ABSTRACT
The comparative peace and stability of the century after 1815 have been widely admired and scarcely less widely analysed. It was unprecedented in terms both of the previous and subsequent history of Europe's international system. The explanation has usually been found in the skill and imagination of the peacemakers who assembled in Vienna in 1814-1815, and that must clearly be a large part of any answer. In important respects the nineteenth-century political world created differed from its ancien regime predecessor. In this as in other respects, the nineteenth-century international system grew organically out of its eighteenth-century predecessor. One central thesis of the present study has been that while the emergence of a modern great power system has been a gradual and evolutionary process, its key period was from the Prussian invasion of Silesia until the conclusion of the Vienna settlement.
