Building blocks 'from below': the Zollverein and the Piedmontese model

While conspirators and poets built a cultural case for unity, two very different states quietly laid the institutional and economic groundwork that would later make unification possible. In the German lands, the Zollverein (Customs Union) was formally founded on 1 January 1834, grouping 18 states and some 23 million inhabitants around a common external tariff and the elimination of internal customs barriers. Its principal theorist, the economist Friedrich List, argued in "The National System of Political Economy" (1841) for protecting Germany's nascent industry, and Prussia deliberately excluded Austria from the union for both economic and political reasons. Railway expansion — from roughly 6 kilometers of track in 1835 to more than 11,000 by 1850 — reinforced this integration, and by 1867 practically every German state except Austria belonged to the customs union.