Philipp Robinson Rössner

Das friderizianische Preußen (1740–1786) – eine moderne Ökonomie?

Dedicated to Ian Blanchard on occasion of his 69th birthday, April 2011*

Eighteenth-century Prussia under Frederick the Great has been credited with an enormous progress from a second-rate regional power to one of the more powerful continental states of her time. Frederick’s success in creating a powerful, partly predatory and highly militarized state, securing Prussia a place in the European ‘concert of power’ (however strong this might have been) are undisputed. So are some of the more notable activities in economic planning, such as canal building, draining and the melioration of wasteland that led to an increase in the areas under cultivation. But did these activities lead to an increase in Prussia’s productive potential, such as a rise in total factor productivity or the increase in the productive capital per capita of the population? Even though the available statistical material does not lend itself particularly well to accurate measurement in terms of national income accounting procedures the following article will nevertheless work out precisely why Prussia under Frederick the Great failed to emerge as a ‘modern’ economy (in the same way as the Netherlands and England did). Using basic theory and evidence established in recent years by de Vries and others with regard to early modern England and Holland the Prussian evidence will be placed alongside models of ‘modern-ness’ in the eighteenth century. It will be argued that the institutional and socio-economic constraints worked particularly effectively against those early traces of ‘modernity’ that could be found in Prussia, thus keeping the overall performance of the Prussian economy close to the (fairly low) basic continental European average figures.

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