ABSTRACT
By the end of the nineteenth century, only three decades after its unification under Prussian leadership, the German Reich had become one of the most powerful states in the worldeconomically, technologically and militarily. For the Germans themselves ‘the rate of change was stupefying, for foreign observers alarming’.1 The population of the Reich was growing by over half a million each year, despite the continued emigration of thousands of people to the United States and other overseas areas.2 The Kaiser’s army (a composite force made up of ‘royal contingents’ from Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg) was rated by many contemporaries as the most formidable in the world, even though it was significantly smaller than the Russian army and only slightly larger than the army of the French Republic.3 Following the appointment of Admiral Alfred Tirpitz as Secretary of State of the Imperial Naval Office in 1897, construction of a big fleet had begun as well, leading eventually to concern and alarm in Britain. By 1910 over twenty new battleships and many other warships had been commissioned.4
