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Short abstract

Peasants rapidly adopted the potato in 18th-century Bayreuth to contest tithes. Difficult to classify within existing crop categories, it disrupted fiscal and agricultural orders. This paper examines the imaginaries, the relational entanglements, and the shifting landscape of power it generated.

Long abstract

This proposed paper, drawing on early modern history, seeks to demonstrate that the potato provided peasants with a means to contest the tithe, renegotiate the balance of power surrounding landownership, undermine entrenched privileges, and materially transform agricultural landscapes, generating new imaginaries and complex relational entanglements within rural society.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, court records from the Lutheran principality of Bayreuth attest to the rapid adoption of this tuber by peasants, who regarded it as a valuable ally in evading tithes. Neither a cereal, nor a legume, nor a pulse, the potato resisted existing systems of classification and regulation. As such, it proved difficult to govern within the prevailing fiscal framework, disrupting both established cropping patterns and the corresponding landscape of taxation.

The question of whether the potato should be subject to the tithe became the subject of sustained debate and conflict between peasants and the parsons and princes who collected it. In response to these forms of infrapolitics, a regulatory response gradually emerged. Princes sought to reassert their authority, most notably through the ordinance promulgated by Margrave Frederick III on 2 May 1746, which sought to regulate the tithe on potatoes.

At the same time, scholars associated with the emerging cameralist tradition reappropriated the potato within a broader discourse of agricultural improvement. Framed as part of a wider set of agrarian innovations, the tuber became integrated into debates on the necessity of reforming fiscal and tax systems.

Keywords: potato; political economy; tithe; infrapolitics; moral economy