Old order, new classes and liberal nationalism

Detail

Europe before nation-states: what a "country" looked like in the mid-18th century

• There were no nation-states in mid-18th-century Europe. A nation-state means a state whose people mostly share a common identity, history and culture. In the mid-18th century, this did not exist. Kingdoms and empires held together many different peoples.
• Germany, Italy and Switzerland were split into kingdoms, duchies and cantons. Rulers ran their lands like private estates. The people in them did not think of themselves as one nation.
• The Habsburg Empire is the best example of a patchwork state. The Habsburgs ruled Austria from 1282 until 1918, and also held Hungary and Bohemia from 1526 to 1918. [3]

The Habsburg patchwork — region by region

• Alpine core: the Tyrol, Austria and the Sudetenland. Mostly German-speaking.
• Bohemia: the aristocracy (big landowners) was largely German-speaking, but the peasants below them were not.
• Italian-speaking lands: Lombardy and Venetia. These were taken by the Habsburgs, not settled by them.
• Hungary: about half the people were Magyar (the main Hungarian-speaking group); the other half spoke other tongues.
• Britannica gives sharper numbers for the same trend: after the Turkish wars depopulated the Magyar heartland and Serbs, Croats, Romanians and German colonists moved in, the Magyars were only about 35% of the population in 1720, rising to nearly 40% by 1780. [3]

• Note: NCERT's "half the population was Magyar" describes the Hungarian portion of the empire; the Britannica figure counts the whole population of the Kingdom of Hungary. Keep the NCERT figure for the exam.

• Galicia: the aristocracy was Polish. The Habsburgs gained Western Galicia in the Third Partition of Poland, 1795, and lost it again in 1809. [3]

• Subject peasant peoples spread across the empire: Bohemians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Roumans (Romanians).
• The only thing binding all of them: allegiance to the emperor. Not language, not religion, not shared history. One loyalty to one ruler held the patchwork together.

The old social order: a tiny aristocracy over a peasant majority

• The landed aristocracy was the ruling class of Europe — but very small in number. Power came from land, not from numbers.
• They owned large estates in the countryside and also town-houses in the cities.
• They spoke French for diplomacy and in high society, across national borders. A Prussian noble and a Russian noble could talk to each other.

• They were tied together by marriage across families and countries. They behaved like one Europe-wide social group.

• Below them, the peasants were the vast majority.

• In Western Europe: land was farmed by tenants (rent-payers) and small owners.
• In Central and Eastern Europe: huge estates were worked by serfs — peasants legally bound to the land and to the lord.

The new classes: industry creates a middle class

• Industrialisation arrived at different times in different places.
• England: from the second half of the 18th century.

• France and the German states: only in the 19th century.

• New classes appeared in the towns: a working class and a commercial/industrial middle class — merchants, factory owners, professionals, officials, lawyers, teachers.

• Key exam line: in Central and Eastern Europe these groups were still small until late in the 19th century.
• The idea of national unity was not a peasant idea. It grew among the educated, liberal middle class. They read, wrote, published, and formed associations. They were the carriers of nationalism.

Liberal nationalism — the political meaning

• The word comes from the Latin liber, meaning free. Liberalism = freedom for the individual, and equality of all before the law.
• What liberals demanded politically:
• Government by consent — rulers must be accepted by the governed.
• End of autocracy (rule by one person with no limits) and of clerical privileges (special rights for the Church).
• A constitution — a written set of rules limiting government power.
• A representative government through parliament — elected people making the laws.
• The inviolability of private property — the state cannot take your property at will.

The limit of liberalism: who actually got the vote

• "Equality before the law" did NOT mean universal voting rights. This is the most-asked point in this section.
• Voting in revolutionary France was limited to property-owning men.
• Only the Jacobins, for a short period, gave all adult males the right to vote.
• The Napoleonic Code went backwards: it restored limited, property-based suffrage and reduced women to the legal status of minors, placed under the authority of fathers and husbands.
• So liberal nationalism carried a built-in contradiction: it spoke of freedom and equality, but in practice gave political rights to propertied men only. Women and non-propertied men were excluded.

Economic liberalism: the trade problem in the German states

• There were 39 German states in the early 19th century. Each had its own currency, its own weights and its own measures.
• Concrete example of how bad it was: a merchant travelling from Hamburg to Nuremberg in 1833 to sell goods had to pass 11 customs barriers, paying a duty of about 5% at each one.
• Duties were charged by weight — which meant every single barrier needed the goods weighed and measured again. Since each region used different units, this ate huge amounts of time and money.
• Measures did not match: the elle — a measure of cloth — varied by city. Frankfurt 54.7 cm, Mainz 55.1 cm, Nuremberg 65.6 cm, Freiburg 53.5 cm.
• The merchants and industrialists hated this. Their demand was simple: one unified economic territory, free movement of goods, people and capital.

The zollverein and Friedrich List

• The zollverein (customs union) was formed in 1834 at Prussia's initiative. Most German states joined it.
• What it did:
• Abolished tariff barriers between member states.

• Cut the number of currencies from over thirty down to two.

• Prussia had already practised this at home. The Prussian Tariff Law of 1818 abolished all internal customs dues inside Prussian territory and offered free trade to neighbouring states — this Prussian free-trade area became the nucleus of the later national customs union. [2]

• By 1834, eighteen states had joined the zollverein, formed by merging two earlier regional customs unions. Austria was not included. A common external tariff — the Prussian Tariff of 1818 — protected members from foreign (mainly British) competition, while trade inside the union was free. [2]
• Railways did the rest. A growing railway network knitted the separate markets into one and stimulated mobility of people and goods.
• Friedrich List, Professor of Economics at the University of Tübingen, gave the idea its slogan. He wrote that the aim of the customs union was to "bind the Germans economically into a nation" — to fuse their interests, and to protect them through a common tariff.
• Exam takeaway: economic unity came before political unity in Germany. The zollverein was a customs deal, but nationalist feeling grew inside it.

Prelims Hooks

• Habsburg Empire's only unifying bond: allegiance to the emperor — not language, religion or shared culture.
• Lombardy and Venetia were the Italian-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire; Galicia had a Polish aristocracy; Bohemia had a German-speaking aristocracy.
• Liber (Latin) = free — root of the word liberalism.
• Only the Jacobins briefly granted the vote to all adult males in revolutionary France.
• The Napoleonic Code restored property-based limited suffrage and made women legal minors under fathers/husbands.
• 39 German states in the early 19th century; Hamburg → Nuremberg (1833) = 11 customs barriers at ~5% each.
• The elle of cloth ranged from 53.5 cm (Freiburg) to 65.6 cm (Nuremberg).
• Zollverein: formed 1834, at Prussia's initiative; cut currencies from over thirty to two. Its forerunner was the Prussian Tariff Law of 1818, and eighteen states were members in 1834, with Austria excluded. [2]
• Friedrich List — economist at Tübingen — wanted the customs union to "bind the Germans economically into a nation".
• Industrialisation: England second half of the 18th century; France and the German states 19th century.
• Habsburgs ruled Austria 1282–1918 and held Hungary and Bohemia 1526–1918. [3]

Mains Points

• Nationalism in Europe was a middle-class project, not a mass movement at the start. The landed aristocracy was Europe-wide in outlook (French language, cross-border marriages) and had no reason to want nation-states; the peasantry was illiterate and tied to the land. Only the educated professional and commercial middle class — created by industrialisation — had both the ideas and the interest. This explains why nationalism came late to Central and Eastern Europe, where this class stayed small until the late 19th century.
• Liberalism and democracy are not the same thing — this is the core tension of the period. Liberals demanded constitutions, parliaments and equality before the law, yet built voting rights on property and excluded women entirely (Napoleonic Code). The 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage and for women's rights grew out of this gap in liberalism itself. A good GS-I answer uses the Jacobin exception and the Napoleonic reversal as evidence.
• Economic integration can precede and produce political nationalism. The zollverein (1834) plus railways created a single German market, common currencies and shared interests before Bismarck created a German state in 1871. List's phrase "bind the Germans economically into a nation" makes the mechanism explicit; the Prussian Tariff Law of 1818 shows Prussia had already rehearsed the model internally. [2] This is a useful comparative point for questions on economic unions and identity (e.g. the EU, or India's post-1947 internal market).
• The Habsburg Empire shows the opposite force — why multinational empires could not survive nationalism. A state held together only by loyalty to a ruler, ruling Magyars, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Romanians, had no answer once each group began to claim a nation of its own. The demographic reality — Magyars at only ~35% in 1720, ~40% by 1780 [3] — meant no single people could serve as the core of an Austrian nation-state.