His majesty's rebels

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In a series of rebellions that took place in the small, impoverished Black Forest lordship of Hauenstein between 1725 and 1745, David Martin Luebke finds evidence for a new and more nuanced view of peasant action and discourse on power and community. In the rebellions called the Salpeter Wars on which Luebke bases his analysis, the peasants of Hauenstein all sought to curtail the expansion of centralizing bureaucratic powers that were eroding traditional local autonomies. They could not agree how best to resist and two factions emerged, the quarrels between them escalating finally into civil war