Anna Ross. Beyond the Barricades: Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, 1848–1858.

Abstract

Histories of nineteenth-century Prussia have conventionally been structured by a series of well-established turning points: 1806 and the ensuing Reform Era; 1848 and the upheavals that followed; 1859 and the revival of political life with the so-called New Era; and the 1866–1871 unification of Germany, in which Prussia (and Bismarck) assumed the leading role. By contrast, in Beyond the Barricades: Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, Anna Ross turns her attention to the understudied 1850s, a period of Prussian history that has traditionally been dismissed as a decade of “reaction”—a view perpetuated by the Prussian government’s liberal opponents that utterly fails to capture the complex range of administrative and social reforms the government embraced in a crucial moment of transition. For, as Ross argues persuasively in her elegant monograph, the 1850s were so essential to the formation of the modern Prussian state that they deserve to be seen as a second Reform Era, one that built on the unfulfilled promise of the first.