by Peter Zeihan
Between deepwater navigation and industrialization, the tyranny of distance had been broken, and the impact on trade was dramatic. Output expanded well beyond the ability of the local populace to absorb it. Had the Industrial Revolution happened anywhere else on the planet, there would have been a market crash as the prices of goods would have cratered due to insufficient demand. But at the time the British (as the English became known after their union with Scotland in 1707) were masters of the oceans, ruling a vast military and commercial empire that spanned the globe. This allowed them to shove all of their (massive) excess production down the throats of any people that they could access via water, particularly within their own empire. The British were (easily) able to cover all of the administrative costs of their empire, the capital costs of their industry, and have huge additional streams left over to justify both a stronger navy and more industrial development.
Just as deepwater navigation guaranteed the Spanish a period of overwhelming superiority in the European power game, industrialization enhanced English prominence to the point of making it the clear European hegemon. But though Great Britain was a geography better suited to leverage deepwater navigation than Iberia, it was not the ultimate European geography for industrialization.
Industrialization requires large volumes of capital to build the industrial base and educate the labor, and then obviously large volumes of labor to work the industrial base. The English had the capital, but most of it was now imperially rather than locally sourced, and England still was at most a mid-sized population. English success was linked to their empire, and while it is sexy to say that the sun never set on that empire, the logistics and supply chains of a system that stretches around the world but is managed by less than 1.5 percent of its population were always going to be unwieldy and temporary.
Just as deepwater technologies migrated from Iberia to a geography that could utilize them better, so too did industrialization. By 1850, it was Germany’s time to rise.
The German Pressure Cooker
Berlin is perhaps the best-located city on the planet from a purely economic point of view. It sits at the junction of the Spree and Havel Rivers, both navigable tributaries of the Elbe. Berlin is only sixty miles from the Oder, and the Havel reaches so far to the east as to almost connect the two river basins. This grants Berlin access to one of the world’s very few maritime systems that taps into more than one river.
And those are just the rivers immediately proximate to Berlin. Close to the west is the Rhine, Northern Europe’s financial-industrial powerhouse, navigable all the way south to the Swiss city of Basel, and possessing tributaries and distributaries that spiderweb through German, French, and Dutch lands. Close to the east is the Vistula—the last major navigable river before the Eurasian Hordelands. Close to the south is the Danube—the longest river in Europe as a whole, one of the very few that flows southward, and the only one mighty enough to punch through the Alps and Carpathians. Any economic hub centered at Berlin is uniquely situated to reach almost anywhere in Europe where wealth can be created. Berlin’s waterways dictate that Germany emerge as the heart of a massive empire with economic links to the North, Baltic, and Black Seas, so long as Berlin is left to develop.
But Germany has almost never been left to develop.
Germany’s location saddles it with three critical weaknesses that make it an insecure—and often poor—country, despite what ostensibly seems like the geography that most peoples could only dream of.
First, Germans don’t live at the western end of the continent like the Spanish or on an island like the English; they are in the very middle of the North European Plain. While Germany’s wealth potential is massive, German lands are inherently vulnerable. To the east is a nigh indefensible border with Poland, whose own eastern border is even less defensible. Germany’s western border is similarly difficult: Opposite it is France, typically the most consolidated European power. Balkan upstarts often seethe on the other side of the Vienna Gap, while maritime powers can easily harass—and at times even hold portions of—the region’s lengthy coastline.
Being in the middle of the North European Plain has made German lands the primary battleground for European dominance as long as the concept of Europe has existed. The Germans directly border six other nationalities: Poles, Czechs, Swiss, French, Dutch, and Danes. Nearby are the English, Norwegians, Swedes, Lithuanians, Russians, Hungarians, and Italians. In terms of proximity to and magnitude of their rivals, the Germans are in the most difficult strategic environment anywhere on earth.
Second, this man-in-the-middle position means that Germany has almost never been united. German rivers lead in different directions to different seas, making different cities look to different horizons for their economic well-being. The middle of Germany—the Harz Mountains region—is akin to having Appalachia between Boston and New York. The presence of not one but six major powers in immediate proximity long denied Berlin easy control not just of its borderlands, but large tracts of its interior as well, including most of the Rhine and Oder river systems. Unlike the English, who established a centralized government in the Thames valley as early as the tenth century, the initial German proto-state of Brandenburg didn’t start stabilizing as a country in its own right until the fifteenth century.
Third, Brandenburg didn’t even have the geographic characteristics that would suggest it would be able to build a successful state. Whether you are producing wheat, textiles, or cars, distance is key in determining your levels of income; the greater your commercial reach, the better you are at connecting your high supplies to someone else’s high demands. Put another way, French wine is financially accessible in next-door Belgium, but in Chile it is for special occasions only.
The Germans lacked independent access to the ocean. Germany didn’t control even one of its major rivers’ delta cities until 1720, when it finally seized Stettin on the Oder from the Swedish Empire. Even then German ocean access was sharply circumscribed. The Danish island of Zealand is positioned perfectly to regulate traffic between the Baltic and North Seas. Germans only got their first full access to the ocean in 1871, when Berlin finally proved able to fold Hamburg, on the Elbe delta, into the German Empire. While the rest of Europe was enjoying an economic boom from the expansion in reach that deepwater navigation provided as early as 1700 (1600 for Iberia), the Germans remained dependent upon expensive roads for transport, keeping them locked into pre-deepwater levels of economic development.
Industrialization changed that.
For the Germans industrialization changed everything.
Industrialization II: The German Juggernaut
Geography does more than simply shape balance-of-power struggles and the flavor of the local economy, it influences cultures as well. Germany’s geographic shortcomings molded German development in unique ways.
• Local government. If the patchwork nature of political borders and the nonunified nature of Central Europe’s rivers kept Berlin from being readily reached for consultation, as was so often the case, then local authorities had to learn to act autonomously. They had no choice but to marshal their own resources—financial, labor, technical, and even military. In a world in which your country had perhaps one-fifth the strength of its competitors, and your city boasted perhaps one-hundredth the strength of an immediately neighboring empire like Austria, total talent capture was a prerequisite to survival. Local leaders and their staff developed excellent organizational skills, proving competent at mobilizing everyone from the intelligence apparatus to the bankers to the academics (and in contemporary times, the labor unions) in order to advance the interests of each particular major city. Unlike most cultures, in Germany local government is seen as a high calling, and it consistently attracts the best and brightest.
• Infrastructure. The plethora of regional rivers and the patchwork nature of political borders had the consequence that these hypercompetent cities often saw their destinies as lying beyond different horizons or even in
concert with rival powers. The southern provinces of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden were all part of the Danubian system and as such treasured their close cultural and economic links with next-door Vienna. In the west, Alsace-Lorraine and the entire Rhineland had far more day-to-day contact with French and Dutch. Despite being packed with ethnic Germans, Schleswig and Holstein were part of Denmark right up until the 1800s. Berlin had to find ways to link all Germans to a common destiny. The result was an incredibly advanced and forward-thinking infrastructure policy that would link all Germans into a region-wide artificial transport network. The Germans had a national rail network as early as 1840—fully three decades before Germany actually consolidated politically, and at a time when the Americans were debating whether to build a second road. The German rail network was expensive—crushingly so—but it was a requisite for German coherence. As Brandenburg evolved and expanded under different ages and names—from Brandenburg to Prussia to the German Confederation and ultimately into Imperial Germany—this became more, not less important. New territorial acquisitions already had preexisting links to rival powers, links that had to be broken and rerouted to Berlin.
• The quest for quality. The omnipresence of competition, both external and internal, required a national government that was hypercompetent at forward-thinking national planning. Resources to knit together disparate populations and geographies do not magically materialize. Canals that link together different rivers do not miraculously dig themselves, and wishful thinking does not protect a small, exposed country from its much more powerful, richer, more mobile, and more numerous neighbors. So the Germans had to be better. By 1717, Prussia already had compulsory education—150 years before England. Germans pioneered the standing army, and by 1740 boasted Europe’s fourth largest military, despite ranking twelfth in population. By 1860, Prussia had more kilometers of rail lines than France, despite being a laggard to the industrial era and holding less than one-third the land area. The need for technical advancement was reflected not simply in national infrastructure and Germany’s military excellence but also in Germany’s social pecking order. German territories were the first in the world to accord equal social status to industrialists and scientists as to military princes; corporate magnates regularly consulted and advised all levels of government up to and including the chancellor and, later, the emperor.
• Capital capture. All this national planning to overcome geographic complications required money—for standing armies, for infrastructure development, for education, for an industrial base. That money had to come from the population. Private savings were co-opted into government-linked banks, and those hypercompetent bureaucrats, whether at the local or national level, ensured that the money went where the state required it. This had a wide variety of effects. Most obviously, financing of government projects came first and foremost, enabling German governments to build all that expensive infrastructure and maintain a standing army in an era of peasant drafts. The national government urged the consolidation of local banks into powerful regional banks to better see to state needs, fusing the German financial world with the German industrial and governmental worlds.
Collectively, these innovations allowed the Germans to punch with all of their weight against whatever problem or foe arose, making them a force to be reckoned with even before Germany became one of Europe’s major powers. They may have still been the half-pint of the neighborhood, but they were a half-pint with a gun and a doctorate in engineering.
The true power of those innovations, however, was how perfectly they had sculpted Germans to benefit from industrial technologies when they finally leaked into Central Europe.
Industrialization in Prussia started with pain. The British could, and did, shove their surplus production down the throats of anyone they could reach. In the American colonies, this led to revolution. It nearly did in Germany too. The endless quantities of cheap, high-quality goods decimated the Germans’ painstakingly fostered cottage and guild industries. Economic depression triggered the revolutions of 1848. Prussia only held together because of its national planning mechanisms and the strength of its military class, which derailed the revolutions and ejected vast droves of dissatisfied citizens.
With their previous manufacturing base dead and gone, the Prussians did the only thing they could: apply the qualitative advantages of German culture to the technologies of the day and develop something extraordinary. As a result, industrialization was different in Germany than elsewhere by a variety of critical measures.
First, industrialization happened everywhere. Elsewhere in Europe, the various industrial revolutions launched from the respective capital cities. Money accrued in the capital and was spent from the capital, so road and rail networks radiated from it too, metabolizing whatever resources lay beyond in a system of diminishing returns. But the Germans, down to the most remote provincial city, were uniquely skilled in economic management and had already constructed the base road infrastructure that industrialization required to take root. Each and every one of the German cities was fertile ground for the seeds of industrialization. None were as powerful independently as London, but any ten of them surpassed the English core—and the Germans had forty regional cities. As industrialization proceeded, German cities each built their own local hub-and-spoke rail networks. The national government, needing to ensure that the various German regions remained knitted into a national whole, connected these hubs together into the world’s first true national rail network. What few regional laggards remained were now surrounded and bolstered by ever-booming internal trade.
Second, industrialization happened much faster. Fractured fifteenth-century Brandenburg with no coastline or major port city was a very capital-poor country. Money had to be husbanded with ruthless efficiency. Imperial Germany of the 1870s, by contrast, controlled the bulk of Central Europe’s river networks and was awash in war booty from its recent string of military victories against Denmark, Austria, and France. Germany’s hypercompetent governments included industrialists on their cabinets, and the public-private pairing ensured that adequate funding reached each and every project that needed investment. Employment, growth, and output all exploded. The industrialization of England took nearly 150 years. The industrialization of Germany was carried out in less than forty.
Third, German industrialization had massive military applications. Most European countries’ military application of industrial technologies focused on quantity: more guns, more uniforms, more transports. Only Germany truly embraced the fundamental newness of industrial technologies to remake how it waged war. This would have been impossible had Germany not entered the industrial age with the highest level of literacy in the world, largely due to its ongoing need to maintain a qualitative edge over its quantitatively superior competitors. The most important manifestation of this superior education system was the innovation of the General Staff, a sort of military middle management designed to disseminate information up and down the chain of command. A military commission required a college degree. Fusing the expertise of local governments with academia, industry, and finance, the General Staff achieved two things: It encouraged the development of ever larger cannons that the military thinkers redesigned their strategies around, and it pioneered new logistical methods to take advantage of the German rail system. The pair proved a crippling advantage. Europe’s maritime powers regularly used the mobility of their navies to flit around each other and avoid paralyzing conflicts. That was hard to do when Germany’s professionalized soldiers came hurtling down the rails in the thousands, backed by dozens of long-range cannons, switching not just between battle sites but between actual fronts in a matter of a few days. After three generations of fine-tuning, the world came to know the gentle German mix of technology, logistics, and force as blitzkrieg.
Finally, industrialization unified the Germans as a country and as a people to a degree unheard of elsewhere, before or since. All governments got a boost from industrialization. Industrialization
brought per capita increases in wealth, health, and living standards so unprecedented that you have to go back to the domestication of animals to find a point in human history where the general populace experienced so rapid and sustained a period of improvement. With rising wealth came rising government legitimacy.1 For the birthplace of industrialization, England, this was merely garnish; the English were already rich from the benefits of deepwater navigation and a globe-spanning empire. In Germany, however, the legitimacy gain wasn’t so much radically different, but exponentially faster and larger. For the previous millennia, Germans had gotten the short end of the European stick, and only through centuries of hardship had managed to scrape together a few bits of identity, security, and dignity. In a single generation, industrialization took them from being some of the North European Plain’s poorest people to some of its richest, and enabled them to impose decisive defeats in four significant conflicts with powers that had preyed upon them for centuries (Poland, Denmark, Austria, and France).
In the next generation all of the various German principalities were fused into a single empire courtesy of the diplomatic genius of Otto von Bismarck, and that empire became the colossus of Europe. Germanic cities that had been unassociated since the death of Charlemagne connected their rail networks together to discover a peer relationship, far different from when a sleepy country town became connected to mighty London. The effect, economically and culturally, was electric, and considering the era, that term is used both figuratively and literally. This was not simply a culture that had finally unified, this was a culture that was ecstatic with its identity and its government in a way that few other cultures have ever approached.