Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 292

This is a book that very much does what it says on the cover. It seeks, successfully, to provide a quantitative account of the structure of large-scale landownership in the eastern provinces of Prussia between 1875 and 1914. This is a task rendered useful by the fact that Prussian statisticians collected census data on the units by which the land was actually worked (often so hard for agricultural historians to obtain!), but not on ownership, that is, how many of these units were held, separately or in combination, by individuals. Eddie’s remedy is to use ‘address books’, basically compilations produced from 1875 onwards on the holdings of the families and institutions in these Junker heartlands. We should note however that this picture remains partial: only landowners holding 100 hectares or more are investigated. Although the smaller properties were a vanishingly small proportion of those recorded in the address books, the address books themselves covered less than half of East Elbian land in 1882. This is a study of large-scale landownership.

The author provides an exhaustive demonstration that census data on farms cannot be used a proxy for ownership units, and notes variation in accounting of farms between censuses – a salutary lesson in the use of agricultural statistics. He provides an equally exhaustive account of method. One wonders if we really need to know that, ‘the records were examined page by page’, but the manner in which the results were achieved is certainly transparent.

The Junkers, unsurprisingly, are found to have owned a majority of the land of large states, but not greatest number, and they certainly held much less than half of the total land area. This is in line with findings more broadly across Europe, that the position of the nobility can be exaggerated, perhaps because of the relative ease of finding records related to them. Eddie finds relative stability in landownership among the greatest owners, and that the process of ‘embourgeoisement’ subsequent to Prussia’s liberal reforms in 1807 had basically ended by the mid-1850s. Indeed the trend was reversed as non-nobles tended to withdraw from estate holding after 1890. A more novel finding is the extent of industrial activity on great estates, especially in food processing, and brickworks. Eddie concludes the book with a cluster analysis of land use in estates, where he expresses surprise at the relative unimportance of animal husbandry (i.e. pastures and meadows). But given this is a period of rapid expansion in the use of fodder crops, data based solely on land use criteria is perhaps not terribly useful for determining the economic orientation of landowners.

This is very much a book for the specialist. As the author himself states, much of the analysis is presented in ‘excruciating detail’. Contextualization is brief, and there is very little consideration of agriculture itself, the role of tariffs, relating landownership to other sources of income, or wider Prussian economic development. Nevertheless it will be an essential port of call for those who want to know who exercised control over the land in East Elbia in the decades after unification.