ABSTRACT
It is natural that historians have shown great interest in the early development of Brandenburg-Prussia, since after all it was this state which under the ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck united most of historic Germany in the new German Empire of 1871. But even without that event, there would be much reason for special attention to Prussia’s history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of certain unique features of its development in the context of the German world of its time. After 1640, in particular, a combination of unusual challenges and opportunities, together with a couple of strong rulers who largely eschewed those seductive comfortabilities of rulership which ensnared so many of their counterparts elsewhere in Germany, resulted by the mid-eighteenth century in the elevation of this electorate and kingdom to a position of power not remotely approached by any territory of the Empire besides Austria.
