¹ Karin Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 1466–1806: The Rise of a Composite State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 43.

² Georg Friedrich Knapp, Die Bauernbefreiung und der Ursprung der Landarbeiter in den älteren Teilen Preussens, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1887); Georg Friedrich Knapp, Die Bauernbefreiung und der Ursprung der Landarbeiter in den älteren Teilen Preussens, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1887); Georg Friedrich Knapp, Die Landarbeiter in Knechtschaft und Freiheit: Vier Vorträge (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1891); Georg Friedrich Knapp, Grundherrschaft und Rittergut: Vorträge nebst biographischen Beilagen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1897).

³ Friedrich Engels, “On The History of the Prussian Peasants,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 26 (1886; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 341–51; Friedrich Engels, “Wilhelm Wolf,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (1876; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 129–71; Friedrich Engels, “The Mark,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (1891; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 439–56; Friedrich Engels, “Varia on Germany,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 23 (1873; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 599–610.

⁴ The line formed by the Elbe River (and its tributary the Saale) is usually thought to be the dividing line between eastern and western Germany, with areas of Gutsherrschaft (manorial lordship) predominating in the east. See, for instance: J. A. Perkins, “Dualism in German Agrarian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1986): 287; Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 28.

⁵ I use “peasant” and “villager” interchangeably to denote a rural commoner; some other authors use “peasant” to refer to a subset of rural commoners who have certain conditions of land tenure or status.

⁶ I use “Junker” (which is derived from the Middle High German word for “young nobleman”) interchangeably with “lord” and “seigneur” to denote a Prussian rural noble. Over the years the word has become sufficiently anglicized such that it often appears in an English-style plural form as “Junkers” or even in lowercase as “junkers.” For the etymology and various connotations of the word, see: F. L. Carsten, A History of the Prussian Junkers (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1989), vii; H. W. Koch, “Brandenburg-Prussia,” in Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. John Miller (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 245, n28; Edgar Melton, “The Prussian Junkers, 1600–1786,” in The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Hamish M. Scott, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1995), 71; Hans Rosenberg, “The Rise of the Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1410–1653 Part I,” The American Historical Review (1943): 2–4.

⁷ See the similar phrasing of Engels and Ziekursch. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, 30; Engels, “Prussian Peasants,” 344–45; Johannes Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre schlesischer Agrargeschichte: vom Hubertusburger Frieden bis zum Abschluss der Bauernbefreiung (Breslau: Hurt, 1915), 129–30.

⁸ The authors associated with “revisionism” (in, for instance, the works cited below by Ogilvie, Rasmussen, Friedrich, and Malanima) who have written about the Prussian context include William Hagen, Markus Cerman, Edgar Melton, Jan Peters, and Lieselott Enders. I also include S. A. Eddie, who identifies his book as extending the revisionist project. Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System in Early Modern Germany,” in Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy 11th–18th Centuries, ed. Paolo Malanima (Florence: Florence University Press, 2014), 33–35; Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 59; Paolo Malanima, “Serfdom in Eastern Europe after the Revisions,” in Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy 11th–18th Centuries, ed. Paolo Malanima (Florence: Florence University Press, 2014), 677–87; Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen, “Innovative Feudalism. The Development of Dairy Farming and ‘Koppelwirtschaft’ on Manors in Schleswig-Holstein in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Agricultural History Review (2010): 173; Markus Cerman, Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800, Studies in European History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); William W. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Edgar Melton, “Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany and Livonia, 1500–1800: A Critique of the Model,” Central European History (1988): 315–49; Lieselott Enders, Die Altmark: Geschichte einer kurmärkischen Landschaft in der Frühneuzeit (Ende des 15. bis Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts) (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2008); Lieselott Enders, Die Uckermark: Geschichte einer kurmärkischen Landschaft vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 1992); Lieselott Enders, Die Prignitz: Geschichte einer kurmärkischen Landschaft vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2000); Jan Peters, Märkische Lebenswelten: Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Herrschaft Plattenburg-Wilsnack, Prignitz 1500–1800 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007); S. A. Eddie, Freedom’s Price: Serfdom, Subjection, and Reform in Prussia, 1648–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–13.

⁹ William W. Hagen, “How Mighty the Junkers? Peasant Rents and Seigneurial Profits in Sixteenth-Century Brandenburg,” Past & Present (1985): 80–116; William W. Hagen, “Working for the Junker: The Standard of Living of Manorial Laborers in Brandenburg, 1584–1810,” The Journal of Modern History (1986): 143–58; William W. Hagen, “The Junkers’ Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1763–1811,” in The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. Robert Lee (London: Routledge, 1986), 71–101; William W. Hagen, “Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg: The Thirty Years’ War, The Destabilization of Serfdom, and the Rise of Absolutism,” The American Historical Review (1989): 302–35; William W. Hagen, “Der bäuerliche Lebensstandard unter brandenburgischer Gutsherrschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Die Dörfer der Herrschaft Stavenow in vergleichender Sicht,” in Gutsherrschaft als soziales Modell: vergleichende Betrachtungen zur Funktionsweise frühneuzeitlicher Agrargesellschaften, ed. Jan Peters (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 179–96; William W. Hagen, “Subject Farmers in Brandenburg-Prussia and Poland: Village Life and Fortunes under Manorialism in Early Modern Central Europe,” in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), 296–310; William W. Hagen, “Village Life in East-Elbian Germany and Poland, 1400–1800,” in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tom Scott (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), 145–89; William W. Hagen, “Two Ages of Seigniorial Economy in Brandenburg-Prussia: Structural Innovation in the 16th Century, Productivity Gains in the 18th Century,” in European Aristocracies and Colonial Elites: Patrimonial Management Strategies and Economic Development, 15th–18th Centuries, ed. Paul Janssens and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (2005; repr., London: Routledge, 2018), 137–53.

¹⁰ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians.

¹¹ Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 111 (emphasis in original).

¹² Hagen, “Village Life,” 147.

¹³ Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 34.

¹⁴ Hagen, “Village Life,” 149.

¹⁵ Quoted in Hagen, “Village Life,” 146.

¹⁶ Andreas Dorpalen, “Post-Mortem on Prussia: The East German Position,” Central European History 4 (1971): 332–45; Hagen, “Village Life,” 147–54.

¹⁷ Hagen, “Village Life,” 147.

¹⁸ Hagen, “Village Life,” 189.

¹⁹ Hagen, “Village Life,”147.

²⁰ Hagen, “Village Life,” 189.

²¹ Hagen, “Village Life,”145.

²² Cerman, Villagers and Lords, 5; Hagen, “Village Life,” 160.

²³ Jan Peters, ed., Gutsherrschaft als soziales Modell: vergleichende Betrachtungen zur Funktionsweise frühneuzeitlicher Agrargesellschaften (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995); Jan Peters, Barbara Krug-Richter, and Martina Schattkowsky, eds., Konflikt und Kontrolle in Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften: über Resistenz- und Herrschaftsverhalten in ländlichen Sozialgebilden der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995); Jan Peters and Axel Lubinski, eds., Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997).

²⁴ Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 162.

²⁵ Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 59.

²⁶ Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Economies in the Era of Early Globalization, c.1450–c.1820, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 124–25.

²⁷ T. C. W. Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), 433.

²⁸ Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Choices and Constraints in the Pre-Industrial Countryside,” in Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain 1290–1834, ed. Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson, and S. J. Thompson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014), 278–79.

²⁹ Another, less pointed, line of criticism has come from the German historian Heinrich Kaak, who has argued against a “legend change” (Legendenwechsel) from the traditionalist manorial dominance perspective to an exaggerated revisionist perspective; he advocates a middle course between them. Heinrich Kaak, Eigenwillige Bauern, ehrgeizige Amtmänner, distanzierte fürstliche Dorfherren: vermittelte Herrschaft im brandenburgischen Alt-Quilitz im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010), 31–32.

³⁰ Hagen, “Working for the Junker,” 145–46; William W. Hagen, “Capitalism and the Countryside in Early Modern Europe: Interpretations, Models, Debates,” Agricultural History (1988): 41; Hagen, “Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” 334.

³¹ Hagen, “Subject Farmers,” 310.

³² Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 591.

³³ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 122.

³⁴ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 648.

³⁵ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 647.

³⁶ I use “serfdom” and “subjection” interchangeably, agreeing with scholars (for instance, Berdahl, Blum, McKay and Ogilvie) that the difference between them is an arcane legal technicality which was essentially irrelevant in practice, in contradistinction to revisionists (e.g., Cerman, Hagen, Melton) who maintain the distinction between the terms. Robert M. Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 30–31; Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (1978; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 33; Derek McKay, The Great Elector (New York: Longman, 2001), 118; Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 35–37; Cerman, Villagers and Lords, 12,38; Hagen, “Subject Farmers,” 308–09; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 25; Edgar Melton, “Manorialism and Rural Subjection in East Central Europe, 1500–1800,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 298–99.

³⁷ For instance, an 1809 oath of loyalty on the Stavenow estate reads as follows: “I swear to God Almighty and Omniscient a true corporeal oath, that I will be true, obedient, and subject to my overlordship, His Excellency Herr State Minister von Voss, and will comport myself as befits and behooves an obedient, true, and honest subject, so help me God to blessedness through his son Jesus Christ.” Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 607.

³⁸ See also for a 1756 oath from the Stavenow village mayors (Shulzen): Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 454.

³⁹ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 55; Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 33.

⁴⁰ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 72–73.

⁴¹ Enders, Die Altmark, 311–17.

⁴² Hartmut Harnisch, “Peasants and Markets: The Background to the Agrarian Reforms in Feudal Prussia East of the Elbe, 1760–1807,” in The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. Robert Lee (London: Routledge, 1986), 45.

⁴³ Or, alternately translated, “undefined.” Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 37.

⁴⁴ Cerman, Villagers and Lords, 72.

⁴⁵ Edgar Melton, “The Decline of Prussian Gutsherrschaft and the Rise of the Junker as Rural Patron, 1750–1806,” German History (1994): 336.

⁴⁶ Although the extent of these insurance schemes is not firmly established. Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 48–67.

⁴⁷ Werner Rösener, “Zur Problematik des spätmittelalterlichen Raubrittertums,” in Festschrift für Berent Schwineköper zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Helmut Maurer and Hans Patze (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1982), 469–88.

⁴⁸ To what extent the Bauernschutz policies were effective is the source of controversy. Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 49; Harnisch, “Peasants and Markets,” 43.

⁴⁹ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 423.

⁵⁰ Monika Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law or Private Jurisdiction? The Prussian Patrimonial Courts 1820–1848,” in Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 75.

⁵¹ Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law, 71, 75.

⁵² Monika Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte in Preussen: ländliche Gesellschaft und bürgerliches Recht 1770–1848/49 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 314.

⁵³ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 58; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 174; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 426.

⁵⁴ Monika Wienfort, “Private Courts and Rural Justice in Prussia (1815–1848),” in Justice without the State within the State: Judicial Self-Regulation in the Past and Present, ed. Peter Collin (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016), 215.

⁵⁵ Wienfort did find one case in which a Prussian patrimonial court ruled against the lord, but that occurred in the west-Elbian province of Westphalia, outside of the Junker stronghold of manorial rule. Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 230.

⁵⁶ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 97.

⁵⁷ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 170, 221, 360, 371, 420, 434, 457, 528.

⁵⁸ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 118.

⁵⁹ On rare occasions men were punished with the fiddle as well. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 457.

⁶⁰ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 435.

⁶¹ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 95.

⁶² Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 433.

⁶³ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 407.

⁶⁴ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 436.

⁶⁵ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 67.

⁶⁶ Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law,” 71.

⁶⁷ Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law,” 82.

⁶⁸ Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law,” 86–87.

⁶⁹ Patrimonial courts were abolished throughout Prussia in 1848–9. Wienfort, “Private Courts,” 221.

⁷⁰ Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 56.

⁷¹ Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 57.

⁷² Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 275.

⁷³ See background to the Miller Arnold affair in: C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 111–15; Blanning, Frederick the Great, 424–29; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 243–44; David M. Luebke, “Frederick the Great and the Celebrated Case of the Millers Arnold (1770–1779): A Reappraisal,” Central European History (1999): 379–408.

⁷⁴ Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 58.

⁷⁵ Jenny Thauer, Gerichtspraxis in der ländlichen Gesellschaft: eine mikrohistorische Untersuchung am Beispiel eines altmärkischen Patrimonialgerichts um 1700 (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 2001), 297–99.

⁷⁶ Thauer, Gerichtspraxis, 265–67.

⁷⁷ (“keine Aussicht auf Erfolg”) Thauer, Gerichtspraxis, 265.

⁷⁸ (“einträgliches Geschäft”) Thauer, Gerichtspraxis, 255.

⁷⁹ Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 51.

⁸⁰ Otto Büsch, Military System and Social Life in Old Regime Prussia, 1713–1807: The Beginning of the Social Militarization of Prusso-German Society, trans. John G. Gagliardo (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 23.

⁸¹ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 38–39, 58–59.

⁸² Hartmut Harnisch, “Questions of the Mentality and Economic Circumstances of the Peasants Living on East Elbian Estates in the Final Decades before the Agrarian Reform,” in Marxist Historiography in Transformation: East German Social History in the 1980s, ed. Georg G. Iggers (New York: Berg, 1991), 134.

⁸³ Berdahl also mentions that (at least) one noble was forced to sell his estate by the government due to his predilection for torturing serfs. Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 42; Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 51; Robert M. Berdahl, “Paternalism, Serfdom, and Emancipation in Prussia,” in Oceans Apart? Comparing Germany and the United States: Studies in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Carl Schurz, ed. Erich Angermann and Marie-Luise Frings (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 36.

⁸⁴ Sonja Köntgen, Gräfin Gessler vor Gericht: eine mikrohistorische Studie über Gewalt, Geschlecht und Gutsherrschaft im Königreich Preussen 1750 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2019), 183–85.

⁸⁵ Enders, Die Uckermark, 510.

⁸⁶ Enders, Die Uckermark, 511.

⁸⁷ Heinrich Kaak, “From Fishing to Farming Village: Quappendorf an Der Oder in the Eighteenth Century,” in Modernisation and Tradition: European Local and Manorial Societies, 1500–1900, ed. Kerstin Sundberg, Tomas Germundsson, and Kjell Hansen (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2004), 234–35.

⁸⁸ Köntgen, Gräfin Gessler vor Gericht, 209–10.

⁸⁹ Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre, 244–45.

⁹⁰ Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre, 213.

⁹¹ Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre, 239–40.

⁹² Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre, 211.

⁹³ Enders, Die Uckermark, 445.

⁹⁴ Enders, Die Prignitz, 1029.

⁹⁵ Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 76–77; Enders, Die Prignitz, 943.

⁹⁶ Kaak, Eigenwillige Bauern, 167–200.

⁹⁷ Kaak, Eigenwillige Bauern, 275–91.

⁹⁸ Michael Burleigh, Prussian Society and the German Order: An Aristocratic Corporation in Crisis c.1410–1466, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 98.

⁹⁹ Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 52.

¹⁰⁰ Hagen, “Faithless Servants,” 82–83.

¹⁰¹ Or, alternately translated, “juridification” (Verrechtlichung). Wienfort, “Administration of Private Law,” 77.

¹⁰² Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 22.

¹⁰³ Behrens hails these reforms as “among [Frederick II’s] greatest achievements.” Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, 106, 108; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 164; Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 42; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 423; Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 53.

¹⁰⁴ Blanning, Frederick the Great, 423.

¹⁰⁵ Hagen, “Village Life,” 189.

¹⁰⁶ Hagen, “Faithless Servants,” 71.

¹⁰⁷ Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 62–63; Hagen, “Faithless Servants,” 82–86; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 541–90.

¹⁰⁸ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 592.

¹⁰⁹ The use of these agreements to contractually specify the obligations between lord and peasant increased towards the end of the eighteenth century. Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 36.

¹¹⁰ However, the increasing use of Urbarium should not be seen as an unqualified victory for peasants. Often these contracts were brokered at points where lords had subordinated peasants and then coerced them into signing under duress. For instance, in Silesia an authority “slapped the [peasants] or grabbed them by the hair and banged their heads against a cupboard until they stopped objecting and signed the Urbar.” Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre, 219.

¹¹¹ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 590.

¹¹² Ogilvie, “Serfdom and the Institutional System,” 53.

¹¹³ Clark, Iron Kingdom, 164.

¹¹⁴ Wienfort, Patrimonialgerichte, 289, 359.

¹¹⁵ Luebke, “Millers Arnold,” 401.

¹¹⁶ Three large-scale European peasant revolts of the eighteenth century. Blum, End of the Old Order, 347.

¹¹⁷ Winfried Schulze, “Peasant Resistance in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Germany in a European Context,” in Religion, Politics, and Social Protest: Three Studies on Early Modern Germany, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 62.

¹¹⁸ Schulze, “Peasant Resistance, 65; Tom Scott, “Peasant Revolts in Early Modern Germany,” The Historical Journal (1985): 456, 460–61.

¹¹⁹ Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, 183.

¹²⁰ Kaak, Eigenwillige Bauern, 12–14.

¹²¹ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 81–95.

¹²² Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 88.

¹²³ Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany 1648–1914, 2nd ed. (1977; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 8.

¹²⁴ Hagen, “Working for the Junker.”

¹²⁵ Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, 147; Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 62; Hagen, “bäuerliche Lebensstandard,” 196; Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, Dienste und Abgaben der Bauern im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1969).

¹²⁶ Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 60.

¹²⁷ “It is difficult to say why Upper Silesia time and again became the centre of fierce peasant revolts.” Blum, End of the Old Order, 339; Terence J. Byres, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 95; Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 79 (quote).

¹²⁸ Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 148.

¹²⁹ Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 82.

¹³⁰ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 15, 35; Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 66.

¹³¹ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 9.

¹³² The future United States president John Quincy Adams, traveling through Silesia, related some colorful remarks in his correspondence about the misery of Silesia’s peasant population. Blum, End of the Old Order, 183.

¹³³ Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 41.

¹³⁴ Melton, “Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany,” 340–41.

¹³⁵ Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, 183.

¹³⁶ Günther Franz, Geschichte des deutschen Bauernstandes vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Verlag Eugen Ulmer, 1970), 192; Otto Hintze, “Calvinism and Raison d’État in Early Seventeenth-Century Brandenburg,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 101.

¹³⁷ Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 9.

¹³⁸ Hagen, “Two Ages,” 138.

¹³⁹ Hagen, “Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” 303–5; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 9.

¹⁴⁰ Hagen, “Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” 303–5; William W. Hagen, “Descent of the Sonderweg: Hans Rosenberg’s History of Old-Regime Prussia,” Central European History (1991): 49; Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 9.

¹⁴¹ William Hagen, “The German Peasantry in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Market Integration, Populist Politics, Votes for Hitler,” Peasant Studies (1987): 276.

¹⁴² Hagen, “Subject Farmers,” 297–301.

¹⁴³ Cerman, Villagers and Lords, 33.

¹⁴⁴ Markus Cerman, “Demesne Lordship and Rural Society in Early Modern East Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Perspectives,” The Agricultural History Review (2011): 242, 249; Cerman, Villagers and Lords, 2, 4, 14, 93,123 (quote from 93).

¹⁴⁵ Eddie engages in some rather startling apologetics for serfdom, holding that a negative moral judgment of the manorial system is simply a “teleological fallacy” deriving from “bien pensant modern sensibilities.” A more measured revisionist attitude towards the morality of the manorial system comes from Hagen, who advises that “The historian need not exonerate the Junker,” and elsewhere references the Junkers’ harmful role in German history. Hagen, “How Mighty the Junkers?,” 115 (quote); Hagen, “Faithless Servants,” 90; Hagen, “Descent of the Sonderweg,” 49; Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 20–23 (quotes from p. 20 and p. 21).

¹⁴⁶ Eddie, Freedom’s Price, 2.

¹⁴⁷ Hans Rosenberg, “Die Ausprägung der Junkerherrschaft in Brandenburg-Preussen, 1410–1618,” in Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjunkturen: Studien zur neueren deutschen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 75.

¹⁴⁸ Carsten, Prussian Junkers, 14, 61–65, 77–79.