Zollverein Begins

1834

Eighteen German states abolished tariffs between themselves and agreed on a common external tariff. Prussia, tactfully, had organized the whole thing. It was a customs union before it was a nation - and thirty years before Bismarck, the economic shape of a unified Germany had quietly been poured. Austria's exclusion from the Zollverein ensured that any future German unification would follow Prussian, not Habsburg, lines.