ABSTRACT
Next to agriculture and its closely associated industries, manufacturing was the most important sector of the German economy and one which received a great deal of attention from the territorial princes and their Cameralist advisers and officials. Recovery from the Thirty Years War in this sector occurred more rapidly than in agriculture; the larger cities which housed artisan and other manufacturing activities had generally suffered less direct war damage than smaller towns and rural areas and population losses were less severe, so that the important factors of fixed capital and labour started from levels considerably better than in the agrarian sector. State activity, here as elsewhere in Europe in the age of mercantilism, was directed towards increasing both quantity and quality of manufactures – the former primarily in order to cover domestic demand as fully as possible so as to reduce imports, the latter for both that reason and to increase exports. With problems in both areas from somewhat to greatly more severe than in other countries of Europe until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, the German territories coupled the encouragement of domestic manufactures with a particularly rigorous prohibition of imports of finished goods and of exports of many raw materials, thus not only depriving German consumers of many commodities fairly readily available elsewhere in Europe, but also disadvantaging the commercial sector by reducing it to a handmaiden of the manufacturing economy. The universal recognition of the inferiority of German manufactures, particularly to those of France and especially in high-quality luxury goods, was in fact responsible for some rare legislative activity in the imperial diet: in 1676, 1689 and 1702, imperial laws prohibiting the import of a majority of French goods into the Empire were passed. While in each case passage was eased by the fact that the Empire was at war with France, war was more occasion than cause for these measures, which lay in the desire to protect a still recovering manufacturing industry from foreign competition. The seriousness of the problem is further exposed by the ineffectiveness of the laws, due to non-observance by a number of territories, including especially the Imperial Cities, most of which had opposed their passage in the first place.
