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Copyright of Züchtungskunde is the property of Verlag Eugen Ulmer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Züchtungskunde is the property of Verlag Eugen Ulmer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper inquires into some of the myths that surround Frederick II. One of these is the notion of "modernity," which since Jacob Burckhardt has been attributed to the person of Frederick as well as his reign, including his economic and agricultural policies. The latter aspect is questioned here. Starting with an extraordinary document, the Quaternus excadenciamm, which details the use made of manors that had fallen into the hands of the crown, the author asks whether the sources reveal innovative farming methods inspired by Frederick's court. The answer is negative, notwithstanding rather coherent insights into the factors influencing agricultural productivity shown in some royal mandates. The assumption of Frederick's modernity is subject, at least in the field of his agrarian policies, to a double error. What is often asserted is not confirmed by the records, and what is attributed to him is startlingly anachronistic - the idea of rationalizing society and economy in a sense characteristic of much later times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from unique agricultural surveys from the late 18th century as well as recent research on deforestation give surprising results concerning agricultural development in Saxony, one of the most densely populated and industrialized regions of Europe and Germany in the 19th century. For the first time for Germany, the pattern of land use can be reliably reconstructed for as early as 1800. Change was slow but steady afterwards. Instead of full enclosures, fencing of small plots ("Hegung") within the fallow allowed for modifications of crop rotations within traditional methods and institutions. However, characteristics of the classic three field rotation were kept until the end of the 19th century and key characteristics of the English agricultural revolution could not be found: cultivation of legumes stayed quite low, cultivation of grain stayed above 60 percent even until after 1900, and four crop rotations were never dominant. Still, food supply was stable during the 19th century. If a continental and land-locked region could sustain dramatic population growth while largely keeping the traditional system, then the English standard model of an agricultural revolution cannot be a template for continental development. Specifically, crop rotations must have contributed far less to agricultural growth than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors comment on agricultural production and market decisions in Germany. Within German-speaking agricultural history, quantifying approaches are the exception rather than the rule. This has to do with the cultural-historical reorientation of historical science, which in contrast to social history encounters statistical methods primarily in a critical-deconstructive way.

The study reviews evidence produced with different methods to track output and productivity in agriculture during the pre-statistical era and derives a characterization of the long-term evolution of the agricultural sector in Germany during the threeand- a-half centuries prior to the transition to modern economic growth. The three methods are: (1) An indirect estimation of agricultural output using a consumption function; (2) returns from tithes and sharecropping as proxies for grain production; and (3) an estimate of total factor productivity (TFP) using product prices and rents of input factors. Yield ratios and a TFP estimate for four estates in Westphalia suggest stagnant productivity during the seventeenth and eighteenth century in most parts of Germany. Feeding an expanding population thus required more intensive cultivation of land at a declining marginal product of labour, testified by a rising rent-wage ratio and an expansion of the arable. Regions situated in the neighbourhood of proto-industrial were exceptions to this general picture: at least from c. 1740 output grew in line with population there, and output per agricultural worker rose. Nevertheless, the effects of demand from proto-industrial workers on agricultural growth was weaker compared to effect of expanding urban populations in north-western Europe. Only the emergence of modern industry from the 1830s set a strong stimulus to agricultural modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study constructs new data series for population and vital rates in the German states between 1815 and 1871 and aggregates these to the national level. Major improvements in the data at state level include a broadening of the source material, the determination of population size in years between censuses on the basis of recorded natural increase, and a correction for improvement of population coverage across the censuses taken between the late 1810s and the 1830s. The resulting national series also show broader regional coverage than the earlier series constructed by Hoffmann (1965). The new series establish that the period from the late 1810s to the 1870s can be characterized as Germany's post-Malthusian era: High population growth of 0.8 per cent p. a. could coexist with largely stable real wages in the long run, implying that expansion of demand for labour compensated for the negative effect of population growth on material welfare. Moreover, on the national level (not on the regional level) natural increase was positive in every single year during the period under study. Nevertheless, vital rates and the emigration rate remained vulnerable to fluctuations of grain production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the role awarded to agriculture and the rural sector in international development thinking over the course of the twentieth century, focusing especially on the modernization approaches promoted by development agents to reform agricultural practices and rural life according to the problems they believed they had identified. The majority of the countries that came to be understood through the prism of development were predominantly rural, agricultural, or both. The article thus argues that it is vital that we better understand the ways in which development experts and policymakers conceptualized rural life and agricultural production with an eye to identifying both similarities and differences across temporal and spatial distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses crop production in Saxony, Germany, from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Using crop production rates as an indicator of rural economic growth, the authors present a quantitatively based, longitudinal study of rural conditions in Germany. Issues addressed include agricultural yields, land use patterns, and the processes of agricultural reforms and industrialization that shaped the economy in Saxony in the mid-nineteenth century. Crops surveyed include grains and potatoes.