The Transitions of Politics and Society in Early Modern Germany

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jinfei, Qian, author.

Title: The transitions of politics and society in early modern Germany / Qian Jinfei.

Description: New York : Peter Lang, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023022492 (print) | LCCN 2023022493 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781433177224 (hardback) | ISBN 9781433178306 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781433178313 (epub) | ISBN 9781433178320 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Germany—Politics and government. | Political

culture—Germany. | Social change—Germany. | Political

science—Research—China.

Classification: LCC DD112 .J56 2024 (print) | LCC DD112 (ebook) | DDC

306.0943—dc23/eng/20230608

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022492

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022493

DOI 10.3726/b16640

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German

National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available

on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISBN 9781433177224 (hardback)

ISBN 9781433178306 (ebook)

ISBN 9781433178313 (epub)

DOI 10.3726/b16640

Supported by a Grant from the Yunnan University Double First-Class Initiative

This edition is an authorized translation from the Chinese language edition

Published by arrangement with Social Sciences Academic Press (China)

All rights reserved

© 2024 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA

info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Qian Jinfei received his PhD in World History (with a focus on medieval European history) from Peking University in 2004. Since then Qian has worked in the Department of History at Yunnan University, where he is now a professor and tutor for Doctor The main areas of Qian’s teaching and research include European history in the late Middle Ages and early modern times, German history, and comparative studies of the Chinese and Western Histories. Supported by a grant from the China Scholarship Council, Qian spent a year at the University of Vienna, Austria from 2014 to 2015 as a visiting scholar. Qian has presided over or taken part in around ten national- and provincial-level research projects, and published more than ten articles in academic journals. Qian is also the translator or co-translator of the following works: The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective (by Peter Blickle), Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (by Peter Brown), and History of Western Society (by John Buckler, Bennett D. Hill and others).

About the book

Based on relevant research from domestic and foreign academic circles, this book focuses on the path choices and transitions of the main political forces of Germany (the emperors, the princes, the Imperial Cities and the peasants) in the early modern political and social transitional processes in the 15–18th century, as well as the impacts of these transitions on the historical development of Germany after the 19th century. In this book, the author puts forward his own thoughts on the theory of “the German Special Path” (deutscher Sonderweg), thereby revealing the “continuity” of the historical development of Germany. This book is the first in China that systematically and comprehensively explores the political and social transitions of Germany in early modern times, reflecting the understanding of Chinese scholars on the issues of the political and social transitions of Germany in early modern times and the theory of “the German Special Path” (deutscher Sonderweg).

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Foreword

In the sixteenth century, seventeen million German-speaking people lived in one hundred thirty thousand settlements, with 85 percent of them being peasants living in rural areas and the remaining 15 percent spread across two thousand and eight hundred cities and towns. The emperor and ruling princes, as well as the local nobility, churches, and free cities (Freie Städte), clung to power, forming a map of political disintegration. With Lübeck as the principal city, merchants and nobles from big cities such as Hamburg, Cologne, and Bremen founded the Hanseatic League in 1367. For a time, the league outwitted Denmark, winning a monopoly of the Baltic trade. Many of their trading posts (kontore) spread along the coast from London (the Steelyard) in the west to Novgorod (Peterhof) in the east. However, they began to lose these monopolies due to the stiff competition from the rising monarchies such as Britain and France, resulting in their decline in the fifteenth century and their inevitable official dissolution in 1669. The Holy Roman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is generally perceived as one of political disunity and economic decline, while British or French models are viewed as the true paths to development, in sharp contrast to the inherently “backward” Holy Roman Empire.

Two new investigations, however, have cast doubt on this traditional viewpoint. The first is a study of the political history of the Reformation by the German historian Peter Blickle. In the Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants War from a New Perspective and the Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Blickle (1997 and 1992) found that Germany’s political division provided opportunities for the common people to participate in historical events, making modern politics possible from the bottom up and facilitating a direct transition from communalism to republicanism. In fact, in places where the power of the monarchy was declining and cities and citizens were empowered, such as Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, this path to modernity might have been achievable. However, this was not at all an easy road. In Germany, with more powerful princes, unity was finally achieved by force, while in Switzerland and the Netherlands, where the feudal power structure had weakened, the republic was established directly.

The second study comes from the American historian Mack Walker, who offers a new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire’s rulership model. Walker argues that because it did not conform to the theory of the state that was based on state sovereignty and set forth by France or England as norms, the Holy Roman Empire has typically been perceived as politically backward. From the fifteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire functioned within a continuous, self-contained political structure. It did not fit into any of the centralized, absolutist models of government in Western Europe. The German nation was not built on internal forces, but rather on a new mechanism that obviously imposed restraints and limitations on those forces. Its stability resulted from the constant restraint of aggressive powers and disruptive energy. For Walker, the distinctive hallmark of the Empire was the long-term operation of very small units of administration and the inner councils and other decentralized institutions within those units. As a result, on a practical and legal level, Germany no longer had the power to maintain its own interests or uphold the imperial constitution. The empire fell short of sovereignty or a political center, and its governance operated at many different levels and in many different forms. Thus, German history, after all, has always been the people’s stories and events that took place in the Reich, the territorial states, and the local communities. The so-called German problem was really a German particularity or popular sovereignty, or, more precisely, a decentralized system of governance.

For more than a decade, Qian Jinfei has employed the critical juncture framework in analyzing the transition model of Germany from the Middle Ages to the modern age, culminating in this new book, The Transitions of Politics and Society in Early Modern Germany. In contrast to Blickle, Qian not only highlights the role of burghers (Bürger) and peasants but also conducts an in-depth discussion on the territorial states of Germany. Unlike Walker, Qian maintains that political fragmentation was not necessarily an obstacle to modernity, and he does not support the idea that the transition path of Germany was in absolute opposition to that of Britain and France. Consequently, Qian has made a comprehensive investigation of the political system and social structure of Germany, including the reconfiguration of political power that involved the monarchy, cities, peasants, and territorial princes and was shaped by the unfolding events, to present a broad overview of the transition of German politics and society.

Qian Jinfei suggests that Germany’s transition in the early modern epoch unfolded with distinctive features. This occurred both at the imperial and territorial levels. At the imperial level, a federal system based on the Imperial Estates was constructed; at the territorial level, the territorial states and the city republics in the early modern period were established with the absolute monarchy and political and administrative centralization. This transition does not neatly fit into the so-called “classic” path of transition of the British and French models. It is problematic, in the view of Qian, to accept the traditional view of a Germany where a feudal system was perpetrated over a lengthy period of time, no transition ever took place in the early modern period, the unification was retarded, and absolutism originated.