Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Shearer Davis Bowman

NAME:
- Shearer Davis Bowman

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Berkeley (USA) (1986)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: PLANTERS AND JUNKERS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO NINETEENTH-CENTURY LANDED ELITES AND THEIR REGIONAL SOCIETIES

Abstract: "This study of plantation owners in the antebellum U.S. South (ca. 1820-1860) and the Junkers (proprietors of Ritterguter, or knight's estates) of roughly contemporaneous Prussian East Elbia is intended to identify and explore important analogies between the two regional landed elites, and to isolate and, so far as possible, explain significant differences between their historical environments. The interpretive, theoretical questions that most consistently inform the comparison concern the degree to which the two classes can and should be adjudged ""capitalist"" and ""conservative."" I argue for definitions of these ambiguous and contentious terms that permit planters and Junkers to be labelled both agrarian capitalists and conservative (but not paternalistic) elites.

Although Prussia's royal bureaucracy abolished hereditary bondage in East Elbia over half a century before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution accomplished the same end in the South, antebellum planters and Vormarz (1815-1848) Junkers were comparable because of structural and functional analogies between plantations and Ritterguter as at the same time autocratic political communities and commercial agricultural enterprises. Both planters and Junkers wielded a kind of private authority over their slaves or cottagers and servants that is incompatible with the democratic nation-state and its concomitant principles of civil and political equality. In addition, the regional economies of the South and East Elbia both functioned within the world economy as producers of essential agricultural commodities--i.e., Southern cotton, East Elbian grain and wool--for more urban and industrial areas, particularly England, the world's premier commerical and industrial nation during the nineteenth century. Yet planters and Junkers lived within very different geographic, political, and racial milieus. Comparative study of the historical records of the U.S. South to 1860-61 and of Prussian East Elbia to 1848-49 indicates that the crucial distinction between the planter and Junker elites at mid-century was the former's libertarian but racist republicanism versus the latter's militarist and corporatist (estatist) monarchism."

MPACT Scores for Shearer Davis Bowman

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:25:36

Advisors and Advisees Graph