It is difficult to exaggerate the effects of Seventeenth-Century warfare on southwest Germany. A large percentage of the population fell victim to the plaque or combat, and many more fled the region. A village which was averaging 30 births per year went two years without recording a birth. The grave diggers, though, were busy, as deaths went up tenfold in this period. One consequence of this was that society became more mobile. People moved, not just from village to village, but from region to region, or from country to country. The war did not end abruptly in 1648, but continued on and off for another fifty years especially along the Rhine River.
As more peaceful times did return, many of the old ways returned also, but, in other cases, new ways emerged. For a period, labor was very scarce and gave the surviving members more power. Slowly, though, the local rulers began gaining more control over their subjects' lives. In the Eighteenth Century, the larger governments deepened their hegemony over regional and local governments, even village life, by extending their bureaucracies and their taxing power. This extended to the legal system and to the military forces. The losers were the cities, guilds, estates, and weaker neighbors. Though this pattern was present before the wars of the Seventeenth Century, it reemerged after the Seventeenth Century.
In the southwest, the process of state-building was closely connected to population policy and, ultimately, emigration. Most of the rulers of the larger states (Wuerttemberg, Baden-Durlach, the Palatinate) believed that a rational population policy was central to rebuilding a strong, prosperous state. A key thought was that it was good to encourage in-migration and to restrict out-migration. People (subjects) are power, people are income from taxes, people are soldiers.
Though the evidence in the Eighteenth Century showed there were too many people on the land, leading political theorists argued that until every square inch of land was under maximum cultivation, until all possible raw materials were being used, and until there was more labor than necessary to maintain industrial efforts, then a country was not over populated. These theorists also argued that this condition had not yet been reached. Accordingly, many territorial rulers maintained policies that promoted immigration into their region while restricting or making it difficult to emigrate. In some cases, outward migration was simply forbidden.
These efforts on the part of the rulers were only partially effective because the people would not conform like chess pieces on a board.
(27 May 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.