ABSTRACT
The European international order was locked into two mechanisms: the Vienna Congress system, securing the balance of power between the great powers, and the mechanism of international law. The first component, the Vienna Congress system, has been much studied and interpreted. Yet the nineteenth century was also a century of imperialism and European overseas expansion. It was a century that saw the colonization of Asia and the scramble for Africa and the Pacific. Many conflicts between European great powers originated in their competing interests overseas. The Vienna Congress was the great peace conference that ended the two decades of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe. It shaped the grounds of the nineteenth-century international order. Perhaps even more important, from the British point of view, was the neutralization of the Low Countries. The territories in present-day Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands were strategically and economically crucial.
