Cottage Industry in Silesia and Saxony

In Eastern Germany, the Province of Silesia and the Kingdom of Saxony formed the centres of the capitalist mode of production. Even in the times of its deepest decline, Germany had maintained the linen industry which furnished almost its only export, and since the middle of the seventeenth century Silesia had been one of its main strongholds. At that time, the lively demand of English and Dutch traders had given the Silesian linen trade a strong impetus. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, linen was produced for sale in 287 localities in Silesia. It was almost exclusively a rural cottage industry carried out in villages whose land was poor, and it rested on the basis of feudalism.

To a certain extent Silesia represented the classical example of feudalism east of the Elbe. When Schön visited the province in 1797 he was horrified by the ‘ghastly’ conditions. What he meant was that here the very air itself was impregnated with feudalism, that outside the towns there were only lords and servants. If there was not revolt after revolt, it was explicable partly by the remnants of a patriarchal relationship between landlord and smallholder, by reason of which the latter in their ignorance were better able to endure the otherwise unendurable, and partly because the Silesians were morally and physically stunted by serfdom, bondage and hereditary subjugation, and by the trade of spinning and weaving. In fact the organization of the Silesian linen trade was rooted in landlordism. Whereas in the other old Prussian provinces the handicrafts were banned or as good as banned from the countryside, there were in Silesia countless craftsmen in the villages too, dating back to the days of Austrian rule, and it was the landlords alone who had the right to license the pursuit of trades. King Frederick, it is true, forbade the increase of traders’ and craftsmens’ taxes after he had conquered Silesia, but as so often happened, the will of the enlightened despot collapsed in the face of the united resistance of the feudal Junkers.

All weavers, free and unfree, had to pay the weaving tax to the landlords. But the free were a diminishing minority; the huge majority were estate serfs, and had to pay and perform all the feudal dues and services on top of the weaving tax. In selling to their subjects the right to carry out weaving as a commodity production, the landlords felt no obligation to provide an outlet for the commodity. On the contrary, they had the yarn, which they received in massive quantities as payment in kind from the serf flax spinners, sold on to the weavers by middle-men. The tradesmen they themselves taxed were a sure market for their excess yarn. But what the weavers were supposed to do with any excess of finished linen was their own affair, and no concern of the landlord. They had to sell it off at whatever was the market price, or at whatever the linen dealers saw fit to tell them was the market price. The poverty of the Silesian weavers, which has long since been proverbial, is sufficiently explained by this, that they were fleeced simultaneously by feudalism and by capitalism in friendly competition.

Despite, or rather because of, the poverty of the weavers, the Silesian linen industry flourished until towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Then however it succumbed to rising Anglo-Irish competition. Indeed, life was no bed of roses for the Irish and Scottish spinners, but the meagrest reward proved itself to be a better spur to industrious and efficient work and to technical progress in the spinning process than the feudal obligation to supply a certain amount of yarn, whether fixed or not. The spinning wheel had not even replaced the hand-spindle in Silesia, and Silesian yarn gained a reputation that was as bad as it was merited. Landlordism influenced the competitiveness of the Silesian weavers even more thoroughly. According to an English parliamentary report of 1773, weavers in Scotland earned 10d, in Ireland 8d and in Silesia from 2d to 6d a day. On top of that the Scottish and Irish weavers did not have to pay a weaving tax, or feudal dues or perform services to a landlord. If trade was good and their wages rose, so that they could put a penny or two on one side, they could emigrate to America when trade was bad. The Silesian weaver on the other hand could only leave his landlord’s estate by paying a redemption fee, which was more than he could afford under any circumstances. Thus spinning and weaving, as Schön correctly said, were highly disadvantageous for the moral and physical development of the Silesian population. But since the work had to suffer along with the worker, the Silesian linen industry was increasingly obliged to give ground to its English competitors, despite all the arts of unfair competition.

By their very nature, King Frederick’s mercantilist policies could not remove these abuses. However many Regulations and Statutes he decreed, aimed at ensuring the quality of the work by inspectorates, by the exclusion of shoddy work, by threatening the weavers with flogging, the stocks, the neck-irons and penal servitude – all this was useless as long as the root of the evil, the feudal bondage of the spinners and weavers, remained. Frederick only increased the poverty of the weavers by constantly seeking to bring fresh weavers into the land, an effort that exercised him constantly and which went as far as forcibly seizing human beings from his less powerful neighbour states. His measures for the improvement of the Silesian linen industry are one of the most incredible chapters of his backward economic policy.

A distant echo of the French revolution broke through to the Silesian weavers for all their dullness. In 1792 revolts broke out amongst them. With their sacks over their left shoulders they marched down out of the hills to the town markets and by rough treatment forced the yarn-dealers to sell cheap and the linen-dealers to buy dear. The movement was supported by peasant disturbances and a riot by the Breslau journeymen. Since the Prussian army was away on the tragi-comic crusade against revolutionary France and Silesia was without troops, the horrified government vacillated between barbaric suppression and useless palliatives. But the merchants beat down the revolt more effectively than alms or the whip by staying away from the markets until the weavers had been starved into submission.

Just as the Silesian cottage workers were fleeced equally by feudalism and capitalism, so, in accordance with the noble harmony of the Prussian social reforms, they were cheated equally by the emancipation of the peasants and by that of the crafts. The ambiguous conception of freedom that the peasant was to enjoy from Martinmas 1810 was strictly suppressed in many parts of Silesia, and an order of the King in Council informed his beloved subjects that forced labour and socage , payments in money and in kind, ground rent and dog fees, hen, goose, egg, broom, watchmens’ and silver dues were by no means abolished along with serfdom. The government interpreted the emancipation of the crafts in the same way, with Hardenburg explaining, on the insistence of the Junkers, that the new freedom by no means abolished the weaving tax, which was on the contrary to continue, on a legal basis -- the very tax that Frederick had attacked in principle, even if he had not abolished it in practice. The poverty of the Silesian linen workers continued undiminished, and now the competition from England threatened them with a second and mightier blow. Instead of the struggle between free labourers and serfs, they were now faced with the struggle of the machine against the hand. There followed a period in which the Silesian weavers were, in the words of an official reporter, ‘perhaps the most poverty stricken of all the inhabitants of Europe.’

In the Kingdom of Saxony, the beginnings of capitalism dated from the age of the Reformation. Its oldest stronghold was mining. The revenue from mining, a blessing for some, was a curse for the miners who brought the minerals to the surface. As early as the fifteenth century there are reports of forcibly suppressed wages struggles and countless decrees against the truck system. With the discovery of gold and silver mines in America, the importance of the mining of precious metals in Saxony declined, but its old trade and transport connections, the country’s favourable geographical position, the wealth of mineral treasures in its soil, of lead, tin and coal, prevented a permanent economic decline. The fairs at Leipzig became the biggest markets in Eastern Europe, first for French, then for English manufactured goods, and the various branches of the textile industry flourished. Cloths from Saxony, linen from Lusatia, muslin from the Vogtland, cotton goods from Chemnitz and lace from the Erz Mountains were exported to the most distant countries. Saxon industry received a new and powerful impetus from the Continental System. Chemnitz began to develop into a Saxon Manchester. A calico mill employed 1,200, a calico printing plant and a cotton spinning mill over 3,000 workers. Small jennies for spinning cotton were introduced as early as the end of the eighteenth century, but until the middle of the nineteenth century there were still no mechanical looms. Cottage industry was predominant, and its starvation wages were notorious. The cottage workers of the Erz Mountains lived exclusively on potatoes and chicory broth; as early as 1780 a Vogtland doctor published a book on the special diseases that flourished with the growth of cottage industry.

In the eighteenth century Saxony was economically and therefore intellectually the most developed part of Germany. Saxony was the trail-blazer of German culture, the Saxons were the most educated and learned branch of the German nation. Saxony possessed the best schools, and it was from here that German classical literature developed. But as to its political constitution, things were different. On such an economic basis, of course, it could not erect a military state on the Prussian pattern. The economic understanding of the day had progressed much further in Dresden than in Berlin. The Electress Regent Maria Antonia tried in vain to convert der Alte Fritz (Frederick the Great) from his outdated mercantilism. Leipzig was virtually an Imperial Free City, and the Saxon towns generally enjoyed a certain measure of independence. Even if this independence primarily favoured a patrician clique, the simmering discontent of the plebeian mass represented a progressive element entirely missing in the Prussian towns, which were cowed by the corporal’s cane. Nevertheless, neither feudalism on the land nor the guilds in the towns had been cleared away, and the mouldering forms of the monarchy based on the Estates persisted into the nineteenth century. Saxony was a voluntary ally of Napoleon, and being neither, like Prussia, his enemy, nor, like the states of the Confederation of the Rhine, his creation, Saxony maintained its social structure amidst all the beneficially disruptive consequences of the French conquest. When, already exhausted to death by the campaign of 1813, it was torn apart by the Congress of Vienna as a punishment for its loyalty to its ‘great ally’, it staggered on in the old humdrum way.