ABSTRACT
The historical literature holds that the Brandenburg-Prussian nobility's principal management strategy was, in Marx's phrase, extra-economic coercion. Peter-Michael Hahn has argued that entry into the wealthiest Brandenburg nobility's ranks required more than successful estate management. The Junkers' chief entrepreneurial accomplishment was to bring the large-estate system into production. The older literature attributed to the system of noble demesne-farming or Gutswirtschaft a long-term under-developing impact. While many eighteenth-century noble landlords adopted improved methods of estate agriculture and increasingly employed wage labor, a more powerful engine of old-regime economic growth in the Kingdom of Prussia was the state itself. The owners of medium and large-scale Junker estates sought after 1700 to reimpose on their subject villagers the full measure of seigniorial rent. The Junkers advocated a political economy of free trade, whereas the towns clung to medieval corporatism and monopoly. The short-term effect of the nobility's orientation was to advance agrarian rather than commercial or proto-industrial capitalism.
