‘The first decade of Frederick William III's reign’, Heinrich von Treitschke writes, ‘is the most traduced and least-known epoch of Prussian history’. Indeed, H. M. Scott describes the whole fifty-year period from 1763 to 1806 as ‘one of the most neglected half-centuries in Hohenzollern history’. The relative obscurity of the period from 1797 to 1806 can be explained by the fact it is apparently untypical of what we are accustomed to think of as typically Prussian. The early reign of Frederick William III lacks the clear contours of the Great Elector's state-building; the stern militarism of Frederick William I; the unprecedented expansion of Frederick the Great; and the later achievements of the Prussian reform period after 1806. Unlike many other periods, the years from 1797 to 1806 saw Prussia shock Europe not by her assertiveness, but by her quiescence, not by her contempt for international norms, but by her trusting belief in such norms long after they had been abandoned by her neighbours; and when Prussia was punished in 1806, it was not for her aggression, but for her diffidence. Yet – as this book attempts to show – Prussian statesmen before Jena did not regard themselves as untypical. They were no less beholden to the doctrine of the primacy of foreign policy, and the demands of geopolitics, than their predecessors or successors. The decisive difference lay not so much in the unspoken assumptions underlying Prussian deliberations, but in the resulting responses: timidity, indecision, opportunism, miscalculation, high-political intrigue, royal preference and sheer necessity sustained the neutrality policy until the bitter reckoning at Jena and Auerstedt.