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“Right-Sizing” in Oftering Parish: Labor Hoarding Peasant Firms in Austria, 1700–1850
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2013
Extract
When Hans Rosenberg wrote an assessment of the first three published volumes—by Friedrich Lütge, Heinz Haushofer, and Wilhelm Abel—of what would become the six-volume Deutsche Agrargeschichte (1962–1984), he thought he detected a new analytical direction in German agrarian history, one that pointed toward how the economic and social experiences of rural populations could be understood as mutually intertwined and active in the broader course of events. In contrast to the legal formalism of Lütge and the technicist agronomism of Haushofer, Rosenberg held up Wilhelm Abel's work as particularly noteworthy for seeing rural populations simultaneously engaged in several kinds of markets, with movements in European grain prices over three centuries playing, for Abel, the role of comparable indicators for regionally differentiated market swings with diverse effects on rural life.
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References
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3 Abel, W., Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New York: St. Martins, 1980)Google Scholar, 8; Rosenberg, “Deutsche Agrargeschichte,” 99–100. In economist J. Hicks's language these are forms of “bilateral monopoly” (i.e., exchanges without competition in which transactions are “settled . . . by the will of the stronger”); Hicks, J., A Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 105–06Google Scholar. The recent turn toward claiming that in the early-modern absolutist-corporatist world rural populations were able to negotiate with their overlords about mutually understood legal guidelines has elements of a corrective. Such “weapons of the weak” perspectives threaten to misrecognize the play of power in systems, however. Language about “supplication” and “merciful dispensation” assigned unequal status to the negotiating parties from the outset in systems where “unenforced” (and therefore unquestioned) laws were the absolute rule held in reserve inside the cynically flexible and, when it comes to things that matter, finally unresponsive practices of the authorities. Cf. Schlumbohm, J., “Gesetze die nicht durchgesetzt werden—ein Strukturmerkmal des frühneuzeitlichen Staates?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (1997)Google Scholar.
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15 The fear that commercial contacts with outsiders would empower the subject population to become “independently” wealthy and act as a revolutionary force was a fear that never left the Imperial house. See Beer, A., Die Finanzen Österreichs im 19. Jahrhundert (Prague: Tempsky, 1877)Google Scholar for an account of how Metternich's (economically “liberal”!) pleadings to restore the long-lost connection with the south German Oberland by a customs union met iron-willed opposition on just such political grounds by the highest royal treasury officials.
16 That in other German states rural guilds fought for “free trade” against urban guild and state authorities' trade restrictions has also recently been recognized by Medick, Hans, “Weaving and Surviving in Laichingen, 1650–1900: Micro-History as History and as Research Experience,” in Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge, ed. Scott, J. and Bhatt, N. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 290Google Scholar.
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23 Ibid., 184, 190–91. Worth noting is castle Hartheim's medical and welfare presence in the region long before it became a notorious euthanasia installation beginning in 1938.
24 Extrapolated from Klein, K., “Zur Entwicklung der Bevölkerung und der Sozialstruktur in Österreich,” in Beiträge zur Bevölkerungs- und Sozialgeschichte Österreichs, ed. Helczmanovszki, H. (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1973), 105Google Scholar.
25 Meixner, H., Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Landes Oberösterreich (Salzburg: Müller, 1952), 77–78Google Scholar. Meixner's account of Austrian rail development (82–3) suggests that it was considerably burdened by dignitaries' forcing, under the pretext of “strategic considerations,” expensive and presumably self-serving changes on the planners and builders, making, in turn, these projects unprofitable and unattractive to investors.
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28 When we exclude Lower Austria from the growth rate of Cisleithania in the period 1810–1850, we get an adjusted growth rate of 0.58 percent per annum.
29 Extrapolated from Sandgruber, R., Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft. Konsumgüterverbrauch, Lebensstandard and Alltagskultur in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaft und Politik, 1982), 339Google Scholar.
30 Extrapolated from Sandgruber, R., Österreichische Agrarstatistik, 1750–1918 (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1978), 146Google Scholar.
31 A. Hoffmann, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 318–19.
32 In 1846, 25,278 workers produced commodities for the internal Austrian market and 14,636 for exports, roughly a 6:4 ratio. While we may note a considerable improvement in the number of new Upper Austrian “factory” foundings, signifying expanded business dealings with Northern Italy during the 1820s and 1830s, this was a short-lived boomlet that did not survive into the later nineteenth century. Haider, Geschichte Oberösterreichs, 260; Hoffmann, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 426, 430, shows that new foundings of factories by outside financiers were low in the pre-March period and that fewer than half the goods that were produced for export could find buyers.
33 Hoffmann, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 318–19.
34 Haider, Geschichte Oberösterreichs, 269–72.
35 Hoffmann, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 422–24.
36 Berkner, L., “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An 18th Century Austrian Example,” American Historical Review 77 (1972)Google Scholar: 400 note 8.
37 Mitterauer, M., “Peasant and Non-Peasant Family Forms in Relation to the Physical Environment and the Local Economy,” in The European Peasant Family and Society, ed. Rudolph, R. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 31–5Google Scholar. For a useful brief introduction to this source, see W. Mayrhofer's indispensable Quellenerläuterungen für Haus- und Familienforscher in Oberösterreich (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 1992), 31–40Google Scholar.
38 I cite these as Pfarrarchiv Oftering (PAO) with appropriate years. With thanks also to Pfarrer August Krenn of the Oftering parish office.
39 PAO, “Beichtregister 1910.”
40 PAO, 1703, 1793, 1825, 1846. The earliest register is entitled “Verzaichnüß deren Comoni und nit Commonicanten in Fillial alhier zu Offtering in Anno 1703,” while the rest have various titles with “Beichtregister” becoming the standard by the early nineteenth century. As the title of the 1703 census already indicates, those not taking Communion were also included in these registers.
41 See the discussion in Rebel, H., “Peasant Stem Families in Early Modern Austria: Life Plans, Status Tactics, and the Grid of Inheritance,” Social Science History 2, no. 3 (1978)Google Scholar; see also Rebel, Peasant Classes, 170.
42 Rebel, Peasant Classes, 225–6 and passim; Rebel, “Peasant Stem Families,” passim.
43 Sieder, R., Sozialgeschichte der Familie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 62–64Google Scholar; Rebel, Peasant Classes, 93–99.
44 It is noteworthy that in the Viennese industrial suburb Gumpendorf similar ratios between servant and renter families can be found that exhibit similar changes between 1827 and 1857. Ehmer, Josef, Soziale Traditionen in Zeiten des Wandels. Arbeiter und Handwerker im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994), 172–3, 192Google Scholar.
45 It is evident, moreover, from the household inventories of the lodgers during the seventeenth century that in the pre-1750 configuration of the Austrian empire, they constituted a relatively prosperous and locally “settled” group, which in turn suggests that, in the absence of an option for direct industrial employment by outmigration, there was a sufficient local market for short-term waged labor in the earlier period. Rebel, Peasant Classes, 80–87, 95–103, and passim.
46 That these labor relationships persisted through the mid-twentieth century is evident from Lackinger, O., Der Strukturwandel in Linz-Land (Linz: Oberösterreichische Landesregierung, 1955), 100, 115–131, and passimGoogle Scholar.
47 I owe my initial perspective on “labor hoarding” to Vollmer, Uwe, Arbeitslosigkeit in sozialistischen Planwirtschaften (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1994)Google Scholar. I will take up his argument later in the text.
48 Sandgruber, Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft, 115–6; Scheichl, Franz, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des gemeinen Arbeitslohnes vom Jahr 1500 bis auf die Gegenwart (Vienna: Pichler, 1885), 37–9Google Scholar.
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52 Mitterauer, “Formen,” 209–11, 297–300, and passim.
53 Ibid., 189–90; see Mitterauer, “Peasant and Non-Peasant Family Forms in Relation to the Physical Environment and the Local Economy,” Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 139–60Google Scholar.
54 Ehmer, Soziale Traditionen, 52–3.
55 I am referring to the documentation of primarily lower-class experiences initiated by Michael Mitterauer during the early 1980s at the Institut für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte at the University of Vienna. The project continues currently as the Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen at the institute and has gathered about 3,000 manuscripts, of which about sixty have been published by Böhlau in Vienna. My references here are to the initial volume in the project by Gremel, Maria, Mit neuen Jahren im Dienst (Vienna: Böhlau, 1983)Google Scholar; also Weber, T., ed., Häuslerkindheit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984)Google Scholar; Weber, T., ed., Mägde (Vienna: Böhlau, 1985)Google Scholar; Ortmayr, N., ed., Knechte (Vienna: Böhlau, 1992)Google Scholar; Ziss, E., ed., Ziehkinder (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995)Google Scholar. Still worth considering are some of the early rationales behind this project in Ehalt, H., ed., Geschichte von Unten (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984)Google Scholar.
56 Gremel, Dienst, 187–8, 201–3; Weber, ed., Häuslerkindheit, 115, 118–19, 124–7, 195, 201–2.
57 Gremel, Dienst, 68, 82–3; Weber, ed., Häuslerkindheit, 40–2, 57, 103, 143–45.
58 Weber, ed., Häuslerkindheit, 210.
59 Mitterauer, M., “Auswirkungen der Agrarrevolution auf die bäuerliche Familienstruktur in Österreich,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit. Neue Forschungen, ed. Conze, W. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976)Google Scholar; Mitterauer, M., “Familienformen und Illegitimität in ländlichen Gebieten Österreichs,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 19 (1979): 181–3Google Scholar.
60 Vollmer, Arbeitslosigkeit, 52–3 and passim. His language is about “tacit reserves” (“stille Reserven”) of labor (53), and his work reveals the tendency of East German factory bosses “to hoard unneeded labor” (“nicht benötigte Arbeitskräfte zu horten”). There is also the, in many ways, admirable study by Woodward, S. L., Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, which, however, because of its complicated preoccupations with the interplay of “full employment” concerns, the ideological management of paradoxes of socialist unemployment, and the impact of regional-ethnic, foreign trade, and military contingencies, has no room for the several dimensions of labor hoarding at play in the various solutions to these problems, even in places in the text where such a perspective might have offered clearer explanations; cf. 21–3, 86–90, 261–64, and passim.
61 Vollmer, Arbeitslosigkeit, 56.
62 This is where D. C. North's specific “modernization” approach in Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981)Google Scholar, 43, governed by a kind of last-instance measure of an economy's possible range of flexible responses to the always shifting contingencies of market movements, has relevance to the analysis presented here.
63 In this regard, see also Casson, M., Information and Organization: A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 86Google Scholar.
64 Keynes, J. M., The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harbinger, 1964)Google Scholar, 166–8, 41–3, 128–9, 166–8, 245–50, 254, 257–60; cf. Skidelsky, R., John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (New York: Penguin, 1994), 464–6Google Scholar.
65 One can point to at least two authors of the autobiographies in the ISWG collection that bring the word “slave” into recognition, once in the context of how village children saw each other across class lines (Gremel, Dienst, 164) and once as a sobering self-recognition (Ortmayr, Knechte, 197).
66 Percentage of occupied houses in column unless specified otherwise.
67 Percentage of Housed/Total (row 3); applies to all of row 4.
68 Average number of occupants per occupied house.
69 Occupancy percent rate.