"Schaffe, Schaffe, Hausle Baue": Hans Medick, the Swabians, and modernity

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1998 by Frederick Marquardt

By Frederick Marquardt Syracuse University

Hans Medick's big new book carries us into the middle of two major controversies. The first is the extensive scholarly discussion surrounding the concept of "proto-industrialization." This analytical category was first elaborated in detail in the volume, Industrialization before Industrialization, published in German in 1977 by Medick, Peter Kriedte, and Jurgen Schlumbohm - all then colleagues at the Max Planck Institut fur Geschichte in Gottingen.(1) Since then Kriedte, Schlumbohm, and another scholar formerly affiliated with the institute, David Sabean, have published sophisticated monographic studies of widely differing local communities in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.(2) Medick's new book thus caps the series of studies that this group launched in the 1970's. The book also articulates Medick's position in a second controversy: the sharp debate that still reverberates in Germany between those like Medick who advocate a turn to the "history of everyday life" (Alltagsgeschichte) by means of "micro-history" and those like Jurgen Kocka who insist that, whatever their method, historians should keep their eyes on the "big structures and processes."(3)

The empirical focus of Medick's study is the linen weavers of Laichingen, a village in the stony "raw alps" of Swabia in Wurttemberg. Medick follows them in detail from the early 18th century to 1900. This is a dense book - exhaustively researched, extensively argued, and erudite. It is also, in Medick's words, "experimental." This stems from his starting point and sources.

The conceptual starting point is proto-industrialization. Laichingen offers a richly documented case to test the hypotheses put forward in the model of European proto-industrialization that was proposed in the 1970's and has been qualified since. Laichingen's weavers in the 18th and 19th centuries fit the model's most basic characteristic: as commercial markets for cloth grew in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, more and more men in this rural community took up linen weaving on hand looms in their households. Already in 1722, 73 out of 211 householders in the village were weavers; by 1797 the weavers constituted 248 out of 364 households, and in 1880 they still represented 281 out of 408. Most of them combined craft production with some degree of farming. In various regions of early modern Europe this kind of rural handicraftsman, who had to rely on both craft production and farming for subsistence, was a source of cheap labor for merchants seeking manufactured goods to sell in distant markets, thus helping to fuel the growth of market-oriented rural industries - proto-industries - that reached their greatest extent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Medick probes the dynamics of the process in Laichingen, seeking out specifically the interrelationships between it and other material and cultural dimensions of local life. For this purpose the documentary sources are rich. In Wurttemberg during this period, when anyone married or died, an official inventory of the person's movable and immovable property was compiled. Using 645 marriage inventories and 833 death inventories for 1748-1820, Medick is able not only to trace trends in the material wealth and possessions of different categories of people over time but also to discern patterns of accumulation and depletion within individual lives between marriage and death. From the parish registers for 1658-1880, Medick has reconstituted 2,594 marriages and is able to link these to the inventories to recreate the multi-generational material histories of individual families. He supplements these materials with information on earnings from tax rolls and with descriptive insights from documents such as pastors' visitation reports and protocols by government officials.

The richness of the sources permits Medick to attach to this particular case study a large methodological significance. He sees it as an example of the benefits of "micro-history." His argument is that only by reconstituting different dimensions of the lives of discrete individuals and small groups through such thickly compiled local sources can we really ascertain the interrelationships between different spheres of experience. Aggregate concepts and statistical averages cannot by themselves lay bare the existence of relationships or their precise nature and variety.

But in fact Medick's book is much more than pure "micro-history." He stresses that his purpose is to write not a "history of details" (Detailgeschichte) but rather "a history of the whole in its details" (Detailgeschichte des Ganzen), in other words, an account of the concrete ways in which "big" structures and processes, especially capitalism and the bureaucratic state, both formed, and were transformed by, the everyday behavior of flesh-and-blood people. As a result of this approach, Medick's book proceeds on three different but closely interrelated levels. On the most empirical level it is an exploration of what the sources tell us about the proto-industrialization of Laichingen. And on this level Medick frequently takes the reader through the detailed decoding of individual sources and cases, making reading the book a veritable exercise in historical method. He follows closely the protocols that describe the sometimes violent confrontation between the weavers' guild and the Urach Trading Company in the 1750's, pointing out the "theoretical sense" in the vocabulary used by the weavers. He scrutinizes the itemizations in individual marriage and death inventories to reconstruct, for example, the factors involved in the loss of a value of 178 Gulden in the twenty-year marriage of the weaver-cottager Johann Jakob Weinmar and his spinner-wife, Ursula. Or he reproduces the minute descriptions of the wardrobes of the weaver Mangold, who wore a respectable brown coat, and the gravedigger Laichinger, who wore a more modest gray one, but who, along with his wife, had some items in festive red that suggested a certain disregard of formal convention.