Prior to the Napoleonic Wars, German-speaking Central Europe included more than 300 political entities, most of which were part of the Holy Roman Empire or the extensive Habsburg hereditary dominions. They ranged in size … See more

The period of Austrian and Prussian police-states and vast censorship before the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany later became widely known as the Vormärz, the "before March", … See more

Crucially, both the Wartburg rally in 1817 and the Hambach Festival in 1832 had lacked any clear-cut program of unification. At … See more

By 1870 three of the important lessons of the Austro-Prussian war had become apparent. The first lesson was that, through force of arms, a powerful state could challenge the … See more

Another institution key to unifying the German states, the Zollverein, helped to create a larger sense of economic unification. Initially conceived by the Prussian Finance … See more

There is, in political geography, no Germany proper to speak of. There are Kingdoms and Grand Duchies, and Duchies and Principalities, inhabited by Germans, and each [is] separately ruled by an independent sovereign with all the machinery of State. … See more

The new German Empire included 26 political entities: twenty-five constituent states (or Bundesstaaten) and one Imperial Territory (or Reichsland). It realized the Kleindeutsche Lösung ("Lesser German Solution", with the exclusion of Austria) as opposed … See more