The Prussian Settlement Commission and Its Activities in the Land Market, 1886–1918

Abstract

Inner colonization, as is clear from the chapters in this volume, can take many forms. The farther back one goes in history, the more likely it is that the colonization effort was directed at populating empty lands. This was the case, for example, in the efforts of the Habsburgs to attract settlers to the Southeastern areas of their Empire in the eighteenth century, after expulsion of the Turks. Even schemes in modern times, such as Nikita Khrushchev’s virgin lands scheme in the Soviet Union, or the settlement schemes in Sri Lanka in the 1960s, were primarily aimed at bringing new land, or underused land, into cultivation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, there existed an official government settlement scheme that was unusual in that it was directly aimed at changing the ethnic balance of population in an already settled region,¹ and undertaken primarily for political, rather than economic, ends.