In 1872, the British journalist Walter Badget, at that time the editor of the weekly newspaper, The Economist, released an extensive essay on the evolution of civilizations. Reading it today is a bit tough, as it shrouded in the cultural norms of its times, i.e. it's pretty racist. But there's an interesting passage I want to read to you about our old friends, the Puritans.
Quote, The process of nation-making is one of which we have obvious examples in the most recent times and which is going on now. The most simple example is the foundation of the first state of America, say New England, which has such a market and such a deep national character. A great number of persons agreeing in fundamental disposition, agreeing in religion, agreeing in politics, form a separate settlement. They exaggerate their own disposition, teach their own creed, set up their favorite government.
They discourage all other dispositions, persecute other beliefs, forbid other forms or habits of government. Of course, a nation so made will have a separate stamp and mark. The original settlers began of one type. They sediciously imitated it, and, though other causes have intervened and disturbed it, the necessary operation of the principles of inheritance has transmitted many original traits still unaltered, and has left an entire New England's character, in no respect unaffected by its first character.
The causes which formed New England in recent times cannot be conceived as acting much upon mankind in their infancy. Society is not then formed upon a voluntary system, but upon an involuntary. A man in early ages is born to a certain obedience, and cannot extricate himself from an inherited government. Society then is made up, not of individuals, but of families, creeds then descend by inheritance in those families.
At the time of Badget wrote these words, an undeniable shift was underway in Europe, and in some cases, around the world. People were beginning to identify themselves more and more along the lines of nationhood. Shared language, ethnicity, creed, and culture had long been important in local communities, but now they were becoming ever more important across the broader polities, too. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, human beings were becoming increasingly aware of the things that united them, and the things that divided them.
And this push and pull would prove to be one of the most enduring legacies of the modern era. This is the Industrial Revolution's Chapter 53 Nationalism. As always, let's cover the admin before we get going. Next up is a correction from last time.
Listener Ian Gorlick noted that the rifles used in the Crimean War had a greater range than those used in the Napoleonic Wars, but contrary to what I said, that range was more like twice as long, not twenty times as long. The comparison I meant to make was between the typical rifles used in Crimea versus the muskets used in the Napoleonic Wars, which were the more common long guns at that time. In fact, my script said long gun, not rifle, but I was very tired the weekend I recorded and edited Chapter 52, and so I didn't catch my mistake. Ian actually noted that at the 1809 Battle of Kakabelos, a French general and his aide to camp were killed by an Irish rifleman from a distance of 500 meters, which was longer than the normal range of a mini rifle in the 1850s.
So, thank you, Ian, for your correction. Second, a shout out to everyone supporting the podcast on Patreon, including New Patrons Adam Bibby, Harriet Buchanan, Duncan McHale, and Seth Wiener, as well as Akima Med, Jim Enkenbrand, John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brookin, Yepa Burkhot, Tara Carlson, Amelia Duncan, Michelle Gerstich, Jason Hayes, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hoganson, Cara Holm, Brian Long, Mack Loveland, Dennis Morgan, Ameka Okofor, Ido Uziel, Christian Sebastian, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stensbury, Sebastian Stark, Alex Strains, Ross Templeton, and Walter Taurus. Thank you. To what extent have nations existed throughout history, is a tricky question to answer.
Tribes go way back into prehistory, and, to some extent, tribal heritage helps shape the characteristics of many of our nations today. It's impossible to imagine England today without the Anglo-Saxon tribes, Hungary without the Magyars, etc. Even in settler colonial societies, indigenous tribes tend to have a big, even when unrecognized, influence over how those societies developed. When a Jewish diplomat from Portugal, named Don Pacifico, was accosted by an anti-Semitic mob in Greece in 1847, it led to a stunning episode of British foreign policy.
Born in Gibraltar, Pacifico was able to claim British citizenship. The UK's hawkish foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, spent years trying to get Pacifico restitution, melting in a blockade of Greece until they settled with him. Referring to the privileged position of ancient Roman citizens during an 1850 speech to the House of Commons, Palmerston remarked that, quote, the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, civis romanas sum. So also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong, end quote.
But in reality, who was or wasn't a Roman, wasn't always that simple. The Romans were constantly asking themselves questions, like, are these people from southern Italy really Roman? I mean, they've been a part of the Empire for a while now, but they're not from Rome. And then, when they decide that their fellow Italians did count as Roman, they'd be like, wait, are the people from Spain, Roman?
Not to mention, the Romans wouldn't exactly accept you as a fellow citizen if your people were conquered and you were sold into slavery within their empire. And you can see similar conundrums play out in other empires throughout history, from ancient and medieval China, to the Islamic Caliphates, and so on. Our American founding fathers faced similar issues when crafting the US Constitution, and, as a result, the construct of citizenship was left remarkably vague until after the Civil War. But we'll be talking more about that next time.
Our old friend, Yuval Noah Harari, actually spends a good deal of time talking about this phenomenon in his book, Sapiens, what he calls the Imperial Cycle. Next a small group establishes a large empire. Then an imperial culture is forged, rooted in the culture of the conquerors. That culture is then adopted by the subject peoples.
Eventually, then, the subject peoples demand equal status now that they accept the common imperial values. The empire's founders then lose their dominance, but the imperial culture goes on to flourish and develop anyway. In a sense, this is also what happened during the Dark Ages, as tribes like the Franks and Danes and Poles settled their countries. But under the general union of Christendom and the feudal system of Vassilage that developed in the centuries that followed, nationality just didn't play an especially important role in medieval Europe.
With a few small republican exceptions, power was vested in powerful individuals, not entire peoples. The first big shift in this order wasn't the emergence of the modern nation, but of the modern state. As the power of nobles declined with the rise of gunpowder-based weaponry, the power of Europe's kings rose, and by extension so did that of their kingdoms. With the Protestant Reformation came greater autonomy, the peace of West Thalia, the treaties ending the Thirty Years War, effectively ended whatever remained of Vassilage and vested strong sovereignty in Europe's sovereigns.
Territory became more rigid, and the holder of the territory more independent from those of other territories. And with the states independent from one another, it created an environment where the best way to ensure your rivals didn't get too powerful was for you to get powerful yourself and act as a check against them. To these ends, the great powers would build little European empires, and then the first signs of nationalism begin to emerge. The proto-nationalist outlook was mostly in a grarian one.
Irish peasants had problems with their English lords, Norwegian peasants with Danish lords, Ukrainian peasants with Polish lords, Romanian peasants with Hungarian lords, you get the idea. This dynamic continued well into the 19th, and even into the 20th century, even as a more modern nationalism emerged. Then came the French Revolution. Strictly speaking, this was not the first example of a nation, that is the people of a country, being a sovereign source of power in and of itself, but it was the most significant example to date.
It created the language, the philosophy, and the spirit for that concept to spread in the years to come. Although revolutionary France was eventually defeated, and the Congress of Vienna re-imposed and reinforced the Westphalian order, the cracks in the system were clearly there. And then the industrial revolution spread throughout Europe. Now, we covered this sum in chapter 47, but I think it's worth reiterating and expanding.
The decline in demand for rural labor, and the high wages to be found in the growing mill cities encouraged peasants to migrate into urban areas. They left their local communities, where local traditions had been passed down for centuries, and they entered towns and cities where people from other communities were living. They didn't share all the same traditions, so these new populations had to figure out what they had in common, and in this way they began to build their modern nations. Helping that along were new technologies like railroads, steamboats, navigable rivers and canals, and telegraphs, which slowly brought far-flung peoples closer together.
Rural-free trade in the United States, post-anción regime France, and the Zolvarine had a similar effect. But perhaps the most important of these technologies were the machines for mass papermaking and mass printing, with more and more printed materials becoming available, more and more people became literate, and as they did, it became more and more important to standardize their languages. And this was already underway in the United Kingdom, where English crowded out traditional Celtic languages like Irish, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh, French became dominant among peoples who once spoke Breton, Gascon, Provencal, Alsatian, and Corsican. The same story was played out in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The standardization of language was important to nation building, but so too was the resistance to that standardization. Because what if your government isn't just using a different dialect, but a language that's entirely foreign to you? Now what if you're a literate educated Czech, but the documents that describe the laws you live under, your property, and your rights are all in high German? Well, then your identity becomes distinct from that of the Germans, and then maybe you don't want to be forced into something called Germany.
Maybe you would prefer a government of, by, and for, Czechs. And in this era of increasing education, it was the middle classes who were advancing the most. More and more, they were attending the great Universities of Europe, coming into greater contact with other people from nearby polities who shared their national characteristics. Okay, you come from Baden and I come from Prussia, but let's face it, we're both German for crying out loud.
Thus, the bourgeoisie became among the earlier promoters of this new nationalism. In most places, though, the peasantry of Europe was fairly ambivalent about it. The middle class nationalists tried appealing to them with the sentimentalities of folk culture coming out of the Romanticism movement, Shoutout, Chapter 44. Societies sprang up across Europe to promote the quote unquote traditional, folklor stories, music, dance, dress, etc., of Hungary and Croatia and Romania and Czechia, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy, and so on, even though all these national cultural norms were quite new in the grand scheme of things.
To what extent they actually influenced, the common person is unclear. When it came to the urban working classes, this issue really came down to specifics. In the early 19th century, French workers heralded French nationalism, but German workers cared a lot more about their economic security than they did about a unified Germany, especially since they tended not to support the Zulverine, which threatened their local trades. Karl Marx was incredibly selective about his nationalist sympathies.
He was a strong German nationalist and supporter of Irish and Polish nationalists, but he was adamantly opposed to Czech nationalism, which they opposed to German unification, and most other Slavic nationalist movements as he feared they would align with Tsarist Russia. In the Communist Manifesto, he wrote, complaining of the criticisms of communism, quote, the Communists are further approached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got, end quote, proletariat revolution was his motivation and end goal in all things.
Nothing else bolstered the rise of nationalism as a political ideology more than the Greek War of Independence during the 1820s. It was here where mythologized peasant herdsmen and bandit heroes successfully fought off their quote unquote oppressors from the Ottoman Empire. It was a romantic vision of ordinary people fighting for their sovereign rights against foreign imperial forces. It was in the spirit that young Europe emerged.
Nationalist organizations sprang up across the continent, starting with the 1831 founding of young Italy, by our old friend Giuseppe Mazzini. Soon there was a young Germany, young Poland, young France, young Ireland, and others. They sought a new democratic Europe where people were consolidated into their own nations rather than being consolidated into oppressive empires or divided among trivial political boundaries. It was in this vein that liberal magiars sought to create an independent, or at least autonomous, nation-state of Hungary, free from the Austrian Empire.
It was in this vein that early fenions set up organizations like the Irish Republican Brotherhood and began planning armed revolts in the 1860s. It was in this vein that Bosnian nationalists began resisting the Ottomans, despite their shared Islamic faith. But the failures of the 1848 revolutions really brought the challenges of democratic nationalism into the light. Constructing a nation within a geographic area wasn't as easy as supposed.
This was especially the case in Eastern Europe where the overlapping of distinct Slavic populations would never allow for any straightforward maps. Not to mention that, across these territories, there were also sizable communities of Germans, Jews, and the Romani people, among others. As state-sponsored education spread in Europe, these problems were exacerbated further. The schools were required to teach a national language and history that were often at odds with the local populations.
Now, Czechs, for example, were forced to learn German. Our old friend, Lioskoshuth, anticipated this problem as early as 1842, arguing that, quote, in one country, it is impossible to speak in a hundred different languages, there must be one language, and in Hungary this must be Hungarian, end quote. This magiarization was to be at the deliberate expense of the German, Croat, Slovakian, and Romanian languages spoken within Hungary, in other words, at the expense of those national identities within a magiar nation state. Thus, nationalism hindered nationalism.
Croatian nationalism came at the expense of Hungarian nationalism, Czech nationalism came at the expense of German nationalism, Montenegrins would fight Albanians and Bosnians, Catholics and Muslims, as part of their war with a common Turkish foe. In fact, after Greece, there were only a few cases of success. Belgium gained independence from their Protestant, Dutch-speaking neighbors in the Netherlands in 1830. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 led to the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro with an autonomous Bulgaria.
Croatia achieved some autonomy as well. It is important to note, though, that democratic nationalists did not see a contradiction between their own aspirations and those of other nationalities. As our old friend, Eric Habsbaum, put it, they, quote, indeed envisaged a brotherhood of all, simultaneously liberating themselves, end quote. Metzini even hoped these shared aspirations could be the basis for a future sort of League of Nations, which could regulate the common interests of the various nations states of Europe.
As it turned out, nationalism was also an ideology that could be easily adapted to the agendas of Europe's more reactionary, imperialist, and opportunistic regimes. The most notable nation states, created in the 19th century, were not small breakaways of oppressed minorities from great empires, rather they were two nation states formed in order to advance the power of rulers from smaller states. I am, of course, referring to the formations of Italy and Germany, and in both cases, this task was accomplished not by idealistic nationalists, but by gifted politicians of noble birth who were masters in the art of real politique. When we last left the Italian peninsula, Charles Elbert had been forced to abdicate as King of Piedmont Sardinia.
He was succeeded by his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Characterized, almost comically, as an uncivilized brute by his contemporaries, Victor Emmanuel II seemed more like a king from the Dark Ages than a great reformer, but his orientation toward reform early in his reign would do him wonders. The young new king was offered good terms by the Austrians in 1849, they only asked that he abolished the constitution his father had agreed to and returned to absolute monarchy. In a stroke of long-term political foresight, Victor Emmanuel turned the terms down, keeping the constitution and paying a massive indemnity to the Austrians instead.
It made him the new best hope for Italian liberalism. Austria, for their part, kept a close eye on Italy. With puppet strings extending to most of the Italian polities, save for Piedmont Sardinia, they continued to mount pressure on local leaders to stay vigilant against the nationalist movement. The Habsburgs feared an Italian nation-state would only embolden their other subjects, like the Magyars and Czechs.
Pope Pius IX, meanwhile, was now squarely opposed to Italian unification. While sour over his treatment by Italian nationalists in 1848 and 49, he was no longer the great liberal hope he had once been, but rather a typical conservative pope. Beyond Pius' personal grievances, the Church generally feared that an Italian nation-state would strip the papacy of its vast lands in central Italy and reduce the pope to a mere religious figurehead, rather than a political sovereign on the level of other European monarchs. And Metzini and his protégé, Giuseppe Garibaldi, were on the run.
The former ran around Europe, evading the police for a few years, before returning to Italy and attempting insurrections, which failed to get off the ground. The latter went on something of a worldwide tour, including stops as far as the US and China, working different jobs before settling on the little Italian island of Caprera, where he tried his hand at farming. Thus, the key for Italian unification could only be found in Piedmont Sardinia. It began with a clamor of demands from Piedmont's progressives to weaken the power of the Catholic Church.
Not only did they blame the Church for the failures of 1848, they also viewed it as a hindrance to general modernization. The Church held enormous legal and economic powers in Piedmont Sardinia, keeping the small kingdom a virtually medieval state. It strictly enforced the observation of holidays, of which there were about two or three a week, leading to lower levels of economic output. Only Church marriages were considered valid.
Twenty percent of the land in Piedmont Sardinia was controlled by the Church and not taxed, leading to lower revenues. And yet, most of the money earned on these Church-controlled estates went to high officials, like bishops and their families. Paris priests were so poorly paid that the state had to subsidize their stipends. But these Church powers were gutted in 1850 by a series of reforms known as the Saccardi Laws.
Though not a fan of them, Victor Emmanuel was persuaded by his ministers to accept the reforms, and they would be enforced by a forward-thinking strategist, rising fast through the ranks of Piedmontese politics. Camino, Paro, Valipo, Buito, Benzo, better known by his noble title, Count of Cavour, was born in Turin in 1810. The second son of a prominent Piedmontese family, he was sent to a military academy and subsequently joined the army as an engineer. But his liberalism got him in trouble with his superiors and he resigned his commission.
Then Cavour began taking trips across Europe, to Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. His trips would be incredibly influential. During his travels to Paris and London, Cavour became obsessed with the politics of those countries learning the issues and observing how politicians they are maneuvered. A noble who dressed more like a bourgeois, he also made sure to meet with merchants, bankers, and industrialists.
As he did, he became more and more interested in economic issues. It made him frustrated by the lack of development in Italy. In Milan, for example, there were only two small steam engines as late as 1841. As he once put it, quote, Oh, if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something, and my name would not be wholly unknown, end quote.
So when Cavour returned to Piedmont, he started organizing conferences on agricultural modernization, as well as a steamship company. He also put some of those modern agricultural ideas to use on his estate, becoming a quite prosperous gentleman farmer. When the revolutions of 1848 broke out, Cavour got in on the action. He was elected to the first ever Piedmontese parliament, serving in the Chamber of Deputies.
Two years later, shortly after the Saccardi Laws were passed, he was elevated to a cabinet post, serving as Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. The next year he was promoted to Minister of Finance, and finally, to Prime Minister of Piedmont Sardinia in late 1852. Throughout his meteoric rise, Cavour began planting the seeds of his economic agenda. The most important component was the expansion of railways.
The first railway from Turin to Genoa had been completed only a few years earlier. Cavour envisioned it as a first step to a rail network across the Italian peninsula, also linking up with other European rail networks. He proposed the tracks from Turin to Venice, from Milan to Naples. Not only would it be good for commerce, but it would also give Italians opportunities to travel and to mingle with other Italians, and soon local borders would seem petty.
Now Cavour was not an Italian nationalist, per se. But like the Zulbrine had done in Germany, he believed that greater trade and communication within Italy would help advance the economy and the prospects of constitutional government. To Cavour, unification was the means to other ends. As Prime Minister, he worked toward these ends as a moderate liberal.
He sought reform of the military and the Church. In 1855, he suppressed all the monasteries, not engaged in quote-unquote useful work, i.e., work related to religion and or social welfare, and taxed the bishoprics and other ecclesiastical establishments. Church officials were also booted from politics. Cavour proudly described the arrangement as quote, a free church in a free state.
He briefly resigned when Victor Emmanuel urged to compromise with the church instead, but the king dropped it and Cavour was soon urged to return. During these years, he also introduced scientific farming across the kingdom, increased irrigation, subsidized rail construction, and other transport infrastructure, and stabilized the currency with modern financial practices. He got good commercial treaties with France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Zulbrine, and he linked his railroads across Italy and across Europe. All of this led to rapid economic growth, making the government of Victor Emmanuel very popular.
By extension, the booming economy also led to a rapid growth of tax revenues, which went into building a well-equipped army of about 90,000 strong. The secret goal of this military build-up? To oust the Austrians from the Italian peninsula. To succeed, Cavour would need to raise Piedmont Sardinia standing in Europe.
He advertised it as a well-behaved and well-governed little kingdom, so they could have some good western allies when the time came. It's why he sent their troops to join the UK and France in Crimea. When the Crimean Peace Conference came in 1856, he had his allies raise the Italian question. British and French delegates made a point of it to criticize the Pope and the Church, corrupt local princes in Italy, safer Victor Emmanuel, and most especially, Austria.
Cavour also started making overtures to the followers of Metzini, to get behind Piedmont Sardinia for the sake of Italian unification. Now, he viewed Metzini as an inspiring figure, but one who was totally unrealistic in his approach. Cavour was a pragmatist, but he still knew how to speak to these nationalists. And so, Piedmont Sardinia set up its propaganda machine, the Italian National Society.
Now, officially unconnected to Cavour and the state, it nonetheless promoted Cavour's program. It was allowed to operate in the open in Piedmont Sardinia, though in secret throughout the rest of the peninsula. It showered Italy in broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers heavy in Piedmont's op-eds. The slogan, spreading across Italy, was independence, unification, Victor Emmanuel.
Meanwhile, Cavour conspired with France for war against Austria. Now, Napoleon III had many reasons for this, but one was maintaining the Napoleonic tradition of advocating for nationality, that a people, sharing a race, language, etc., should have their own state and a government with power derived from that nation. Finally, in April, 1859, war came. The invaded, moving fast to capture Turin.
But due to an incompetent commander, the Austrian troops failed to move fast enough, and French troops rapidly swarmed across the Alps. The fighting would mostly take place in Austrian-controlled Lombardy, Phoenicia. Meanwhile, nationalists further spread across the peninsula. The Grand Dukes and Betcheses of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany were driven out of power by popular uprisings, as were officials in the Papal States.
A major revolt started up in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where Garibaldi soon headed to take command of a rebel army. In July, the French Emperor signed an armistice with his Austrian counterpart. Austria would keep Phoenicia, but Lombardy was to be handed over to Piedmont Sardinia. Meanwhile, politicians across central Italy voted to combine with Piedmont Sardinia.
Now Cavour offered Napoleon territories from Piedmont, Savoy and Nice, in exchange for Piedmont annexing these central Italian territories. Napoleon accepted, on the condition that plebiscites be conducted there. Conducted with universal male suffrage, the plebiscites all passed by huge margins, with overwhelming turnout. Soon enough, Garibaldi, leading a small army of a thousand nationalists wearing red shirts, overthrew the king in Naples.
He declared himself a dictator, in the name of Victor Emmanuel. Though hardly a friend of the Piedmontese government, and especially upset about his hometown of Nice getting signed over to France, Garibaldi had nevertheless come around to Kivore's pragmatism. In October 1860, plebiscites across southern Italy voted for annexation into the constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II. Next, Garibaldi planned to march on Rome.
But this created a problem for Napoleon, who depended on French Catholic support. He agreed that the broader papal states could be annexed, but the patrimony of St. Peter must be left intact. When the next Parliament met in turn in February 1861, its representatives came from almost every corner of modern Italy.
They declared Rome their capital, even though they didn't technically control it yet. And a new article was added to the Piedmontese constitution, claiming for Victor Emmanuel II and his successors, the new title, King of Italy. But even though he would be the first ever King of Italy, he did not start styling himself Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. This new Italy was very much to be an extension of Piedmont Sardinia.
They used the Piedmontese constitution and the Piedmontese flag, a green, white, and red tri-color. But though they had their state, they still needed to build a nation. And despite the inspiring nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi, this was easier said than done. As one Piedmontese politician put it, quote, we have made Italy, now we must make Italians.
The Italian people had not been unified politically since the Roman Empire. Ford worked to spread a standardized version of Italian, but he himself would never be very proficient in it, preferring his native Savoy dialect, which was actually a bit closer to French. When Italian language teachers from Piedmont showed up in Sicily to instruct the locals in the new unified tongue, the locals mistook them for British. Yet despite major geographic cultural differences, the national identity did start taking shape.
Resorgimento was nearing its completion. Still, Venetia remained in Austrian hands, and Rome in papal hands. Italy would need to bite its time for full unification. It would not be Cavour's work, though, as he would die in June 1861.
Instead, Italian unification was completed by the wars that completed German unification. Now, when we last left Germany, the revolutions of 1848 were being put down. Liberals and radicals were thoroughly persecuted. The nobles of Prussia took that kingdom in a much more conservative direction, regaining quasi-medieval powers for themselves.
The dream of a united Germany appeared dead. But the next twenty years would see rapid industrialization. The gold rushes in California and Australia were increasing the global money supply and financiers took to investing it, converting the bullion into capital for industrial development in Europe. Banks in Germany were among those sprouting up, making those investments.
Between 1850 and 1870, fixed steam power increased over 2,000%. Railways and telegraph lines spread even more rapidly than before. Mining and manufacturing picked up. Our old friend, Alfred Krupp, was building his steel empire.
Peasants, more and more, flocked to the booming cities of the River Valley for new mill jobs. With the growth of industry came the growth of the industrial bourgeoisie, challenging the youngers for power, making their gains untenable in the long run. Among other things, the many boundaries within the German Confederation and the Zolvarine made less and less sense. Industrialists became frustrated with all the local regulations, which did not take into account any broader, regional commercial strategy.
Then in 1857, the Prussian king suffered a mental breakdown. His brother took over, and, upon the king's death in 1861, ascended to the throne as Wilhelm I. He was a hardcore absolute monarchist and militarist, leading a state priming itself for hegemony. As Prussia industrialized and Austria lost ground in Italy, the balance of power in Germany noticeably shifted northward.
In 1859, a German National Society formed, following the lead of the Italian National Society. It restarted talks about German unification under the Prussian king. Liberal newspapers in the south liked the idea, as did industrialists in the north. But how could Prussia legitimize it?
Wilhelm did not believe it could be done with a new pan-German constitution, where it was whereby power would derive from the German people. So instead, Prussia would need to defeat Austria in war, kick them out of the German Confederation, and locken the support of other constituent states for annexation. To these ends, the Prussian government also followed Kavor's lead in military reform. They industrialized the army, along the same lines we discussed last time in Chapter 52.
New weapons were procured, and recruitment was ramped up, leading Prussia's military strength to more than double, practically overnight. But a newly elected Prussian parliament did not want to pay for it. Wilhelm nearly abdicated at this juncture, but instead, an advisor suggested they try governing without a budget from parliament for a little while, and for this effort to be undertaken by our ambitious, clever old friend, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck had long been opposed to a federal Germany, even one under the Prussian king's emperor.
But, as Prussia's envoy to the German Confederation's diet at Frankfurt after 1848, he came to view unification as inevitable. So, also like Kavor, his goal was to isolate Austria in Europe in preparation for war. As he very famously put it in an 1862 speech, quote, Prussia must concentrate at strength and hold it for the favorable moment. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided, that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849.
But by iron and blood, end quote. Bismarck simply pretended that, so long as the upper house of parliament approved the military budget, that would be enough. As the upper house was appointed by the king, they did just that. Freedom of speech and of the press were suppressed enough that no successful protest of the policy could be mustered.
Then, Bismarck took a number of steps to antagonize Austria. In 1862, he signed a treaty between the Zolvarian and France. He followed that up in 1867 with a similar treaty with Belgium. He would go on to recognize the Kingdom of Italy.
The wars that would eventually unify Germany began in 1864, as the reorganized Prussian army went to war with Denmark over the infamous Schleswig-Holstein question. Now, like in chapter 47, I simply do not have time to explain the background of the conflict in this episode, but it brought up major nationalist implications because of how many subjects in the duchies of Schleswig and especially Holstein were German. Prussia went into the war with Austria as their ally. The king of Denmark, with no realistic chance of defeating these two powers, handed over control of the duchies to Prussia and Austria jointly.
The next question, what to do with these duchies? Austria and the German Confederation wanted them turned into a new state and given membership in the Confederation. But Bismarck was determined they be annexed into Prussia. It was a perfect excuse for war between the two German powers, but neither side was quite ready yet.
Instead, they agreed to a temporary arrangement in which Prussia would administer Schleswig and Austria would administer Holstein. In the meantime, Bismarck promised Venetia to Italy in exchange for their support in a hypothetical war against Austria. He also hinted to Napoleon III that France would get lands around the Rhine in exchange for French neutrality. Then, when Austrian backed rallies in Schleswig called for sovereignty, Bismarck had the perfect pretext for war, arguing to the Confederation it was a revolutionary activity that needed to be suppressed, while Austria broached the topic in Frankfurt, passing the motion against Prussia's role in the duchies.
As Bismarck warned, they'd do ahead of time, Prussia considered the motions an effective declaration of war. Then they declared the German Confederation dissolved and withdrew. Already mobilized for war, Prussia tapped its railways and telegraph lines for the war effort, something Austria wasn't able to match because they were simply behind the times. With clock-like precision, the regiments moved into their pre-arranged positions along the borders and advanced.
Using new, breach-loading needle guns, they overwhelmed the Austrians and their German allies, still using muzzle-loaders, in terms of shots fired. In just seven weeks, Prussia spilled across Germany, taking several of the smaller states and going head-to-head with Austria in Bohemia. Knowing full well the way the winds of war were blowing, the Austrian emperor sued for peace. The subsequent Treaty of Prague was not nearly as bad for Austria as it was good for Prussia.
In addition to paying a small indemnity, the only territory Austria lost was Venetia, which went to Italy. The German Confederation was replaced by a North German Confederation, from which Austria was excluded, and in which Prussia dominated. Schleswig-Holstein went to Prussia, as did several states allied with Austria that Prussia captured in the war. Prussia would annex Hanover, as Castle, Nassau, and Frankfurt.
But unlike in Italy, there would be no plebocytes. It was strictly a policy of blood and iron. And by the way, after losing so much to the Italians, Austria decided not to make the same mistake with the Hungarians. The compromise of 1867 turned the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, providing some autonomy for the magiars, treating the two kingdoms almost like United Equal States.
And by that same year, Prussia controlled basically all of modern-day Germany, and then some. Parliament was so overwhelmed by the success of militarization that the liberals fractured. The nationalist ones realigned behind Bismarck, while the progressives were reduced to a negligible minority. Then Napoleon came, asking for that territory on the left bank of the Rhine, which France considered its natural boundary, and which Bismarck suggested they'd get in exchange for neutrality.
But now Bismarck refused. Franco-Prussian relations rapidly deteriorated, and both sides prepared for war. Once again, Prussia prepared faster and better. Then came a royal succession crisis in Spain, which I'm not going to get into, but it was a good trigger for war between the Germans and French.
When the French ambassador tried negotiating with King Wilhelm on his morning walk, the king instructed an aide to send a telegram to Bismarck recounting the exchange. Bismarck took the telegram, edited its content a bit, and released it to the newspapers, which were now operating as a Prussian mass propaganda machine across Germany. It stoked anti-French sentiment and provided the Germans with justification for war. On August 1, 1870, the war began.
Like in their war with Austria, Prussia used the railways to quickly move men and supplies to the front. By having multiple tracks for each railway, they could move empty cars back while full cars were on their way, making for a brilliantly efficient mobilization that the French hadn't considered. They overwhelmed the French from the start, winning several battles and capturing key commanders, the most important of which was Emperor Napoleon III himself. With France clearly facing defeat, French nationalists and radicals in Paris staged an insurrection, shouting down with the Empire.
Politicians then proclaimed the Third Republic. Claiming it was the imperial government's fault for getting the French people into war, they sued for peace with Prussia, but insisted on no territorial concessions. But Bismarck had no interest in allowing yet another French Revolution to proceed without little neutering. Thus, the Germans laid siege to Paris.
Months later, the starving Parisians capitulated. A moderate French government was elected and did its best to negotiate, but they had very little leverage. They agreed to about a billion dollar indemnity to be paid to Prussia in three years. A German occupying army would remain in France, to be gradually withdrawn as the payments came in.
Most emulating, though, was that France was forced to cede the territory of Alsant-Lorraine. This treaty of Frankfurt was so devastating to the French economy and French honor that a further insurrection broke out in 1871, the Paris Commune, but we'll talk more about that later. Stronger than ever before, Prussia pushed all the other German states in their orbit to sign a treaty, combining them into a single political union. Under the King of Bavaria's suggestion, Wilhelm would take a new title, German Emperor, the Kaiser.
The German nation state was complete. And with Napoleon overthrown, the Italians were free to complete their own nation state. Feeling the pressures of Italian nationalism more than ever before, Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council to tackle all the horrors the world had seen over these past hundred years of industrialization, materialism, naturalism, rationalism, liberalism, socialism, and more. It was an erratic response to modernity from an institution grounded in medieval social and economic structures.
There were attacks on Freemasonry and scientific endeavours. Most shockingly, it decreed for the first time ever that, in his official capacity, the Pope was infallible. Across Europe, especially in Protestant Britain, Jaws hit the floor. In the newly united Germany, it kickstarted the Kultr Kampf, or culture struggle, between the Church and state.
A few months later, Viktor Immanuel sent a diplomat to meet with the Pope, offering him a face-saving way. He could maintain his status while seeding political control of Rome. Pius refused in a violent outburst. The next day, the Italian army crossed the Papal borderland and soon captured the Eternal City.
Italian unification was now complete, but the bitter Pius would never accept it. Instead, the Kingdom of Italy and the Papacy began what became six decades of open hostility, with the Church continuing to claim Papal sovereignty over their traditional lands. It was known as the Roman question, whether the Pope would remain a landed political leader, in addition to the leader of the Church. Not until the rise of Benito Mussolini, would the issue be settled, with the Pope retaining the Tangivatican city as the Holy Sea, and remaining a monarch in his own right.
The democratic idealism of German and Italian nationalists a few decades earlier had not been realized. The nation-states had come together, but they were done through militarization, war and annexation, but an iron, small-scale imperialism. It is little wonder why it was these two countries that would spread the horrors of their illiberal nationalism come the 1930s. But outside Europe, other forms of nationalism were developing against the forces of imperialism, namely the forces of the British Empire.
Whether or not there can be such a thing as bad nationalism is really no longer up for debate. The Holocaust pretty much settled that. But there is this question out there about whether or not there can be good nationalism. We hear it when we follow the news of the Scottish Independence Movement, for example.
On the one hand, nationalism seeks to prevent the destruction of local cultures, customs, languages, etc., so that we're not all forced into a homogenous blob. On the other hand, nationalism comes at a distinct price. It necessarily excludes some people from the nation. And in recent years, in my own country and in many others across the globe, that exclusion has raised some very troubling questions about whether pluralism is even feasible in a democratic nation-state.
In the US, we try to explain this pluralist nationhood in terms of the values we share, in terms of the mixing of cultures in a collective melting pot, and so on. We touched on this last time, how the Civil War helped nationalize American culture, its music, baseball, etc. Around the same time, the Meiji Restoration in Japan was accomplishing something similar, bringing diverse communities together into a shared national identity. But we'll get to Japan all in good time.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, this idea of building a single nation from among so many diverse peoples would be put to perhaps its greatest test in India. When we last left the Indian subcontinent, we left on the sad note of stunted economic development there due to the exploitative practices of the British East India Company. By now, through a combination of direct rule in some areas and client kingdoms and others, the subcontinent was almost entirely under the EIC's control. Through a combination of taxation and cash crop exports, the East India Company stripped the people of the wealth.
I've seen it estimated that $45 trillion worth of Indian wealth was transferred to Britain between 1765 and 1938. In this economic environment, famines and diseases decimated local populations. Yet for all the harm the British brought, they also brought a certain degree of stability. In the 18th century, there had been an epidemic of bandit raiding parties throughout many parts of India, but as the British established a firm hand of law and order, that particular problem abated.
Industrial development finally began in the 1850s, largely in the form of railroads and telegraph lines, to help manage the export of cash crops. And by the way, when I talk about India in this episode, I'm talking about the region under British control, which also included modern-day countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Of course, there was no such nation and no such state of India, there never had been. The peoples of the subcontinent were divided by a myriad of historic kingdoms, ethnic groups, and cultural identities.
There were many different religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and more. On top of this, the Hindus were divided further by the strict caste system. But there were tons of different languages, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, and over 400 others. English was made the standard language, which served to prevent rivalries among Indians from different language groups.
As the Industrial Revolution picked up back in Britain, it continued to shape the state of things in South Asia. As steamships made intercontinental travel easier, more British women began joining their EIC-employed husbands in India, and missionaries began coming as well. They started up by the religious fervor of the age they started coming to convert the Indians, ignoring the warnings from East India Company officials that they were entering a religiously volatile region. Many of those East India Company officials shared the evangelical zeal of the missionaries, as well as the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham and the Mills.
They believed they had come for the right reasons, and would ultimately make life better for the Indians. They maintained an official policy of trying to bring more Indians into EIC administration, arguing that the natives could adopt the important British principles for self-government regardless of their race or religion. So there was clearly an objective of empire building through co-opting the existing population into the imperial scheme. In practice though, these offices remained almost entirely in white British hands.
Many British overseers were outwardly racist. This imperial era was an era of very strong white supremacy. Some of the prejudices they held toward the Indians were rooted in problems they saw that we would still see as problems today. They complained about the despotism of local rulers, some of whom were literally psychopathic, one famously had a ship of innocent people sunk so he could wash them drown.
But the biggest problem they found was sati, the upper caste Hindu practice of burning widows at their husband's funerals. Now, it seems most Indians did not like the practice, but it remained fairly common. Sati horrified the EIC administrators who banned it in 1829. When Hindu priests complained about the enforcement of the anti-Sati law, one British official explained, quote, be it so.
This burning of widows is your custom, prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them and confiscate all their property. Let us all act according to national customs, end quote.
Eventually, the EIC rulers also allowed the spared widows to remarry while they cracked down on several other traditional Hindu cultural practices. As was being done in Europe, a new nationalism was emerging in India with the promotion of traditional arts and culture. This Bengal Renaissance, as it was known, was led by the reformer, Ram Mohan Roy, and funded in part by our old friend, Dwar Kannath Tagore. And just like the similar efforts in places like Croatia and Czechia and elsewhere, it was to draw distinction between a native Indian identity and the imperial British identity.
At the same time, many British observers in India and at home grew increasingly concerned about the ways that Indian customs were rubbing off on their colonial agents, like smoking with hookahs and learning local languages. As British power grew in India, East India Company armies expanded its presence into Sind, Punjab, and Burma. Led by white British officers, the armies were made up in large part of native Indian soldiers, known as sepois. The make-ups of the different armies were largely divided by caste, which led to social grievances that bubbled beneath the surface for decades.
In 1824, higher caste sepois mutinied when the EIC tried sending them to invade Burma by sea, a Hindu taboo at the time. There was also a greater sense building among the sepois that they were supporting this economic powerhouse of the EIC at the long-term expense of their families and communities. In 1839, they expanded into Afghanistan, the counter-Russian ambitions in the region. They captured Kabul and Kandahar and overthrew the Emir.
But just a few years later, an uprising broke out in Kabul, leading to the murders of several British officers. Eventually, the British decided to pull out and fled back toward India. The Afghans continued to hunt them down, killing or capturing almost all of the 4,500 soldiers and 14,000 civilians. It was the first time British forces had faced such a defeat in the region, and it demonstrated what a popular nationalist uprising could accomplish.
Then in 1856, the East India Company adopted the Enfield pattern rifle. Shoutout, Chapter 52! Now, the thing about these rifles was, you had to load the gunpowder into them by first biting off the greased cover of a cartridge. Well, a rumor began circulating that this grease was made from animal fat, either beef fat, which would be offensive to the Hindu sepois, and or pork fat, which would be offensive to the Muslim sepois.
And this rumor just wouldn't go away. This spread all over the place. Soon, other rumors were out there that the British were going to try banning the caste system, or they would impose forced conversion to Christianity. Throughout the spring of 1857, this distrust finally burst open into acts of violence.
That march, a sepois shot at a British officer near Kolkata. He missed and was captured, underwent ritual humiliation, and was hanged in April. The harsh punishment stirred greater resentment among sepois across the East India Company. The barracks suddenly saw a wave of arson sit them.
The next month, at my route, a unit of 90 sepois was ordered to perform firing drills with the infield rifles. When 85 of them refused, they were court-martialed and sentenced to 10-year terms of prison and hard labor. The next day, sepois from the other units broke into the jail, freed their comrades, and killed some junior British officers in the process. The city was soon in full revolt, with mass protests and arson consuming the route.
From there, they marched on Delhi, took the city, and declared the Mughal Emperor, by this point a mere figurehead, as the leader of their rebellion. The British stationed at the local arsenal blew it up, with themselves inside, rather than not the sepois access it, creating massive damage in the surrounding neighborhoods. News of the uprising spread fast across India, and soon several states up and down the subcontinent joined the revolt. The majority of India's 300,000 sepois defected in mass mutinies.
They laid siege to British-controlled towns, massacred EIC officials and their families, smashed locomotives, and attacked large landholders. The fighting went on for 18 months. It caused major headaches for the British, who were also fighting the Second Opium War at this time, and triggered famine and epidemics across India. The whole episode reinforced British prejudices against Indians, especially Hindus.
But ultimately, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a failure. The rebels failed to take the real centers of British power, the ports, Madras, Mumbai, Kolkata, and the areas around them. They also struggled to unify the many different Indian peoples. Muslims, and especially Sikhs, didn't join the rebellion in the same numbers as the Hindus, and among the Hindus, members of different castes often struggled to cooperate.
Many Indians continued to serve the British, and ultimately helped the British re-establish control of the subcontinent. And the British were able to tap their industrial technologies, the railways, and the telegraph lines they had recently built, to rapidly move information, men, and supplies in a way the rebels couldn't. By the time it was over, some 6,000 British had been killed, it is estimated that as many as 800,000 native Indians died, some from the actual fighting, some from hunger and disease. And while the rebellion ultimately failed, it is today considered the first step in the awakening of an Indian national identity.
Because although there were struggles to unify, there was, nonetheless, a broad effort to oppose the British from a diverse array of Indian peoples, the rebellion crossed lines of geography, language, religion, and cast, with a common purpose of expelling the foreigners. It was the start of a movement that would continue into the 20th century, culminating in independence in 1947. The British, meanwhile, decided they had finally had enough of their East India Company, Parliament voted to nationalize and liquidate the EIC, taking over its armed forces, and establishing direct imperial control over the subcontinent. It would rule over a new state, the British Raj.
It was an age of nation-making, yes, but it was also an age of modern empire-making. And speaking more broadly, it was an age of ever-increasing globalization, next time on the industrial revolutions. Don't forget to hit follow or subscribe on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast. And be sure to follow the podcast on social media.
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