Reform in Great Britain and Germany 1750-1850

In the study of late eighteenth-century Europe the concept of 'reform', both in theory and in practice, has been neglected compared to the attention lavished on its more glamorous relation 'revolution'.

Yet it was reform not revolution which characterized the experience of both Great Britain and Germany from 1750 to 1850.

This volume takes a comparative approach to shed all manner of new light on old problems.

The British ship of state sailed untroubled through the turbulence created by the French Revolution without having to do much more than take in the occasional sail and flog the odd mutineer.

Germany was certainly revolutionized after 1789, not least by the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was change imposed from outside, not generated from within by domestic subversion.

Indeed, the various forms of exploitation suffered at the hands of the French Revolutionaries and their heir, Napoleon, only served to strengthen a long-established German preference for gradual change through reform.

Though violent and rapid change may be more dramatic than gradual adaptation, this volume reveals that the study of the latter stimulates just as much intellectual excitement.