1 - Productive forces and social differentiation

Summary

The Schultheiss and Börgermeister stick together because they are cousins, and the other magistrates support them, since they are all related to each other.

- The emigrant Jacob Hampf from Eglosheim, 1817

The socioeconomic structures which developed in the half century after the Thirty Years War continued to characterize Württemberg until past the middle of the nineteenth century. Already in the eighteenth century, as Helga Schulz has ably shown, the density of handicrafts and trades in rural Württemberg was greater than in any East Elbian city. But occupational statistics have always been difficult to put together for Württemberg – and bedeviled investigators until as late as the 1880s – because artisans almost always combined their trade with land and agricultural production. From a census of 1857, Wolfgang von Hippel has established that 92 percent of the families of Württemberg held property of some kind. The transition between village and city was relatively fluid, and no great urban agglomerations developed by the end of our period. The capital city of the region (Oberamt) to which Neckarhausen belonged, for example, had a population only four times greater than the village as late as the mid-nineteenth century. It had well over three times as much arable and meadowland, and a considerable proportion of its inhabitants were occupied with agricultural production. Around 1700, agriculture was probably the primary source of income for more than 70 percent of the Württemberg population.