Privatisation and corruption in historical perspective: The case of secularisation in Bavaria and Prussia in the early nineteenth century
研究了1803-1810年德国世俗化过程中的私有化现象，指出官员将教会财产转移给私人并自辩为合理，但被同时代人指责为腐败，揭示了19世纪对私有化的公共讨论及其与市场、国家、福利概念的关系。
The article deals with privatisation and the valuation of such processes in Germany around 1800. Therefore, it focuses on a topic that has rarely been studied by historians for any time period, although the phenomenon was widespread in the past. The author argues that secularisation in 1803–1810 can be seen as an important privatisation process, because it included large transfers of former church property into private hands. Furthermore, he shows that a new generation of officials benefited from this process, although they had denounced comparable practices as corruption in the previous decades. They could easily justify such advantageous transfers publicly with their self-perception as an administrative and entrepreneurial elite. However, contemporaries publicly accused their actions and the secularisation itself of being corrupt. The author shows that privatisation was already a publicly discussed issue in the nineteenth century and needed to be justified. A history of privatisation, as the author finally states, allows insights into contemporaneous concepts of markets, state and welfare, and their effect in the respective time period.