ABSTRACT
The trade agreement with France and the increasing antagonism between Prussia and Austria all happened within the context of a recovering and expanding economy. Prussia was making a bid to become a great economic power that would stand beside England and France. Exploiting the political crisis in Prussia over the reform of the army, which had reached a peak in the spring of 1862 when elections returned a liberal majority in spite of frantic efforts by the government to secure a conservative victory, the Austrians tried to form a customs union with those states which disliked the proposed Franco-Prussian trade agreement. Unification, far from liberating men from the shackles of the past, subjected Germany to a form of Caesaristic domination that was to stifle the growth of democratic and emancipatory forces. Differences in economic policy could be combined with co-operation against the ‘revolution’, in whatever guise it might appear.
