The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

The incompetence of the British leadership quickly became notorious. The commanding general, Lord Raglan (1788–1855), who had spent years fighting against Napoleon and lost an arm at the Battle of Waterloo, kept on referring to the enemy as ‘the French’, much to the annoyance of the French officers sitting on their horses at his side.

Later, appropriately enough for a cavalry officer, he married the cigarette-smoking Lady Adeline de Horsey

independence to the Danubian principalities. These soon united to form Romania along with the former Ottoman territory of southern Bessarabia, which was removed from Russia,

Former were "nominally Ottoman"

The peace settlement was therefore seriously damaging to Russia’s influence in the region but also affected the Ottoman Empire adversely.

The battles were still fought between gaudily uniformed masses of troops, firing rifle volleys, attacking the enemy on foot, or engaging in cavalry charges that were little different from those of half a century before.

Russia was beaten back to the margins from the central position it had taken in European politics in 1815. France re-entered European politics, its power and prestige greatly enhanced.

it was not until the late 1860s and early 1870s that reforms came into effect, increasing expenditure on the army and abolishing the system through which wealthy and mostly aristocratic young men had been able to purchase commissions instead of training for them and acquiring them by merit.

Tsar Alexander II, who was a grandson of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and thus, like many if not most European monarchs of the nineteenth century, part-German, reacted to the defeat by embarking on a series of fundamental reforms.

French troops were to remain in Rome, keeping it out of the unified Kingdom of Italy, until they were needed for other purposes in 1870, when the Italians promptly moved into the city themselves.

the emperor had not abandoned his ceaseless quest for popularity and sought it once again in military glory.

If Germany was going to be unified, it would have to be without Austria and Bohemia, without the Habsburgs, and without the German Confederation. This meant it would have to be led by Prussia. The problem was that Prussia was not a liberal state.

the Progressives exercised one of the few real powers of the legislature, the right to approve the state budget, and voted it down. Without parliamentary approval it would be illegal to collect taxes or spend money on keeping the government and administration going. And they were not prepared to grant it until they won the argument over the replacement of the army by a militia.

a united Germany. Bismarck was determined that it would not lead the Prussian ship of state onto the rocks of liberalism. Prussia had to be kept intact, with its key institutions, a strong, professional, independent army, an authoritarian monarchy, and a dominant landed and service aristocracy.

cf. Piedmont backing Italian unification

The leading Austrian military man, General Ludwig von Benedek (1804–81), who owed his rise to the courage he had shown in the war with Italy in 1859, boasted that he never read books on military strategy and observed that ‘the only talents required in a chief of staff are a strong stomach and good digestion’.

the North German Confederation. This was halfway to being a German nation state, with a parliament, the Reichstag, which, astonishingly, was elected by universal male suffrage,

Bismarck was taking a leaf from Napoleon III’s book, bypassing the liberal middle classes to appeal to what he assumed were the loyal and conservative masses in the countryside.

the Reichstag’s powers were limited; it had the right to approve legislation but not to introduce it, and it could neither appoint nor dismiss governments and ministers, which remained the prerogative of the President of the Confederation, who was none other than King Wilhelm I of Prussia

Below the President was the Federal Chancellor, who was also to be by custom, though not by law, the Minister-President of Prussia, or in other words Bismarck himself.

Prussian rule meant liberalization in many respects in backward, ramshackle states like Hanover, winning over many liberals to the new arrangements.

The deposed Emperor Ferdinand is said to have remarked: ‘I don’t know why they appointed Franz Joseph; I could have been just as good at losing battles.’

long-postponed elections were held in France, with the co-operation of the Germans, on 8 February 1871. They brought victory to anti-war conservative monarchists.

Universal male suffrage was also very far from what the moderate liberals wanted; they were more comfortable with the situation in Italy, where a limited property franchise still applied.

The old politics of Metternich’s stubborn resistance to the forces of change was superseded by a new, more flexible politics espoused by conservative statesmen who saw that these forces had to be embraced and turned to their own advantage if the society they wished to preserve could be saved.

The relations of governments with the public everywhere, even in Russia, were no longer shrouded in secrecy and mystery or dependent on assumed habits of deference, but were based far more on an openly propagandistic appeal to the loyalty of the masses.

The vast majority of revolutionaries of all political persuasions were of one mind in considering politics a matter for men; women’s place was in the home.

the Communist Manifesto. Many of its pithy phrases have become famous: ‘the idiocy of rural life’; ‘the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class’;

Not actually from the Manifesto. But he tried, I suppose.

Elated at his new notoriety, Marx fired off his classic polemic The Civil War in France (1871), condemning Thiers, ‘that monstrous gnome’, and hailing the Commune as a new form of state created by working men, ‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’.

Hermynia described the incorrigible arrogance of many of her relatives, who treated middle-class people, ‘even when they were millionaires’, with high-handed disdain. Her great-uncle’s wife said to her one day: ‘The bourgeois, you know, are perfectly fine, and I know that before God we are all alike, but I just can’t see them as people like ourselves.’

the ignorance of the Baltic German aristocracy in Estonia, who referred to middle-class people, whatever they did, as literati

The Baltic nobles with whom she now mixed, Hermynia observed, ‘truly believed in aristocracy and in their own place among the elect. It never occurred to them, at any moment in their lives, that other people were also human.’

When Viktor reported on another occasion that he had given another worker ‘the hiding of his life’ because he had ‘dared to whistle the Marseillaise’, Hermynia ‘went to the piano, which was by the open window, and played the Marseillaise over and over again the whole day long.

In Britain the Dukes of Marlborough, who had been obliged to sell off some of their art collection in the 1880s to make ends meet, became past masters at discovering willing American heiresses. The eighth duke, George Spencer-Churchill (1844–92), married an American millionairess, Jane Warren Price (1854–1909), widow of a New York realtor, while his son the ninth duke, Charles Spencer-Churchill (1871–1934), married Consuelo Vanderbilt (1877–1964), who owned $4.2 million of railway stock in the USA;

What emerged in fact from the social changes of the nineteenth century, as bourgeois businessmen invested in landed property and aristocratic estate-owners invested in industry, was a new kind of elite, based above all on wealth, mixing together large landowners, bankers and businessmen, industrialists and investors, some with titles, some without, but all living more or less the same style of life,

In 1890, Britain still had a greater tonnage of shipping than the rest of the world put together. Even in 1910, 40 per cent of the tonnage of the ships engaged in world trade was British.

the transition to ironclad and steam-powered vessels transferred the advantage back to the British shipping industry, above all when steamships became powerful enough to cross the oceans, as they did in the early 1830s.

The hegemony of British shipping was ensured by the largest naval force in the world, which from 1889 onwards was required by an Act of Parliament to have at least as many battleships as the next two largest navies in the world combined.

Witte was determined to bring Russia into the modern world. His policies ranged widely, and included for example a drive to improve literacy rates among the peasantry, in an effort to equip them for success in a market economy. Witte’s policies represented perhaps the most dynamic and determined example in Europe before 1914 of state intervention as a deliberate tool of economic and industrial growth.

Russian industry imported advanced structural models from western and central Europe rather than building on pre-existing proto-industry. Thus firms tended to be large in scale from the outset.

heavy industry was dependent on foreign and especially French investment. Ten of the fifteen companies that dug out three-quarters of Russia’s coal in 1899 were foreign-owned, and almost every shipyard from Riga to Odessa was in foreign hands.

Significant post-1917?

Russian exports in 1914 were still dominated by agricultural produce – half of their value was accounted for by grain – and manufactured goods made up a mere 8 per cent.

Ironically, British machinery firms such as Platts in Oldham near Manchester exported the new automatic looms to Japan and other countries but failed to find buyers in the home market.

The growing difficulty of their situation from the end of the 1870s onwards led British industrialists to control competition and fix prices through trade associations, trusts and cartels. In 1879, for example, the tea shippers agreed to limit the tonnage competing for trade with China so that their ships would all sail with full cargoes.

It was in these decades that many famous brands in the food and drink and other light industries, such as Cadbury and Fry in chocolates, or Lever Brothers’ ‘Lux’ and ‘Vim’ in washing and cleaning products, became established.

Justus von Liebig, whose discovery of the value of nitrogen as a plant nutrient effectively founded the chemical fertilizer industry. Liebig had studied and worked in Paris, and in 1865 founded a company to produce and market meat extract according to a process he had discovered with a Belgian colleague: in 1899 the product was labelled ‘Oxo’. Liebig also developed a technique for producing concentrated extracts of yeast, marketed in England as Marmite

Siemens, for example, employed 75,000 workers in Germany in 1913, and 24,000 outside the country.

by 1907 cartelization covered 90 per cent of the German market in paper, 74 per cent in mining, and 50 per cent in crude steel. By 1900 there were 275 cartels in operation in Germany, in all branches of industry,

In 1914 the hydroelectrical capacity of Italy reached a million kilowatts, and though some of this was used for purposes such as providing electric lighting for Milan (one of the first cities in the world to be fully lit by this method), 90 per cent of it was employed in industry,

Italy, Sweden and Norway all leapfrogged the coal-based stages of industrialization and entered the industrial age on the basis of the most modern power technology.

While the technological innovations that brought about the first industrial revolution had been achieved largely by the ingenuity of mechanics, the second clearly required the knowledge of scientists. British universities began to adopt the focus on centrally directed research that characterized German higher education,

The widespread belief in Britain that Germany was forging ahead economically before 1914 fuelled anxieties about the rise of an economic rival that translated all too easily into political and military terms.