ABSTRACT
In the 1840s List was one of the most influential journalists in Germany and was widely recognised as an economist and as an authority on transport and on Zollverein affairs. His articles championed causes which he was confident would bring prosperity to his fellow countrymen. Occasionally he tried his hand at amateur diplomacy, but with little success. Undeterred by earlier failures in Vienna and Darmstadt in 1820-1, he had undertaken equally abortive diplomatic missions in 1844 in Brussels, Vienna, and Budapest. Then in 1846 he turned up in London to lay before leading English statesmen his grandiose plan for the conclusion of an AngloGerman alliance. He had already contributed an article to the Zollvereinsblatt on the need for such an alliance74 and he now claimed that his proposal represented "the opinion of all the enlightened politicians of Germany".75 List had changed his mind since 1841 when he had urged Germany to join other "manufacturing nations of the second rank" to check Britain's "insular supremacy". 78 Now he considered that the United States and Russia would be the most powerful countries in the world in the future - a view expressed by de Tocqueville in the previous year. List hoped to persuade political leaders in England to co-operate with Germany to ward off this danger. His proposal was perhaps not so far fetched as might appear at first sight. In 1844 the writer of an article in a leading review had declared that "in every point of view, whether politically or commercially, we can have no better alliance than that of the German nation, spreading as it does, its 42 millions of souls without interruption, over the surface of central Europe".77
