Rethinking the role of artisans in modern German development

Central European History

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 33-64

  Hansen, Hal ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

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EID: 68849110374     PISSN: 00089389     EISSN: 15691616     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0008938909000028     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. The same applies to Austrian and Swiss institutions, though these lay beyond the purview of this essay. Economic historians have, however, been active in the study of guilds in the medieval and early modern periods. See Sheilagh Ogilvie, "'Whatever is, is right?' Economic institutions in pre-industrial Europe," Economic History Review 60, no. 4 (2007): especially 653-656.
2. Remarkably, the sustained historiographic neglect of the crafts and their influence on modern German development sometimes extends even to treatments of the German economy and its history, despite its prominence. See, for instance, Colleen Dunlavy and Thomas Welskopp, who do not mention it in their juxtaposition of the two economies in their "Myths and Peculiarities: Comparing U.S. and German Capitalism," GHI Bulletin 41 (Fall 2007): 33-64.
3. This is in contrast to the American historic preference for producing mass standardized goods. See Wolfgang Streeck, "On the Institutional Conditions of Diversified Quality Production," in Beyond Keynesianism: The Socio-Economics of Production and Unemployment, ed. Edward Matzner and Wolfgang Streeck (Aldershot: Elgar, 1991), 21-61.
4. On how Handwerk-controlled training shaped the German labor movement, see Kathy Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
5. See Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780-1914 (London: Routledge, 1995), 2-5. Marx and Engels were especially influential here; however, due to the effective disappearance of the handicrafts in the U.S., Britain, and France, countries from which most postwar social scientific theory derived, it seemed only natural to regard the handicrafts in Germany as a politically protected "residue" of Germany's premodern past.
6. Hans Rosenberg, "Political and Social Consequences of the Great Depression of 1873-96 in Central Europe," Economic History Review 13 (1943): 58-73;
7. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarkzeit (Berlin: Ullstein, 1967);
8. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918 (Gö ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973);
9. Heinrich Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972);
10. and Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
11. Also influential was Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Norton and Company, 1967), especially 31-77.
12. For a brief summary and contextualization of some of this literature, see Charles Maier's The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 100-115.
13. Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982);
14. Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983);
15. Detlev Muhlberger, The Social Bases of Nazism, 1919-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
16. For an important update on this literature, see Gary King, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner, "Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler," The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (December 2008): 951-996.
17. David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 348.
18. Also see his "Between Resignation and Volatility: The German Petite Bourgeoisie in the Nineteenth Century," in Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (London: Methuen, 1984), especially 50-51.
19. My critique of Blackbourn is a friendly one because it strengthens his and Geoffrey Eley's contention in The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) that German institutions were not as "backward" as Sonderweg proponents have claimed.
20. On the contributions of knowledge to industrialization, see Joel Mokyr, "Useful Knowledge as an Evolving System: The View from Economic History," in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Vol. III: Current Perspectives and Future Directions, ed. Lawrence E. Blume and Steven N. Durlauf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 307-337;
21. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
22. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
23. For an overviewof these developments, though one that does not follow the storyline developed below, see Hans-Peter Ullmann, Interessenverbände in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1988), 22-31.
24. Compare this with Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, 33-58,
25. Bruno Amable, The Diversity of Modern Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
26. Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
27. Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John Stephens, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
28. Wolfgang Streeck, "German Capitalism," in Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, ed. Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck (London: Sage, 1997).
29. While I know of no good data for Germany, Diane Lindstrom estimated that the average rural migrant increased his/her market consumption by a factor of three upon settlement in metropolitan Philadelphia between 1810 and 1850. Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810-1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), especially 1-54, 153-185.
30. James Coleman, "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement): 95-120;
31. James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 300-321;
32. Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
33. The kind and quality of learning one had access to depended greatly upon social milieu, for what one learned was largely a function of whom one knew. See Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 152-185.
34. Using patent data from sixteen U.S. cities for the period 1860-1910, Alan Pred showed that cities were instrumental to technological development, for only there was it possible to bring together all the ingredients requisite for it. Cities permitted critical information flows among inventors, sources of investment capital, and manufacturers that put people with technical problems in touch with others capable of solving them. Alan Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 86-142.
35. For Germany, see Jochen Streb, Jörg Baten, and Shuxi Yin, "Technological Knowledge Spillover in the German Empire 1877-1918," in Economic History Review 59, no. 2 (2006): 347-373.
36. On the importance of knowledge and its diffusion for industrialization, see Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena.
37. On the privileged place of metropolitan areas in technological development and diffusion, see Streb et al., "Technological Knowledge Spillover," 347-373.
38. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992) offers the best detailed description of this type of big-city, urban-hinterland development, a process common to all metropolitan growth in these years.
39. Also see Frank Tipton's "Regional and Economic Geography," in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Volume III, Since 1800, ed. Sheilagh Ogilvie and Richard Overy (London: Arnold, 2003), 1-15.
40. Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 226 and 227, Table 7.2. For other reasons, some of Germany's mid-sized cities grew, in relation to their initial size, very quickly as well.
41. Jürgen Reulecke, Geschichte der Urbanisierung in Deutschland (Frankfort: Suhrkamp, 1985), Table 3.
42. Gerhard Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871-1914, vol. 3 of Geschichte der Arbeiter und der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gerhard Ritter (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1992), 68-77.
43. Also see Gary Herrigel, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72-110.
44. This is a central part of Herrigel's account of what he calls "autarkic industrialization." See Herrigel, Industrial Constructions, 72-110. Although Herrigel stresses the role of coal and water transport in his description of the rise of the Ruhr, he gives them little place in his broader theoretical account of the emergence of "autarkic industrialization." He does so in part, no doubt, because it would weaken his contention that social institutional practices-especially landholding patterns-largely determined a region's industrial order. But the physical attributes of place were essential to industrial urbanization.
45. Also see Jürgen Kocka and Hannes Siegrist, "Die hundert größten deutschen Industrieunternehmen im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Expansion, Diversifikation und Integration im internationalen Vergleich," in Recht und Entwicklung der Großunternehmen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Norbert Horn und Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 55-122.
46. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, 81-150, 239-271.
47. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development inWestern Europe from 1750 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 148-192. Americans relied on the same process.
48. Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and American Growth (Armonk, NY:M. E. Sharp, 1972), 59-86.
49. Otto Keck, "The National System for Technical Innovation in Germany," in National Innovation Systems, ed. Richard R. Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 115-157.
50. For more on metropolitan and industrial development, see Hansen, "Caps and Gowns," 134-168.
51. These forms of industry, often misleadingly referred to as "protoindustrial," proliferated throughout Europe from about 1650. See Jan de Vries, "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution," Journal of Economic History 58 (1994): No. 1, 249-270.
52. On Germany, see Sheilagh Ogilvie, "The Beginnings of Industrialization," in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Vol. II, 1630-1800, ed. Sheilagh Ogilvie (London: Hodder Arnold, 1996), 263-308.
53. Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 181.
54. Gary Herrigel, "Industrial Organization and the Politics of Industry: Centralized and Decentralized Production in Germany," (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), 71-92. Herrigel followed the lead of Gustav Schmoller, and others, in exploiting the observation that craft production was densest in areas of partible inheritance.
55. Gustav Schmoller, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kleingewerbe im 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1870).
56. Josef Griesmeier, "Die Entwicklung derWirtschaft und der Bevölkerung von Baden undWü rttemberg im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ein statistischer Rückblick auf die Zeit des Bestehens der Länder Baden und Wü rttemberg," in Jahrbücher für Statistik und Landeskunde von Baden-Württemberg, vol. II (1954): 12-123, 128-129;
57. Schmoller, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kleingewerbe, 316-317, 322-325.
58. Stuttgart, for instance, doubled in size over these two decades. Gerd Hohorst, Jürgen Kocka, and Gerhard Ritter, eds., Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch II (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1978), 45, Table 12.
59. Hermann Schäfer, Regionale Wirtschaftspolitik in der Kriegswirtschaft. Staat, Industrie, und Verbände während des Ersten Weltkriegs in Baden (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1983), 7.
60. Hermann Schäfer, Regionale Wirtschaftspolitik in der Kriegswirtschaft. Staat, Industrie, und Verbände während des Ersten Weltkriegs in Baden, 8-9.
61. For a description of this type of manufacturing, see Rudolf Boch, "The Rise and Decline of 'Flexible Production': The Cutlery Industry of Solingen since the Eighteenth Century," in Worlds of Possibility: Flexibility and Mass Production inWestern Industrialization, ed. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
62. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890), chapter 10.
63. Frank Haverkamp, Staatliche Gewerbeförderung im Großherzogtum Baden. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung des gewerblichen Bildungswesens im 19. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1979);
64. Albert A. Snowden, The Industrial Improvement Schools of Württemberg (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1908);
65. andWolfram Fischer, Der Staat und die Anfänge der Industrialisierung in Baden, 1800-1850. Die staatliche Gewerbepolitik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1962).
66. Note how these strategies contravene Alexander Gerschenkron's contention that successful late developers necessarily turned to autarkic forms of large-scale production to compensate for their backwardness. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
67. See Karl-Jürgen Rinneberg's analysis of the survey in Das betriebliche Ausbildungswesen in der Zeit der industriellen Umgestaltung Deutschlands (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1985), 120-127.
68. Helmut Sedatis, Liberalismus und Handwerk in Südwestdeutschland. Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftskonzeptionen des Liberalismus und die Krise des Handwerks im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 59, 69. Moreover, lenders typically tried to guide the business practices of the people to whom they lent money as a means of enhancing the probability of repayment. Familiarity with language and logic of standard business practices thus enhanced the attractiveness of a borrower to a lender.
69. For references to developments in France and Italy, see Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production," in Past and Present 108 (August 1985): 133-176.
70. For Austria-Hungary, see John Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 119-165.
71. On the logic of collective action, see Mancur Olsen, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), especially 53-65.
72. Fischer, Der Staat und die Anfänge der Industrialisierung, 139-157.
73. See MackWalker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 47-77. Some 7.2 percent of Baden's population left the Grand Duchy in the years 1845 to 1849, a rate that accelerated to 12.7 percent between 1850 and 1854.
74. Haverkamp, Staatliche Gewerbeförderung, 146-148;
75. Sedatis, Liberalismus und Handwerk, 78-117;
76. Peter Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden, 1848-1914 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976), 17-30;
77. For similar developments inWü rttemberg, see Manfred Hettling, Reform ohne Revolution. Bürgertum, Bürokratie und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in Württemberg von 1800 bis 1850 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990).
78. See Sedatis on southwestern liberalism and the state in Liberalismus und Handwerk, 1-50.
79. Griesmeier, "Die Entwicklung der Wirtschaft," 134;
80. Schäfer, Regionale Wirtschaftspolitik, 8-9.
81. See Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie, 28-119;
82. Ernst Homburg, "The Emergence of Research Laboratories in the Dyestuffs Industry, 1870-1900," British Journal for the History of Science 25 (1992): 91-111.
83. Rolf Schö fer, Berufsausbildung und Gewerbepolitik. Geschichte der Ausbildung in Deutschland (Frankfort: Campus Verlag, 1981), 50;
84. Carl Friedrich Nebenius, Ü ber technische Lehranstalten in ihrem Zusammenhang mit dem gesamten Unterrichtswesen (Karlsruhe: C. F. Muller, 1833), 96-100.
85. Nebenius, Ü ber technische Lehranstalten, 78 ff.
86. Klaus Harvey, Die preußische Fortbildungsschule. Eine Studie zum Problem der Hierarchisierung beruflicher Schultypen im 19. Jahrhundert (Weinheim: Beltz, 1980).
87. See Klaus Harvey, Die preußische Fortbildungsschule. Eine Studie zum Problem der Hierarchisierung beruflicher Schultypen im 19. Jahrhundert (ibid., 13-60;
88. Oscar Simon, Die Fachbildung des Preußischen Gewerbe- und Handelsstandes im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mittler, 1902), 726 ff.;
89. Gustav Schmoller, "Das untere und mittlere gewerbliche Schulwesen in Preußen," in Schmoller, Zur Social- und Gewerbepolitik der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), 1262 ff. Interestingly, American schools followed a similar trajectory once academics monopolized their governance.
90. Haverkamp, Staatliche Gewerbefo ̈rderung, 215-237.
91. W. Lexis, ed., Der mittlere und niedere Fachunterricht im Deutschen Reich, vol. 4, part 3 of Lexis, Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich (Berlin: Verlag von A. Asher & Co., 1904), 183-184;
92. Snowden, The Industrial Improvement Schools of Württemberg, 41-43. On the quality of the teacher's training in Karlsruhe, see 43-44.
93. Lexis, Der mittlere und niedere Fachunterricht, 175-178, 184-187;
94. Rinneberg, Das betriebliche Ausbildungswesen, 159, 167-169. The single most frequent suggestion for improvement of training in Adelsheim, which lacked a trade school, was trade schooling.
95. Emile Gutmann, Die Gewerbeschule Badens 1834/1930. Ihre Entwicklung und ihr gegenwärtiger Stand, im Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte ihres Lehrerstandes und des Verbandes badischer Gewerbeschulmänner dargestellt (Bühl and Baden: Konkordia, 1930), 328-450.
96. Interestingly, Jörg Baten, Anna Spadavecchia, Jochen Streb, and Shuxi Yin concluded in "What made southwest German firms innovative around 1900? Assessing the Importance of Intra- and Inter-Industry Externalities," Oxford Economic Papers 59 (2007): i105-i126, that "the excellent state of technical and commercial schools of 19th-century Baden significantly increased firms'successful patenting activities"-along with the diffusion of innovations across industries that were not spatially concentrated, supporting the "view that state intervention in the educational sphere was the single most important contribution to the development of an industrial system," i123.
97. See Rinneberg's analysis of the survey, Das betriebliche Ausbildungswesen, 156-157.
98. Wolfgang Gimmler, Die Entstehung neuzeitlicher Handwerkerverbände im 19. Jahrhundert, ihre Ziele, Struktur und Auseinandersetzungen um eine grundsätzliche, gesetzlich verankerte Reglung des Organisationswesens (Ph.D. diss., University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 1972), 81-99.
99. Johannes Kö rting, Geschichte der Gewerbeförderung in Baden, 1865-1965 (Karlsruhe: Verlag C. F. Mü ller, 1965), 77.
100. Gimmler, Die Entstehung neuzeitlicher Handwerkerverbände, 144, table.
101. Kö rting, Geschichte der Gewerbeförderung in Baden, 89-95.
102. Thilo Hampke, "Das neue badische Gewerbekammergesetz," Jahrbuch fürGesetzgebung, Verwaltung, und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich XVIII (1894): 1,166-167;
103. Thilo Hampke, Handwerker- oder Gewerbekammern? Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der gewerblichen Organisationsfrage ( Jena: G. Fischer, 1893), 20-22.
104. Erhebungen über die Lage des Kleingewerbes in Amtsbezirk Mannheim 1885. Veranstaltet durch das Großherzogliche Ministerium des Innern, vol. I (Karlsruhe: Macklot'sche Druckerei, 1887);
105. Erhebungen über die Lage des Kleingewerbes in Amtsbezirk Adelsheim 1885. Veranstaltet durch das Großherzogliche Ministerium des Innern, vol. II (Karlsruhe: Braunsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1887);
106. Erhebungen über die Lage des Kleingewerbes 1885. Veranstaltet durch das Großherzogliche Ministerium des Innern, vol. III (Karlsruhe: Gutsch, 1888).
107. See the "Erlaß des preußischen Ministers fü r Handel und Gewerbe: Zur Frage der Regelung des Handwerks. Vom 15. August 1893," in Annalen des Deutschen Reichs, ed. Georg Hirth and Max von Seydel (Munich and Leipzig: Hirth, 1893), 801-815;
108. reprinted as Document 29 in Karlwilhelm Stratmann and Anne Schlüter, eds., Quellen und Dokumente zur Berufsbildung (Cologne: Böhlau, 1982), 199-205.
109. Report of the Commission upon the Plans for the Extension of Industrial and Agricultural Training (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company, 1911), 18.
110. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, IX. Legislaturperiode, IV. Session 1895/97 (Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt, 1892), VII, 5427. My translation.
111. James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 32.