Masters and Lords

Masters and Lords is an ambitious study that presents a comparative view of large planters in the antebellum American South (1820 - 60) and the Junkers of roughly contemporaneous Prussian East Elbia. The author claims that planters and Junkers were comparable because of structural and function analogies between plantations and Ritterguter (knights' estates) both being autocratic political communities and commercial agricultural enterprises. He uses his comparisons to contrast the behaviour of these two lites during the major nineteenth century crises that confronted them - the revolutionay crisis of 1848-49 in Germany and the secession crisis of 1860-61 in the US.