15th Gerald Stourzh Lecture on the History of Human Rights and Democracy
Lora Wildenthal
Equal and Free?
Waged Agricultural Laborers in the Prussian Reform Era
22 May 2024
© Eric Granquist
Lora Wildenthal is John Antony Weir Professor of History and director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Rice University, Houston, Texas. Her research has focussed on the history of the German colonies from a gender perspective and on human rights movements in the German Federal Republic. Currently, she is working on the topic of labor rights as human rights, in particular free wage labor in the early nineteenth century.
Selected publications: German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (2001); ed. with Eric Ames and Marcia Klotz, Germany’s Colonial Pasts (2005); The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (2013); ed. with Jean Quataert, The Routledge History of Human Rights (2019).
Homepage of Lora Wildenthal
Abstract
In 1807 Prussian reformers announced the emancipation of subjected farmers. They thereby placed Prussia among the array of countries that legally freed enslaved, enserfed, and subjected people in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries. The question of outcomes for freed farmers long organized the comparative history of emancipations. Did emancipation lead to farmers’ independence, or to their proletarianization? The latter was long the consensus for the Prussian case. Since the 1970s a revisionist historiography on Prussia has used agricultural and quantitative evidence to undo that consensus. This scholarship tells us that freed farmers in Prussia largely held onto their land. Moreover, it tells us that the agricultural labor done by free workers—waged workers who had never been subjected—was more important economically than that of subjected farmers already decades before emancipation. This lecture puts these free waged agricultural laborers at the center of the famous moment of peasant emancipation in Prussia. What were the outcomes for them? It traces how Prussian reformers connected the equality and freedom of these free waged agricultural laborers to their visions for economic and social reform. The free waged agricultural laborers came out of the Prussian Reform Era with less freedom than before—why?