ABSTRACT
Thus, unlike France, Britain and other countries which had already developed into centralised nation states by 1800, the German lands remained politically fragmented. There was no single German citizenship within the Reich, nor any central German capital city to rival London or Paris. The term Deutschland referred to a geographical area of central Europe with no fixed borders rather than to an established political state. While the unified European nation states were building world empires in the eighteenth century, no German ruler was yet strong enough to embark on such a project.
