Felix Selgert - Baden and the Modern State: The Implementation of Administrative and Legal Reforms in the German State of Baden during the 19th Century

Felix Selgert

Baden and the Modern State

Jahrbuch fr Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Im Auftrag der Herausgeber des Jahrbuchs fr Wirtschaftsgeschichte herausgegeben von Alexander Ntzenadel und Jochen Streb

Beiheft 23

ISBN 978-3-11-060079-7

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-060265-4

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-059930-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018019754

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cover image: Ducal District Office in Mannheim around 1906

www.degruyter.com

This book foremost deals with the question of how the nineteenth century state in the Grand-Duchy of Baden had succeeded in convincing its civil servants to adhere to formal administrative rules and rules of personal conduct. Its core parts come from my Ph.D. thesis that I defended in early 2013 at the Departement of Economics at the University of Mannheim. Other projects then delayed the conversion of the individual, although interrelated, papers that I wrote during my time in Mannheim into a book. The interruption of the project nevertheless gave me the opportunity to think in more detail about how the arguments presented in the thesis were related to the overall state building process in Baden. When I resumed the project, I therefore added two chapters that analyze this state building process and shed light on how state building and economic development interacted. Although state building was important for economic development, the latter was not its main purpose. It was rather the provision of internal and external security that legitimated permanent taxation and the development of an administrative capacity. Therefore, the book also includes an analysis of the development and performance of Badens security police force, the Gendarmerie.

The original thesis would not have been written without the encouragement of the late Christoph Buchheim, who aroused my interest in economic history and gave me the opportunity to work on this project. After his death in 2009, the supervision of the thesis was shouldered by Jochen Streb and Eckhard Janeba. I am very thankful for their support in these tough times. Through their continuous advice and encouragement, they also contributed substantially to the successful completion of the thesis. I also have to thank Carsten Burhop, Stefanie van de Kerkhof and Katharina Mhlhoff with whom I enjoyed long discussions and who have taken the burden to read several versions of my work. I also thank the staff of the Generallandesarchiv for their very helpful advice, generous provision of records and the cordial atmosphere. I furthermore thank Kirsten Petrak-Jones for proofreading the final manuscript. All remaining inaccuracies are of course my own. Finally, I thank Jochen Streb and Alexander Ntzenadel for accepting the manuscript for the Beihefte of the Economic History Yearbook.

Mainz, April 2018

The search for the roots of economic growth and development has always been the main purpose of economic history. Unsurprisingly, such a complex question has found a multitude of answers. Prominent explanations range from the origin of a knowledge culture in seventeenth century Europe

In Germany, the acceleration of technological change and the transition to continuous long-term growth occurred around the middle of the nineteenth century. Even when the formal institutional framework e.g. the rules and laws that govern taxation, regulate markets and grant private property is beneficial for growth, bureaucrats may thus face incentives to misuse these rules deteriorating the growth perspectives of a society. For these reasons, the rules and regulations that frame bureaucrats incentives to adhere to the formal institutional framework are an important component for a societys economic fate.

As a by-product of the state-building process, the nineteenth century bureaucracy became more rule-bound and less predatory than its eighteenth century predecessor. However, there are relatively few studies which consider the importance of an efficient bureaucracy for economic growth. There are even fewer studies that ask how such an efficient bureaucracy was established. The main objective of this book is to close this gap. Thereby it concentrates on the internal dynamics of an administration after the introduction of an efficiency-enhancing organization. More explicitly, this study asks how rules and regulations that govern employment, dismissal, promotion and remuneration of bureaucrats shaped the latters incentives to implement or to misuse the formal administrative and legal framework.

The book provides a detailed case study of local bureaucrats, called district magistrates ( Amtmnner ) in the German state of Baden during the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During this period, the small south-west German territory of the princes of Baden turned into a well-ordered state which was often referred to as a Musterstaat .

The study builds on an extensive set of archival material from the Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe including information about district magistrates remuneration and their performance in regard to the implementation of the formal administrative and legal framework. District magistrates were a focal group since they managed daily administrative tasks and provided justice at the local level. Binding district magistrates decision-making processes to clear-cut rules and making them more predictable was therefore a crucial complement to the technological and cultural changes that brought about the industrial revolution.

Asking how the creation of a rule-abiding administration was achieved is thus a crucial question. The book, however, goes beyond this point and provides a second case study of the countrys security police, the Gendarmerie. Internal security was a big spending item of the bureaucratic state. Like the establishment of an efficient local administration, its creation was double-edged. Both organizations were created in order to increase the states grip on its citizens, but could only be successful if their power was restricted at the same time. The chapters on the Gendarmerie therefore ask by how far the new security force served as a tool of social control on the one hand, or whether the force was an effective provider of security from violence and property offences on the other hand.

The remainder of this introduction is dedicated to a short discussion of the relevant literature, followed by a short outline.

A state can be defined as a community that can employ violence although it may not have a monopoly over its use and is able to raise permanent taxes.

A similar argument is brought forward by De Long and Shleifer. The difference in the growth rates of absolutist and limited regimes is explained by the regimes incentives whether or not to establish a growth-deterring tax system. Limited governments would tax their economies only moderately, because the former are led by merchants who are interested in the flow of commerce or parliaments have the possibility to veto heavy taxation. Absolutist rulers, on the other side, would be more interested in their private economic prosperity which could be increased by extracting citizens resources through high tax rates.