The Peasants of Ottobeuren, 1487-1726: A Rural Society in Early Modern Europe (review)

This study of monasterial peasants in the Allgäu, Upper Swabia, tries to reconcile what the author sees as a fundamental contradiction in the periodization known as "early modern Europe." Although still considered in a dynamic period of transition, most "early modern" societies on the European continent actually proved unable to break free of their social and demographic constraints, thus being unable to achieve significant breakthroughs in economic output. According to Sreenivasan, however, the problem lies in historians' fixation on technologies of production, which overlooks the fact that "superficial continuities of form can conceal dramatic shifts in underlying mechanisms" (7). For the peasants of "Ottobeuren, this "underlying mechanism" was the creation of a dense infrastructure of cash-based market exchanges that the author has uncovered through massive research on the notarized protocols. These documents were used by Ottobeuren peasants to record inheritances, family obligations, and many other aspects of village relations.

By 1550, the rural population of Ottobeuren was approaching a demographic crisis in which the division of farmsteads into parcels had left most households with plots dangerously close to, or below, the subsistence level. Realizing that the continued subdivision of peasant farmsteads would create holdings too small to be economically viable, the monks of Ottobeuren (aided by village leaders) effectively put an end to partible inheritance, strictly controlling creation of new households while preserving existing farmsteads.

On the surface, this strategy had the effect of freezing village property relations in their mid-sixteenth century mold; landholding patterns in Ottobeuren apparently changed little in the period from 1560 to 1620 (148–151). Sreenivasan argues, however, that a dynamic transformation was taking place below the surface of this apparent immobility. The new impartible inheritance, as practiced in Ottobeuren, was not a "winner take all" proposition in which the noninheriting siblings were left with nothing. On the contrary, the designated heir to the farmstead had to purchase the farmstead from the current owner (normally his parents), with each noninheriting sibling receiving equal shares of the purchase sum. The new "cash intensive inheritance practices" forced the the heir to borrow money both to buy the farm and to settle his kinship obligations with cash payments. Regular and frequent participation in the cash economy, driven by impartable inheritance, thus became dominant in the new village order and survived the Thirty Years' War. Although the war cut the population in half, creating a land reserve that could have easily supported a return to partible inheritance, the village elites were able to maintain the system of impartible inheritance

Sreenivasan's treatment of his sources is skillful and engaging, but the changes that he has so ably analyzed do not necessarily add up to "dramatic shifts in underlying mechanisms." Indeed, the old Europe that he describes seems to have been much better at perpetuating itself than at making the transition to modernity.