The focus of this week’s reading on Prussia is something really interesting to reflect on. When we think of eighteenth-century maritime economy and colonial ventures, it is usually Britain, France, and Spain that strike as the most prominent actors, with Prussia relatively marginalised, if not straightly ignored. On top of this, as both Schui and Struck mentioned in their writing, the common perception of Prussian political economy as inflexible and “dogmatically mercantilist” further discouraged historians from thinking about Prussian presence and ambition beyond Central Europe. And it is precisely this assumption that has been very well challenged by readings. Schui’s article on the 1750 establishment of the Prussian Asiatic Trade Company showed that, even though the project was to be deemed a failure, the notions of Prussian segregation from maritime economy as well as its inflexible economic policies are to be revised. The company, in fact, was a genuine bid “to increase the participation in oceanic commerce rather than an attempt to limit it” and was perceived as a genuine menace by other powers such as Britain and the Netherlands, worrying that Prussia might rise to become a prominent maritime power. Far from settling with a manufacture-centred, rural economy isolated from commercial ventures, even if the company had not survived the turbulence of the Seven Years’ War, with the impotence of Prussian naval power a crucial factor, its failure had not erased the concern with maritime trade from the minds of Prussian rulers. As Struck has shown, Prussia framed the 1772 Partition of Poland as far more than gaining lands to bridge East and West Prussia — the annexed Polish-Lithuanian territories were very much seen as an immediate colony, only that there was no Atlantic to cross or hurricanes to be weathered. One letter written by Frederick II in 1775, where he described these lands as Prussia’s Canada, directly betrayed this colonial paradigm by which they conceptualised the annexation. Therefore, Prussia had very much envisioned and made the attempt to develop a more sophisticated economy with an eye on overseas trade — and, indeed, the contemporaries were also sure that they had the potential to achieve this.
The reading also tackled the aforementioned conventional wisdom from another dimension — namely the historiographical compartmentalisation between East-Central Europe and the Atlantic. As Steffen and Weber had shown, despite their geographical distance from a maritime economy, the Central European textile industry was very much connected with not only the North Sea but also the broader colonial market. Lusatia was joined with Hamburg through the Elbe, while Silesia was connected with North Sea trade through a canal linking the Spree and the Oder. Remarkably, as the reading had pointed out, there was a deep favour for Central European linen in African and American colonial markets, with them taking up as much as two-thirds of British linen exports in the early eighteenth century. Struck in his essay on the 1772 Partition of Poland also brought under the light the Atlantic context of this annexation which took place in East Europe. Apart from the aforementioned Prussian ambition in breaking into the maritime trade market, the economic and political disruption from colonial investment failures by other major imperial powers (e.g. France and Kourou, Spain and Havana) was a major factor why Poland was hung out to dry in the event, with her call for support receiving few responses across Europe. Hence, there is a very legitimate need for us to reincorporate East-Central Europe into the history of the Atlantic, and perhaps also our conceptual understanding of the history of globalisation in general.