CHAPTER 1 - Nationalism in Europe VS Imperialism in Europe (HISTORY CLASS 10)CBSE

In 1848 Frederre Sorrieu, a French artist prepared a series of four prints visualizing his dream of a world which is made up of ‘democratic and social Republics as he called them. In his Utopian vision the people of the world are grouped as distinct nations, identified through their flags and national costume. At this time German people did not exist as a united nation. Germans were the people of Austria, the kingdom of Two Sicilies, Lombardy, Poland, England, Ireland, Hungary and of in Prussia. In western and Central Europe the growth of industrial production and trade meant the growth of towns and emergence of commercial classes whose existence was based on production for the market. In its wake new social groups came into being a working class population and middle class made up of industrialists, businessmen, professionals. Ideas of national unity in early nineteenth century Europe were closely allied to ideology of liberalism. For the new middle classes liberalism stood for freedom for the individual and equality of all before the law. In the economic sphere, liberalism stood for the freedom of markets and the abolition of state imposed restrictions on the movement of goods and capital. During the nineteenth century this was a strong demand of the emerging middle class. Napoleon’s administrative measures had created a number of principalities and a confederation of 39 states. Each of these possessed its own currency and weights and measures. In 1833 a merchant travelling from Hambug to Nurenberg to sell his goods would have pass through 11 customs barriers and pay a custom duty of 5 percent at each one of them. Such conditions were viewed as obstacles to economic exchanges and growth by the new commercial classes, who argued for the creation of a unified economic territory allowing the unhindered movement of goods people and capital. In 1834 a custom union was formed at the initiative of Prussia and joined by most of the states in German. The union abolished tariff barriers and reduced the number of currencies from over 30 to 2. The creation of a network of railways further stimulated mobility, harnessing economic (nationalism strengthened the wider nationalist) interest to national unification.

(Followed by the defeat of Napoleon, conservative believed in establishing a traditional institutions of state and society. They wanted to setup a modern army an efficient bureaucracy, a dynamic economy, the abolition of feudalism and serfdom could strengthen the autocratic monarchies of Europe. As conservative regimes tried to consolidate their power, liberalism and nationalism came to be increasingly associated with revolution in many regions of Europe such as Italians and German states, the province of Ottoman Empire, Ireland and Poland. These revolutions were led by the liberal nationalist belonging to the educated middle-class elite, among whom were professors, school-teachers clerks and members of commercial middle class. In 1830 July Revolution sparked in Brussels which led to Belgium, breaking away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Greek was a part of the Ottoman empire since the fifteenth century. Revolutionary nationalism sparkled off in Greece which began in 1821. Finally in 1832 the Treaty of Constinantinople recognized Greece as an independent nation.