Conclusion

John Maynard Keynes famously observed that it was not ‘blood and iron’ that had sealed Prussia’s success in unifying Germany, but ‘coal and iron.’ Prussia’s rapid industrialisation in the mid-nineteenth century had given it the economic and technological advantage to defeat Austria and France. It was not the martial exertions of the smallest of the great powers that had enabled it to triumph, but the transformative effect of the industrial revolution.