Transformation of the commons in rural South-West Germany (18th-19th centuries)

This article traces the individualization of common lands and its economic and political ramifications in a South-West German region (Baden Palatinate) in the 18th and 19th centuries. Based on statistical material and conflict-related archival sources (e.g. petitions, court records) it first shows how the division of collective resources along with an expanding leasehold market led to a landholding structure dominated by a semi-peasant middling sort. In the second place, the process of agricultural intensification fostered by the new management of the commons from the late 18th century onwards is analysed. Particular attention is given to the spread of cash crops (esp. tobacco) and the development of «commercial subsistence farming» among those smallholders who had become the most numerous group of inhabitants. Finally, the paper deals with the socio-political dimension of partitioning. While division schemes formed a major issue of local dispute and government interference in the period 1760-1810, their result – broad access to arable plots for village citizens – served as a pillar of rural prosperity later in the 19th century. Correspondingly, conflict patterns in the countryside shifted from internal strife to dissension between communes and state agencies. On the whole, the investigation area experienced a type of agrarian stabilisation and integration in the decades after 1800 which has been curiously underrated in the literature on Germany’s rural South-West, although it seems to have occurred more generally in fertile valley and basin regions with partible inheritance.