ABSTRACT
Historians of modern Germany generally agree that peasants and lords were among those 'pre-industrial' groups most resistant to political and economic change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Agricultural producers appear in the historical literature to make their contribution of food and surplus labour to early industrialization, and peasants struggle with land-hungry nobles in the wake of the Stein-Hardenberg reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This chapter offers a new and in some cases quite different and explicitly revisionist perspective on the history of peasants and lords in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings together the work of three British and two American students of modern German agrarian history. German agricultural producers mobilization in political organizations and interest groups was closely related to their economic concerns, and reflected not the search for a lost world but rather the attempt to control and regulate the market into which they were so completely integrated.
