The chapter traces change of international order from the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna. International order shifted from a hierarchical order upheld by courtly ceremonial and diplomatic precedence to an order based on a territorial balance of power. A quest for status from Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia animated the change. These actors were unable to enhance their standing with diplomatic precedence, and consequently they outright mocked it. Simultaneously, unrestricted by the requirements of ceremonial, they dramatically rationalized the military. While for the ancien régime powers, the Holy Roman Emperor, the French king, and the Spanish king, court culture impregnated the military, the challengers had the military infiltrate court life. The aesthetic dimensions of military innovations played as much of a role in these dynamics as the military’s functional dimensions. Britain, Prussia, and Russia became the masters of new, rationalized forms of warfare, that brought the ancien régime powers to their knees. The resulting glory for the challengers led to reforms and/or revolution in the ancien régime powers. Courtly ceremonial and diplomatic precedence lost their meaning. The Congress of Vienna bestowed it onto five great powers (defined by their military potential) to manage the balance of power.

The era of enlightened absolutism in the eighteenth century was a moment that decisively shaped Berlin in all senses: topographically and architecturally; socially, both at the time and subsequently; and in the cultural imaginary, in terms of what we think of as ‘Berlin’ today. In the reigns of Frederick William I (1713–40), the ‘Soldier King’, and his son Frederick II (1740–86), ‘Frederick the Great’, Berlin was transformed from a small courtly city into a significant European capital, a garrison town in a powerful European state. The administrative system was developed and reformed, while military exploits abroad led to the growth of the composite state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Under Frederick II Berlin also became a centre of ‘enlightened absolutism’, in which intellectual pursuits, educational institutions, the arts, and culture were fostered. Religious toleration and social diversity were rooted in policies of fostering economic growth through welcoming productive immigrants. By the end of the century, Berlin’s population was growing, and its intellectual life thriving, but its military might was in decline.

King Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Prussia (r. 1740–1786) led his armies personally into a series of wars that doubled the size of his state during his reign. Frederick’s invasion of Silesia, and his subsequent attempts to hold onto it and expand his dominions further, reflected his risk-taking personality. Frederick enjoyed a much greater variety of strategic options than his predecessors because of the large army and well-stocked treasury bequeathed to him by his father, and this reflected the steady growth of states in this period and their increasing capacity to mobilise resources for war. The Hohenzollerns had for generations operated within a strategic context defined by the Holy Roman Empire, which covered all the German lands and within which a variety of princely dynasties competed for prominence under the overall hegemony of the Austrian Habsburgs. Successful Hohenzollern mobilisation of resources, however, made Frederick II the first German ruler in the early modern period to challenge the Habsburgs from a position of relative military parity. His successful gamble created a bipolar Germany, in which the two great powers of Austria and Prussia raised ever greater resources for their struggle against each other, far outstripping the other German states.

This chapter concentrates on the painful zigzag course of Jewish emancipation during the first half of the nineteenth century. It begins with the Prussian legislation of 1812, with special emphasis on the attitude of the national-liberal movement in the various parts of Germany with regard to emancipation but also to other relevant issues of the time. It then tells of the emerging new kind of antisemitism at the time, beginning with Fichte’s ambivalence, through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s principled stand on equality and the outright antisemites, Fries and Rühs. The upheavals known as the Hep-Hep attacks on the Jews in 1819 are then briefly described, followed by quotes regarding ongoing integration in the following decades. Finally, the ambivalent situation of young Jewish scholars, who could now study at the best institutions, but were refused academic posts, is described through the biography of Eduard Gans and the changing fortunes of the young Heinrich Heine.

This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

This chapter offers an example of the role of the Bank in European state finance. The kingdom of Prussia made heavy use of the Bank during the Seven Years War (1756—1763). Public finance in Prussia during this period was primitive, lacking basic features such as a bond market or central bank. Under heavy financial pressure, Prussian King Frederick II chose to finance much of the war through the production of debased coinage. The task of minting debased coins was outsourced to private contractors (“mint entrepreneurs”), who purchased much of the necessary silver in Amsterdam, making use of credit which was abundant in the Amsterdam market. Details of these transactions are revealed in the Bank’s ledgers. Frederick also relied on gold subsidies from Great Britain, which were paid via Amsterdam and can also be matched to Bank records. Finally, at the end of the war, Frederick called upon his entrepreneurs to engineer a reverse debasement (reinforcement). This activity once again relied heavily on Dutch resources, including remote smelting furnaces, Amsterdam credit, and Bank money. Traces of the entrepreneurs’ activity can again be seen in the Bank’s records.

Germany can serve as short-hand for the “Holy Roman Empire” in the eighteenth century. Long dismissed as a constitutional “monstrosity,” the Empire in reality proved a surprisingly durable fixture of Europe’s Old Regime political and dynastic firmament. Within its confines there existed a multiplicity of sub-units that ranged in size and importance from the Great Powers of Austria and Prussia, to tiny independent principalities and city states. Some of these might be considered vibrant, and others stagnant. Some were ruled by princes who deserved the label “enlightened,” whilst others were governed by despots. A generalization that holds for the Empire as a whole is that it encouraged a political culture distinguished by its legalism and its localism. These characteristics were hardly effective when confronting the challenges posed by the French Revolution, whose real impact on Germany began in 1792 with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. These wars ultimately destroyed the Empire, thereby paving the way for the transformation of Germany that occurred under the hegemony of Napoleon.

The Black Death of the fourteenth century reduced Europe’s population by about two-thirds between 1348 and 1420. Since endowments of land and capital remained unchanged, standard economic theory predicts rising real wages, falling rents of land and capital, and hence a drastic reduction of economic inequality. All of this occurred in most of western Europe. Elites eventually yielded, serfdom ended, landowners shifted from labor- to land-intensive production (grazing displaced planting), and labor-saving inventions abounded. In Europe east of the Elbe, by contrast, a formerly free peasantry was reduced to serfdom and landowners specialized increasingly in grain production, much of it for export. A plausible reason for the divergent responses is soil and climate: western Europe was mostly suitable for sedentary animal husbandry, eastern Europe was not; and the two were separated by a sharp dividing line that lay only slightly west of the Elbe. Data on Prussian landholdings suggest a strong correlation between low suitability for animal husbandry and the prevalence of serf-cultivated estates. Western elites could engage in factor substitution; eastern ones could not.

After Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz, a new war loomed on the horizon. In 1806, Prussia confronted the growing French ambitions in the War of the Fourth Coalition. It proved to be a mistake as Napoleon routed the Prussian army barely two weeks into the war. After humiliation of Prussia, on the battlefield at Jena, the French Emperor turned his attention to subduing his Russian foe and marched into Poland in the winter of 1806. Six months later, the Russians had been beaten and brought to the peace table and Napoleon was at the height of his powers.

This chapter assesses the importance of educating royal heirs in the nineteenth century. It traces the development of ideas of princely education and explains how this topic moved from being an internal, dynastic matter to being a political issue of public concern and public debate – another weapon in the arsenal of monarchical adaptation and self-defence. The chapter leads to a comparison between the educational programmes imposed upon the several generations of royal heirs in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia/Germany.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.

This chapter pushes the book’s argument beyond the traditional medieval/modern dividing line around the year 1500 by examining advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging that the volume of administrative evidence grows exponentially in this period and regional administrations became better developed, it nevertheless shows that various abuses that had been happening for centuries continued into this period. These abuses included local acts of violence that provide clear evidence for the ongoing difficulties that met attempts by imperial and princely authorities to govern effectively on the ground in their territories. This chapter, therefore, calls attention to the flaws in traditional historical narratives about a sharp dividing line between a medieval period of feudalism and lordship and a modern period of government, bureaucracy and strong states.

In August 1846, the folktale collector, grammarian, mythographer, and lexicographer Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) wrote a letter to the Prussian king, Frederick William IV (1795–1861), in which he urged the monarch to support the German-speaking population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the areas between Denmark and the German lands. At the time, the Danish king, Christian VIII, was also the duke of the twin duchies; in the summer of 1846, he had publicly declared that they must allow female succession, a reform that would secure continued Danish rule; the Danish royal family was running out of male heirs.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

Arguments for the 1801 Union of the British and Irish parliaments drew on the intellectual resources of the later British Enlightenment to implement a new system of economic and political regulation of Irish society. Proponents of Union articulated a renewed belief in the ability of commercial integration with Britain to act as a solvent to the confessional and ethnic tensions laid bare by the United Irish rising and attempted French invasions of 1796-8. The 'diffusion' of British capital to Ireland would give Ireland’s shattered Anglican aristocracy the opportunity to re-establish its political legitimacy, while forcing them to share power with a rising Catholic mercantile and professional class. The case for Union was interpreted in a broad European context of state competition and reform. The leading continental defender of British policy, the Prussian diplomat and publicist Friedrich von Gentz, hailed the legislative unification of the British Empire as a model for a necessary consolidation of the European states-system in the wake of French revolutionary violence.

Who should pay the costs of civil unrest? Germans confronted this dilemma in the aftermath of the First World War, as thousands of claimants petitioned the government to compensate for varied losses, from stolen crops to medical bills for bullet wounds. By far the greatest demand for redress came from businesses who described “catastrophic” damages caused by looting crowds. To make their case, claimants invoked a seventy-year-old Prussian law that aimed to suppress protest by making the “community” financially liable for “tumult.” And yet the Weimar Republic owed its very existence to the tumult of agitated crowds. This chapter explores how the Weimar Republic and later the Nazi regime staked their legitimacy on their ability to provide sufficient public order to sustain capitalism. But when the costs grew too high, both tried to extricate themselves from liability: the Weimar Republic by citing economic crisis, the Nazi regime by implementing a racial solution.