ABSTRACT
An important benchmark for the analysis of industrialisation and the state is Germany, due to become the most industrially dynamic power in Continental Europe, but at the start of the nineteenth century struggling for an identity. In the 1820s it was weak internally and exposed externally. Partly as a result of being at the crossroads of European wars for centuries, it emerged from the Napoleonic period in 1815 still an untidy mixture of small and large states. There was a German political grouping, the German Confederation, established in 1815 to monitor the independence of each state and the internal and external security of Germany. It was however a loose powerless grouping and excluded the eastern part of the largest state, Prussia, and included only the Austrian part of the Austria-Hungarian empire (cf. Map 1.1 in Chapter 1). There was no common external tariff and internal trade was hampered by tolls, custom duties, guild restrictions in and across all the constituent elements. The Stein Reforms of 1806 had promised much and the peasantry had been emancipated but most historians agree that guilds and corporations were still a potent restriction for much of the period up to 1870. The key political groups were court elites with eastern Junkers and the Prussian King dominant forces, suspicious (like the Russian Tsar) of urbanisation and industrialisation associated as these were with democratisation.
