Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Germany

Hurwich, Judith J.

doi:10.2307/206280

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…ways to circumvent Saxon Law (Hurwich, 1993). For instance, younger sons were often discouraged to marry, or were given the permission to marry only if they found an heiress.…”

Section: Marriages In the English And German Nobilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marriage strategy among the European nobility

Marcassa

Pouyet

Trégouët

2020

Explorations in Economic History

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We use a unique dataset to analyze marriage and union patterns of European nobility from the 1500s to the 1800s. Our matching model predicts homophily in title, and that more stringent constraints on the dowries lead to a higher degree of homophily. Historical evidence supports both predictions: nobles tended to marry nobles with identical title; and, German marriages, whose dowry rules were more rigid, were characterized by a higher degree of homophiliy in titles than English marriages. Moreover, homophily in titles decreased over time for Germans, and remained constant for English nobles.

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“…ways to circumvent Saxon Law (Hurwich, 1993). For instance, younger sons were often discouraged to marry, or were given the permission to marry only if they found an heiress.…”

Section: Marriages In the English And German Nobilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marriage strategy among the European nobility

Marcassa

Pouyet

Trégouët

2020

Explorations in Economic History

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“…Equitable inheritance meant that the feudal class was hard pressed to maintain the cohesion of family wealth. After all, notes Hurwich (, 699) in a careful historical analysis of the German nobility, “primogeniture or other forms of impartible inheritance was [...] [a] method by which noble families could avoid subdivision of their estates and consolidate wealth to hand on to future generations.” Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison second that “[primogeniture] concentrated wealth in the hands of a few dynastic families” that “were entrenched within a centralized power system” (, 658). By abolishing primogeniture, Tocqueville claimed that the revolutionaries had destroyed “the last trace of ranks and hereditary distinctions” (cited in Giesey , 271).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Inheritance Customs Affect Political and Social Inequality?

Hager

Hilbig

2019

American J Political Sci

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Why are some societies more unequal than others? The French revolutionaries believed unequal inheritances among siblings to be responsible for the strict hierarchies of the ancien régime. To achieve equality, the revolutionaries therefore enforced equal inheritance rights. Their goal was to empower women and to disenfranchise the noble class. But do equal inheritances succeed in leveling the societal playing field? We study Germany-a country with pronounced local-level variation in inheritance customs-and find that municipalities that historically equally apportioned wealth, to this day, elect more women into political councils and have fewer aristocrats in the social elite. Using historic data, we point to two mechanisms: wealth equality and pro-egalitarian preferences. In a final step, we also show that, counterintuitively, equitable inheritance customs positively predict income inequality. We interpret this finding to mean that equitable inheritances level the playing field by rewarding talent, not status.

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“…Too many male children made providing for them a problem and was in any case the source of discord within the dynasty; too few male heirs and the basic survival of the house came into question. 43 In contrast to their brethren to the west, German princes continued to use partible inheritance to provide for their younger sons. 44 The results of partible inheritance can be best illustrated through the case of the house of Wettin (Saxony).…”

Section: Partible Inheritance In Early Modern Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Kinship, Property, and Authority

Sharma

2015

Politics & Society

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This article is a step towards a rethinking of the emergence of the modern state in Europe. Traditionally, war has been viewed as the central mechanism of state formation. This approach claims that war caused the emergence of the modern state in two significant ways: 1) by consolidating the politically fragmented world of the middle ages through conquest; and 2) through the pressure of competition in a Darwinian international system, which forced the polities of Europe to create the bureaucratic structures fundamental to the authority of the modern state. This article seeks to undermine the first of these mechanisms by showing that the territorial consolidation of Europe was a logical result of dynastic lordship. I seek to show that the consolidation of territory and authority into fewer and fewer hands was a direct consequence of dynastic successional practices and therefore that the emphasis on coercion in European political development has been overplayed.

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Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Germany

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Marriage strategy among the European nobility

Marriage strategy among the European nobility

Do Inheritance Customs Affect Political and Social Inequality?

Kinship, Property, and Authority

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