The Königliches Lagerhaus Berlin was Prussia’s largest manufacturer of woollen cloth in the eighteenth century. Amongst other things, it produced uniforms for the growing Prussian army. In the existing academic literature, the Lagerhaus has been depicted either as a kind of charity institution that provided much needed work for Prussians, or as a proto-capitalist venture that exploited its workers in order to create taxpayers and thus strengthen the Prussian state. This talk suggests that neither position captures the lived experience of the manufactury’s workers that can be reconstructed from their petitions to the Lagerhaus’ management (today stored in the Prussian state archives in Berlin). The presentation is based on Jutta Wimmler’s article “Troublemakers in a State-Run Enterprise,” published in the edited volume “Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond” (2023).
Prof. O’Sullivan heads the research project “The Fabric of Profit”: https://www.unige.ch/fabric-of-profit/