Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg, Über die Quellen der deutschen Wirthschaftsgeschichte (1877)

Inama-Sternegg’s methodological article argues that historical economics requires systematic source criticism before it can legitimately generalize about economic development. Its six sections move from a diagnosis of the discipline’s weaknesses through a classification of economic evidence to detailed examinations of customary legal declarations (Weisthümer), estate surveys (Urbarien), and account books. The work’s central contribution is to explain how these complementary records can reconstruct economic organization while exposing the differences between prescribed obligations, recorded possessions, and actual transactions.

The opening grounds historical inquiry in the inherited character of economic life: each generation receives institutions and accumulated cultural resources that condition its activity. Contemporary statistics cannot explain this inheritance unaided. Statistical reconstruction might extend across the preceding century, but earlier periods require scattered descriptions and administrative records. Inama-Sternegg criticizes both speculative philosophies of economic history, which force events into schematic categories, and empirical collections of historical details, which remain accidental or serve as illustrations of deductively established propositions.

Soll aus diesen Ansätzen eine wahrhaft wissenschaftliche Behandlung unserer Wirtschaftsgeschichte erwachsen, so muss die Unsicherheit verfrühter Generalisierung, wie die Zufälligkeit historischer Entdeckungen beseitigt werden und eine strenge Kritik der überlieferten Thatsachen eintreten.

English translation: If a truly scientific treatment of our economic history is to emerge from these beginnings, the uncertainty of premature generalization and the randomness of historical discoveries must be eliminated, and rigorous criticism of the transmitted facts must take their place.

The proposed national scope is both practical and conceptual. German legal history supplies an established neighboring field, while the distinctive development of German society demands investigation before universal laws can be asserted. Although Inama-Sternegg believes in underlying laws of social development, he insists that these initially function as hypotheses, not substitutes for evidence. Economists must acquire historians’ critical techniques, and historians must become acquainted with economic questions.

Section two distinguishes economic history from legal history’s relatively bounded body of authoritative texts. Earlier economic life must be assembled like a mosaic from evidence dispersed throughout historical sources. Nevertheless, economic administration itself generated identifiable records: general and specialized regulations, descriptions of existing conditions, accounts, charters, and theoretical literature. These disclose different dimensions of the past. Regulations illuminate social organization; surveys establish possessions and obligations; accounts record realized results; documentary sequences reveal change; and economic or juridical writings convey ideas through which contemporaries interpreted existing practices.

Section three selects the closely connected rural sources for sustained analysis. Customary declarations reveal relationships among property, labor, community, and lordship. Estate surveys supply quantities, population relationships, and the distribution of services and dues. Accounts show actual receipts, expenditure, and market dealings. Their combined use promises unusually precise reconstruction, but the author cautions that familiar, uncontested arrangements often went unrecorded. Understanding such silences requires comparative reading and concrete knowledge of local circumstances.

The extensive fourth section reinterprets Weisthümer as evidence of social and economic organization, rather than merely repositories of legal rules.

Kurz, die Weisthümer sind nicht bloss Rechtsquellen, sondern Quellen für die Erkenntniss der Ordnung des gesellschaftlichen Lebens überhaupt; sie geben uns das Recht wie es thatsächlich ist, als einen Bestandtheil der geistigen Potenzen des menschlichen Gesellschaftslebens, als einen Factor der socialen Ordnung, aber weder als den einzigen noch als den überwiegenden.

English translation: In short, the customary legal declarations are not merely legal sources, but sources for understanding the organization of social life generally; they give us law as it actually exists, as a component of the intellectual forces of human social life, as a factor in the social order, but neither as its only nor as its predominant factor.

Law here emerges from economic and cultural conditions and subsequently acts back upon them. This interpretation also requires rejecting the assumption, associated especially with Grimm and Gierke, that late-recorded rural customs transparently preserve an unchanged ancient consciousness. Original recording, later copying, and revision must be distinguished. Similar wording may indicate common descent, imposed standardization, or simply similar economic conditions. Judicial, communal, manorial, and rent-office declarations must likewise be read according to their institutional origins. Their provisions reveal collective resource management, agricultural coordination, settlement patterns, and the gradual emancipation of individual хозяйholds from communal economic regulation.

Section five combines an extensive chronological inventory of estate surveys with a program for their analysis. Their development runs from Carolingian supervision through the consolidation of lordly power to the abundant records of later medieval territorial and economic expansion. Inama-Sternegg criticizes editions selected primarily for linguistic antiquity or topography: later surveys of the same estate can be indispensable precisely because they permit comparison.

Ohne besonderen Beweis wird demnach jedes Urbar eine Quelle der Wirthschaftsgeschichte für jene Zeit sein, in der es niedergeschrieben ist, und wir können eben deshalb die Urbare auch viel besser chronologisch ordnen, als die in ihren Altersbestimmungen ungleich unsichereren Weisthümer.

English translation: Without specific proof, therefore, each estate survey will be a source of economic history for the time in which it was written down, and for that very reason we can arrange estate surveys chronologically much better than customary legal declarations, whose dating is considerably less certain.

Surveys illuminate landholding, dependent labor, population, cultivation, credit, and the transition toward monetary exchange. Yet their evidentiary authority does not remove the need to investigate falsification, successive entries, or retrospective claims.

The final section makes account books the corrective to recorded entitlements. They can establish whether dues were collected, whether officials exceeded them, and whether survey valuations corresponded to exchange conditions.

In den Rechnungsbüchern dagegen haben wir es überwiegend mit Marktpreisen zu thun, welche, abgesehen von ihrer allgemeinen Wichtigkeit für die Wirthschaftsgeschichte, besonders auch dazu dienen, um die Preisangabe der Urbarien in ihrer Bedeutung für die geldwirthschaftliche Abgleichung von Giebigkeiten und Leistungen richtig zu beurtheilen, und zu prüfen, wie weit sie als wirkliche Mittelpreise einer bestimmten Periode gelten können.

English translation: In account books, by contrast, we are dealing predominantly with market prices, which, apart from their general importance for economic history, also serve especially to assess correctly the significance of the prices stated in estate surveys for the monetary settlement of dues and services, and to examine how far they can count as actual average prices of a particular period.

The concluding appeal to academies for preservation and publication gives the article its institutional purpose. Economic history becomes a coordinated research enterprise founded on critically edited, comparable records—not merely an accumulation of examples, but an investigation of how economic structures operated and changed.