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Seventh Workshop on Early Modern Central European History
more cooperative way, proved to be a driving force towards German
unification. Among other things it allowed Prussia to demonstrate
that it could provide public goods to other states, established a
degree of economic integration, and provided the later Zollverein
with a model for administrative and cooperative structures. Close
attention to developments on the ground was also the hallmark of
Paul Warde’s (University of East Anglia) paper on ‘State Formation
from Below? By-laws, Lordship and Neighbourliness in the South-
West’. He is engaged in a major research project that sees by-laws,
which have been issued in large numbers from the fourteenth
through to the eighteenth century with peaks in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, not as evidence of intra-communal strife and
tension or as means of adoptive environmental policies, as historians
used to do, but as products of cooperation between lords and peasants
in order to restore authority and guarantee order within the
local community. As he demonstrated with examples from southwestern
Germany, by-laws helped households and communes in collaboration
with the territorial government or the local lordship to
maintain social relations and customs as they had been in the past
and to preserve a social equilibrium deemed central to the well-being
of the locality.
In the second session, chaired by Clarissa Campbell-Orr (Anglia
Ruskin University) the focus of the debate shifted from the problems
of state formation to methodological approaches which address
questions of politics and society from the viewpoint of a constructivist
understanding of history. Under the heading ‘New Approaches
to the Political’, three speakers illustrated advances made in this field
over the last few years. Alexander Schmidt (University of Jena) questioned
older assumptions about German high culture in the years
around 1800. According to his paper, ‘The Power of the Muses?
French and German Diplomats Assess High Culture in Napoleonic
Germany’, it was French diplomats who helped to create the picture
of a politically apathetic German people pre-occupied with philosophy,
literature, and aesthetics, while German intellectuals cultivated
the idea of high culture as a political weapon. The Prussian reformer,
Freiherr vom Stein, for example, viewed the support of the middle
classes as crucial to the war effort against the French and suggested
orchestrating military operations with cultural propaganda. Estelle
Joubert (University of Toronto), on the other hand, aimed to revise
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