Georg Friedrich Knapp

Born Mar. 7, 1842, in Giessen; died Feb. 20, 1926, in Darmstadt. German economist and statistician, a representative of the new (young) historical school in bourgeois political economy, head of the Strasbourg school of historians.

From 1874 to 1918, Knapp was professor of political economy and statistics at the University of Strasbourg. In addition to statistics, Knapp wrote on the history of agrarian relations and the theory of monetary circulation. He formulated a monetary theory according to which the bourgeois state could allegedly regulate the economy of a country through monetary circulation.

Knapp’s most important historical economic work was The Emancipation of the Peasants and the Rise of the Class of Rural Workers in the Old Provinces of the Prussian Monarchy (1887; Russian translation, 1900). The work contains voluminous factual material on the evolution of agrarian relations in eastern Germany (mainly since the 16th century) and on the Prussian agrarian reform of the first half of the 19th century; it is also one of the first attempts to explain the reasons for the changeover in eastern Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries to a corvée economy.