This portrayal has been undermined considerably over the years, which makes it curious, then, that such an important story has received so little statistical grounding. The concentration of landownership in the seven provinces of East Elbia, the proportion of “bourgeois” ownership, and even measurements of viability all have needed more comprehensive evaluation. For this reason alone, Scott Eddie's evaluation is a valuable pioneering work.
Eddie first critiques much of the statistical work done on East Elbia already, which (using the Reich's own classification of holding size) has too readily equated the size of holdings with the size of farms. Simply put, though, one man could own several farms, or even sections of farms. Likewise, one rather large farm could have multiple users, each for a subsection. Combined with volumes of address books from across his seven studied provinces, however, Eddie has given a better rendering of the actual levels of concentration of ownership. His conclusions in this regard might seem to confirm our original impressions: “large properties, conventionally defined as those with 100 or more hectares total area, covered just about exactly half of the area outside of cities in the seven ‘core provinces’ of eastern Prussia, and accounted for about 45 per cent of the total land value” (p. 236). The largest owner of land in these provinces, however, was the Prussian state itself, followed by the king. Thereafter follow the largest landowners, including a high number of Silesian aristocrats. Following them, owning a large, but smaller share than anticipated, were other large landowners. The local aristocracy apparently did not dominate as much as one thought. The concentration of land-ownership strongly correlated with its economic function. Forests, for example, were highly concentrated among relatively few owners (who included the Prussian state and the monarchy). Grain production was less so. This is perhaps no surprise, either, though Eddie's statistical analysis does provide better foundations for these assertions.
Eddie then provides a more nuanced picture of the owners' economic activity. Far from being stodgy, anti-industrial throwbacks, they were much more economically adaptive than one gives them credit for. They tended quite often to be industrialists, of course, and often had industrial facilities on the very East Elbian land that they owned. To be sure, these could not be steelworks or chemical refineries, but brickworks and distilleries, given the area's meager subterranean resources. Nonetheless, it does suggest that many holdings were more economically diversified than was commonly thought, and that their owners had more sophisticated commercial mentalities than was commonly thought.
Even so, Eddie also finds, this diversification could not make the estates financially competitive. He notes that “there is no evidence of a net inflow of funds from the industrial or commercial nouveaux riches into landholding after the 1880s.” Indeed, during and after the mid-1890s, the bourgeoisie actually divested itself of agricultural holdings (p. 237). The peak of urban bourgeois purchase of East Elbian land had been before the 1850s, possibly even in the 1830s. (Conceivably, rise and fall of bourgeois interest in these years could correlate with the rise and fall of Prussian wool, before and after the rise of Australian competition. But that is beyond the scope of Eddie's book, which concentrates on the late nineteenth century.)
Eddie also addresses whether the larger estate-owners received any tax privileges through skewed land assessment, which would serve as a good measure of an ability to leverage economic dominance for political advantage. Interestingly, Eddie finds none. (He does find skewed land-assessment, but it had much more to do with confusion about assessing different kinds and combinations of land, rather than to aristocratic privilege.) This fits with other portraits of limited aristocratic power, such as William Hagen's, but not with the conventional wisdom.
One might have wished for discussion of one more geographically peripheral but nonetheless important issue: ethnicity plays little role in his statistical work, though it would be quite useful to know whether Polish and German estate-owners behaved differently. Was one ethnic group more adaptive, more willing to invest and diversify than another? Did the Ansiedlungskommission play any role after its founding in 1886?
Nonetheless, Eddie's findings give a better economic grounding for further scholarship on the area, which will likely serve as a starting point for later revisionist work. Because we now have a better understanding of how landholding was concentrated and of capital flows, for example, the simple correlation of aristocratic decline and bourgeois estate takeover looks rickety. If many aristocrats sold out so long before the estates faced the onslaught of North American grain imports, then our understanding of the timing of the economics and politics in this region will need to change.
As scholars, we perhaps say such things too rarely, but one should commend Eddie for his graceful writing style, which does much to leaven a work laced with statistical formulae and analyses. In all, he has put our knowledge of East Elbia on a better, recalibrated quantitative foundation on which scholars can build with confidence.
