The aim of this paper is to consider how the intensive approach to agricultural land use evolved during the agricultural revolution in Brandenburg. The paper focuses on the reclamation of marshland on the Reckahn Estate. The early 1770s landlord of Reckahn constructed the banks of the Old Plane River in cooperation with the city government of Brandenburg an der Havel and improved the wetlands drainage network, aiming to open meadow land not only for raising his own stock but also for providing area peasantry with fodder. The farms of the Reckahn Estate thereafter succeeded in developing grass production and animal husbandry.

Despite their success in raising stock after these improvements, the farms suffered from the agricultural depression and were unable to increase crop production significantly until the 1830s. The poor sandy soil of the extensive fields became a deterrent to improving productivity and degraded further due to the shortage of the fertilizer. The weaker the estate’s finances became under the prolonged depression, the more indispensable the profit from grass production became for the farm’s operations. Grass resources were so abundant that surplus portions of the grassland were rented to neighboring peasantry, and the revenue from the rental land made up for the other deficiencies.

Although a lack of reliable sources means that this study cannot confirm, as had been hoped, when intensive use of farmland came into being, we can learn that growth in farmland productivity does not become clearly evident until the mid‒19^th century. This development did not lead to significant increases in crop production. Rather, it favored the further expansion of livestock holdings by using the farmland for grass production.

In the 1890s, British politician Joseph Chamberlain called for state‒funded old‒age pensions and interventionist social policies by the state. Old‒age poverty was a problem that mutual self‒help associations such as trade unions and friendly societies could not sufficiently address and was an area in which the need for state intervention was recognized. Chamberlain insisted that the contributory pension be based on voluntary subscription, not only for skilled labor in trade unions but also for unskilled labor and women who were excluded from collective self‒reliance associations. However, his pension plan was not passed, due to the outbreak of the Boer war and Chamberlain’s focus on Tariff Reform. In 1908, the Liberal party approved the Old‒Age Pension Act as one of its social reforms, with non‒contributory pensions funded by government.

Chamberlain’s pension plan involved two systems. One was a contributory state pension system based on voluntary subscription. Under this system, the state would subsidize pension funds to promote contributions to them and would manage them with absolute security till full payout. The second system consisted of subsidies to associations willing to manage private pensions. Both pension systems aimed mainly to stimulate private‒sector thrift and self‒help, with state intervention seen as necessary to bring these about.

Both the Liberal Party’s social reform and Chamberlain’s pension plan illustrate the shift in political thought from classical to interventional liberalism. While classical liberalism emphasized personal causes of poverty and adhered to the principal of non‒intervention in either the market or individual affairs, interventional liberalism recognized the social causes of poverty and called for state intervention in the society and economy in order to secure the welfare and freedom of individuals. Liberal social reform included the idea that the nation should intervene in the decision‒making and behavior fo the economic subject, including laborers and self‒help associations, to ensure a minimum standard of living. However, the aim of state intervention in Chamberlain’s thinking was as an inducement to voluntary self‒help. He considered poverty to consist both in scarcity of income and in a lack of the dignity of free agency caused by a failure of self‒help. He therefore regarded the voluntary return of the poor to self‒help as essential to reducing poverty. Chamberlain’s pension plan therefore rejected compulsory contributions, suggesting instead that the institution induce individuals to make voluntary contributions. Chamberlain’s interventional liberalism was based on a principle of an indirect intervention that would not intervene in the behavior of economic actor but would establish an institutional environment that would enable free action in the market and the achievement of self‒help.