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Farm Labor and Power Politics: Germany, 1850–1914
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2010
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Understanding the political impact of economic growth requires knowledge of the timing of structural changes within a national economy. The decline of agriculture's share in the national economy and variations in regional economic structures are of particular importance. The corrected figures on farm employment discussed in Section II indicate that between 1861 and 1907 the share of agriculture in national employment in Germany declined considerably more rapidly than appears in the census results; regional shares also tended to diverge from each other and from the average throughout the period. New international competition and the thrust of urban and industrial development required regional readjustments within German agriculture. They also made it progressively more difficult for agricultural regions to compete for resources and markets without outside help. In the absence of internally generated pressure from commerce and industry, the elite in the eastern regions of Prussia opposed outside help whenever it threatened the local economic structure. The result was to increase the dependence of the region's labor for jobs on relatively declining regional industry. The response of the landowners to these changes in turn strongly influenced national political groupings. The whole experience laid a foundation for the reaction in German political life to the social discontents and economic miseries of the First World War and decades following.
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References
This essay has profited at various stages from the advice and criticism of Simon Kuznets, David Landes, Stanley Lebergott, Allan Mitchell and the referees and editor of this Journal, and from financial support provided by Wesleyan University.
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59 Appendix Table II.
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68 For instance, that no females under age 14 were reported by their families as full-time workers, or that families began to report females working on farms operated on a part-time basis as full-time workers. There was no space provided for the latter on the Occupational Census (Berufszählung) forms from which these figures come.
69 Hoffmann, Wachstum, pp. 183, 205, 210.
70 The problem is insoluble in any final sense; the results of any census will be imprecise to the extent that respondents are unsure of their situation, and this will most likely be the case when the society is changing as rapidly as Germany in the late nineteenth century. For other purposes, an extrapolation of the 1882 and 1895 results, an a priori judgment as to the fraction of the female agricultural population available for work or an emphasis on family production units might be preferable. What seems impermissible is the simple acceptance of the series of official results when it is known that the enumerators had changed their definition from one census to the next.
71 Germany, Statistisches Reichsamt, Landwirtschaft, pp. 18–19, 35, 44–49.
72 Statistik des deutschen Reiches, n.F., VII (1886); CXVIII (1898); CCXIX (1909); Zeitschrift des königlichen sächsischen statistischen Bureaus, XXV (1879).
73 For all regions in Germany, the coefficient of rank correlation of rates reported in 1895 with those reported in 1907 is .76, significant at the .95 level. A change in employment conditions should have produced a much greater differential impact, in view of the great dissimilarities among regions.
74 Rehbein, Franz, Gesinde und Gesindel: Aus dem Leben eines Landarbeiters im wilhelminischen Deutschland (East Berlin: Tribüne, 1955)Google Scholar; Quante, “Mithelfenden,” p. 211. In the United States a family member must work only 15 hours per week to qualify as a full-time worker. United States, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, p. 67.
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