Katherine B. Aaslestad
Immediate and Enduring Costs of War: The Economic and Social Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars in the Hanseatic Cities and Saxony
Forlorn peasants returning to burnt villages, war refugees seeking shelter, shattered trade and mounting debt are universal results of war. If the most familiar example of these catastrophic conditions is Europe in 1945, the first modern example is post-Napoleonic Europe. The Napoleonic period has attracted much attention for its wars and politics, but scholars have neglected to examine the subsequent decades as a “post-war period.” The social and economic costs of the war did not end when fighting ceased or armies moved on to another state. New armies of occupation appeared that also needed to be fed, housed and supported, as did the recently formed local militias. Displaced people, war refugees, and expellees needed food and shelter and often medical care. This paper explores the processes undertaken by civilians to gain compensation for wartime losses as well as the work of a range of private organizations formed to meet the needs of distraught civilians. It recounts the destruction of the war and some of the strategies that Germans from the Hanseatic cities and Saxony implemented to rebuild their societies after 1815.
Katherine B. Aaslestad is Professor of History at West Virginia University. Her main fields of research and teaching is modern German history. She is the author of Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era(2005). She has co-edited special issues on war and gender in Central European History and European History Quarterly. She has published articles on republican political culture in the Hanseatic cities, gender and consumption, and the Napoleonic Wars in northern Europe as book chapters in a variety of edited volumes.
