This book discusses the impact of cameralism on the practices of governance, early modern state-building and economy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It argues that the cameralist conception of state and economy - aform of 'science' of government dedicated to reforming society while promoting economic development, and often associated mainly with Prussia - had significant impact far beyond Germany and Austria. In fact, its influence spread into Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Portug...

First published in 1991, this collection of original studies by British, German and American historians examines the whole range of modern German bourgeoisie groups, including professional, mercantile, industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois family. Drawing on original research, the book focuses on the historical evidence as counterpoint to the well-known literary accounts of the German bourgeoisie. It also discusses bourgeois values as manifested in the cult of local roots...

This book is the first comprehensive survey of women in the Weimar Republic, exploring the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences in the economy, politics and society. Taking the First World War as a starting point, this book explores the great changes in the lives, expectations, and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight. Engaging...

For many years scholars have sought to explain why the European states which emerged in the period before the French Revolution developed along such different lines. Why did some become absolutist and others constitutionalist? What enabled some to develop bureaucratic administrative systems, while others remained dependent upon patrimonial practices? This book presents a new theory of state-building in medieval and early modern Europe. Ertman argues that two factors - the organisation of l...

European law, including both civil law and common law, has gone through several major phases of expansion in the world. European legal history thus also is a history of legal transplants and cultural borrowings, which national legal histories as products of nineteenth-century historicism have until recently largely left unconsidered. The Handbook of European Legal History supplies its readers with an overview of the different phases of European legal history in the light of today's state-o...

Presenting a new historical narrative on European integration and identity this title examines how the concept of Europe has been entangled in a dynamic and dramatic tension between calls for unity and arguments for borders and division. Through an in-depth intellectual history of the idea of Europe, Mats Andren interrogates the concept of integration and more recent debates surrounding European identity across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the post-war period. ...

Whereas the history of workers and labor movements has been widely researched, the history of work has been rather neglected by comparison. This volume offers original contributions that deal with cultural, social and theoretical aspects of the history of work in modern Europe, including the relations between gender and work, working and soldiering, work and trust, constructions and practices. The volume focuses on Germany but also places the case studies in a broader European context. It ...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Saar river valley was one of the three most productive heavy industrial regions in Germany and one of the main reference points for national debates over the organization of work in large-scale industry. Among Germany's leading opponents of trade unions, Saar employers were revered for their system of factory organization, which was both authoritarian and paternalistic, stressing discipline and punitive measures and seeking to regul...

The emergence of the state in Europe is a topic that has engaged historians since the establishment of the discipline of history. Yet the primary focus of has nearly always been to take a top-down approach, whereby the formation and consolidation of public institutions is viewed as the outcome of activities by princes and other social elites. Yet, as the essays in this collection show, such an approach does not provide a complete picture. By investigating the importance of local and indivi...

This open access book explores the role of continuity in political processes and practices during the Age of Revolutions. It argues that the changes that took place in the years around 1800 were enabled by different types of continuities across Europe and in the Americas. With historians of modernity tending to emphasise the rise of the new, scholarship has leaned towards an assumption that existing modes of action, thought and practice simply became extinct, irrelevant or at least subordi...

The Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build.Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minuti...

‘The Visionary Realism of German Economics’ forms a collection of Erik S. Reinert’s essays bringing the more realistic German economic tradition into focus as an alternative to Anglo-Saxon neoclassical mainstream economics. Together the essays form a holistic theory explaining why economic development––by its very nature––is a very uneven process. Herein lie the important policy implications of the volume.