The reactive nature of Hessian policymaking is illustrated by the uneven activity of government legislation over the course of Frederick's twenty-five-year reign. Domestic initiatives and reforms tended to reach peak levels of intensity during each of three crisis periods: at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, when the regime worked to rebuild the devastated economy; at midreign, when it responded to the Continentwide crop failures of 1771–2; and during the closing years of the war in America, when it felt compelled to react to a number of recurrent problems made worse by the government's own domestic and foreign initiatives (Figure 2). Through each of these periods it is possible to trace not only the regime's reaction to existing injustices and suffering, usually after consultation with the Landtag, but also the evolution of new approaches to reform as it adjusted to earlier failures and mistakes with new strategies.

The common thread that ties together all three periods is the country's poverty and economic stagnation, a circumstance that both shaped and limited the success of domestic reform. At Frederick's succession Hesse-Cassel had a population of perhaps 275,000, living in roughly 2,750 square miles in central Germany. It was a predominantly rural society, with three-quarters of the people living outside population centers of more than 1,000, and over 90 percent of them engaged in farming. The country was not, however, well suited for agriculture. The terrain was hilly, and more than half of it was covered by forest. Arable land was in short supply, and it was also generally poor in quality.