ABSTRACT
Any overview of the development of the German economy from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century must begin by recognizing two important facts: first, that the regionally severe destructiveness and dislocations of the Thirty Years War created some uniquely acute problems for the German lands; but second, that the economic climate of the whole of Europe was not a very healthy one for most of the seventeenth century and not robust again until around and after the middle of the eighteenth century. 1 These facts mean not only that the badly depressed producer and consumer sectors of Germany helped to deepen the overall European recession, but also that that recession contributed its share to slow the progress of German post-war economic recovery. Over the longer term – until late in the eighteenth century – other factors also limited the progress that could be made beyond the point at which basic recovery was achieved. These included not only several prolonged periods of war from the later seventeenth century onward, but also the growing comparative advantage enjoyed by the maritime states of western Europe – Britain, France and Holland, especially – through their ability to exploit the increasingly important resources and markets of the overseas colonial world, as well as the mercantilist protectionism characteristic of these and other states, which closed their markets to many exports from a Germany more than ordinarily needful of them. Finally, of course, the political and territorial fragmentation of Germany itself, while nothing new, nevertheless prevented conceptualization and implementation of potentially beneficial economic planning on a national or even regional scale and also imposed significant restraints on economic growth through the almost innumerable transit tolls, customs duties and other protectionist and money-raising measures with which territorial authorities sought both to restore and maintain the traditional socio-economic balance within their societies and to satisfy the fiscal demands of their princely courts and governments. Thus, both internal and external causes combined to limit economic growth in Germany to levels which, while not unimpressive when compared to the conditions of 1648, were only modest when compared with those of its western neighbours.
