If the French Revolution and its consequences dominated British historians' interest in Europe for most of the nineteenth century, then, as the century came to an end, their attention turned eastward towards Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans. This was not, initially at least, because of their past, but rather because of their present, and more threateningly still, perhaps, their future. The growing power and, for many thinking Britons, challenge of Germany, particularly with the construction of a high seas battle fleet, beginning in 1898, backed by a booming industrial economy and heralded by an ambitious and rhetorically aggressive monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, caused some historians to focus on the German past, as the unification of Germany at the beginning of the 1870s had already done in the case of Sir John Seeley. At the same time, however, British historians of Germany, as of France, were heavily dependent on the work of native scholars, whose view of the German past was almost uniformly positive and uncritical. Germany had devised the rules of modern historical scholarship, stressing objectivity of approach and neutrality of style and judgment, and British scholars were keen to demonstrate that they respected them. They undertook little original research themselves, but many knew German, and they were able to use published documentary collections and the works of leading German historians to familiarize an English-language readership with the past of the country that was now replacing France as the dominant and most ambitious power on the European Continent.