Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers

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Oxford University Press, Apr 29, 1993 - History - 384 pages
Among the regional landed elites in the Western World of the mid-1800s, the two most formidable were the owners of slave plantations in the Southern states of the U.S. and the proprietors of manorial estates in the provinces of Prussian East Elbia. Masters and Lords surveys the economic, social, and political histories of the two classes from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, and pays particular attention to planters during the secession crisis of 1860-61 and to Junkers during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-49. In the process, Bowman grapples with such ambiguous and contentious concepts as capitalism, conservatism, and paternalism. Despite very different labor systems, antebellum planters and contemporaneous Junkers alike presided over landed estates that functioned as both autocratic political communities and agricultural enterprises exporting valuable commodities to industrializing England. This book also highlights important geographic, demographic, and political contrasts between the South and East Elbia as regional societies. Bowman concludes that the crucial distinction between the two landed elites is to be found in the Junkers' militarist and estatist monarchism versus the planters' libertarian but racist republicanism.

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Contents

Introduction
3
1 Landed Autocrats Gentlemen Farmers and British Influences
17
2 Agrarian Entrepreneurs
42
3 Contentious Concepts
79
4 Planter Republicanism versus Junker Monarchism
112
5 Patriarchy and Paternalism
162
6 Planter and Junker Conservatism
184
Epilogue
217
Notes
225
Index
349
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