Grain Policies and Storage in Southern Germany: The Regensburg Hospital (17th-19th Centuries)
Abstract This paper is concerned with the storage policy of the citizens’ hospital of Regensburg in the Early Modern period (focus: 18th century). The main purpose consists of (1) a source-based micro-study that helps to derive insights into the mechanisms of how experiences and expectations have influenced decisions by a pre-modern institution, (2) an analytical scheme for describing and evaluating the process of decision-making based on narrative evidence, and (3) the suggestion of analytical categories. These should allow a differentiation between time-invariant human behaviour that determines economic decisions, and time-specific factors which can be used to separate possibly “pre-modern” patterns from seemingly modern-day capitalist economic performance.