Great Britain was better suited to leverage deepwater navigation than Iberia, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), but it was not the ultimate European geography for industrialization:
By 1850, it was Germany’s time to rise.
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.
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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.
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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.
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For the Germans industrialization changed everything.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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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).
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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.
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It was the first country in the world to have the majority of its population urbanized — a critical development to both foster and take advantage of skilled labor in the industrial era — and by 1900 its many regional centers had grown to the point that Germany had more major industrialized cities than the rest of Europe combined. It was the first country to develop mass universities and research labs, and then to link the two directly into local governments and corporations, giving German industry the ability to source everything from loans to staff to scientific research, and giving rise to the national economic champions model of corporate organization that pervades Europe even today. And the Germans methodically and assiduously applied every new breakthrough, whether scientific or industrial, to every aspect of their national strategy, culminating in everything from engines so efficient and small that they could propel individual vehicles (via Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, and Emil Jellinek, whose daughter was the original Mercedes) and modern pharmaceuticals (Gregor Mendel, Robert Koch, Friedrich Bayer, and Paul Ehrlich), to cannons (Alfred Krupp) and blitzkrieg.
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Simply put, neither deepwater navigation nor industrialization was done diffusing. England could make better use of deepwater navigation than Iberia, and Germany could make better use of industrialization than England, but there was another geography that could make better use of both.
Japan?