Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1954

This book traces the growth and decline of the principal institutions and social classes in those principalities which formed the basis if the Prussian state of the 18th century, beginning with the German colonization of the East and concluding with the foundation of the Hohenzollern despotism. Among the problems discussed are: the relationship between Germans and Slavs during the Middle Ages, the contribution to the Teutonic Order to the settlement of the East, the rise and the decline of a free peasantry, the development of prosperous self-governing towns, the decline of these towns and of the Hanseatic League, the growrth of the nobility and of large noble estates, the imposition of serfdom, the power of the local Estates and their later subjugation by the Great Elector, the results of the Thirty Years' War, and the foundation and the characteristics of the Hohenzollern state...