The years from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German Empire in 1918 saw fundamental changes both in Germany and in Europe more generally. From an agrarian society, Germany was transformed into a booming centre of industrial capitalism; and competition among states in Europe became competition among imperial powers for colonies across the world. The attempted solutions to the European balance of power embodied in the Vienna settlement were relatively successful in maintaining European peace for the better part of the nineteenth century; but with the unification of a ‘small’ Germany, under Prussian domination, in 1871, and with Germany's rapid industrialisation and entry into competition for empire at the turn of the century, this balance was shattered. The First World War which erupted in 1914 inaugurated changes which were to have implications throughout the twentieth century, rendering Germany a very different place from what it had been in the eighteenth century.

RESTORATION GERMANY, 1815–48

The period from 1815 to the outbreak of the revolutions which swept the German states in March 1848 is conventionally labelled either the ‘restoration’ or the ‘pre-March’ (Vormärz) period. Both labels are to an extent misleading. Conditions after 1815 did not represent a simple restoration of pre-Napoleonic political or socioeconomic patterns; nor can the period prior to 1848 be viewed solely as a prelude to the revolutionary upheavals.