progress of history in the form of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution came late to the German principalities: what had rocked the English economy in the late 1700s was not to affect the primarily agrarian Teutonic peoples until the mid-1800s. Even at that late date, it can be observed, the Industrial Revolution in the states of Germany was not the windfall event as it had been in England. Urban pockets of industrialization alternated with larger, untouched, regions of rural agriculture. But even that description is misleading: by the mid-1800s agriculture had been transformed in Germany. Farmers were not serfs, bound to the land, nor were they tithing to Church and lord. Taxes existed, yes, but the Protestant Reformation two centuries before 1815 had broken the power of religious establishment as practiced by the Roman Catholic Church. Subsequent Napoleonic reforms (cited earlier) altered irreparably the farmer-nobility relationship to land, duty and property.
Indeed, German farmers shared a near-"capitalist" relationship with the "com
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