ABSTRACT
Historians who have ventured such calculations have typically counted peasant farmers among those who gained or at least suffered little relative to other social groups. Liberal and socialist opponents of tariffs in the Kaiserreich and liberal and socialist historians ever since have thus depicted peasants as refusing to adjust their production to the realities of the market. Like the controls on the agricultural sector, the policy of deficit spending by means of the printing press was an innovation of the imperial government during the war, not the early governments of Weimar. Peasants in the imperial period are perhaps best known for their loud and incessant clamouring for the reintroduction of tariff protection, reduced in the 1890s under Bismarck's successor, Leo von Caprivi. The discrepancy between domestic and world market prices also left the government unwilling to spend foreign currency for grain imports and convinced that controls on the German grain supply must be maintained.
