Stabilizing a ‘Great Historic System’ in the Nineteenth Century? Royal Heirs and Succession in an Age of Monarchy

Abstract

In terms of epochal epithets, Europe’s nineteenth century provides an embarrassment of riches. Eric Hobsbawm’s classic tryptic characterized it as a threefold age, first of revolution, then of capital and finally of empire. In his durable textbook M. S. Anderson focused on the continent’s ‘ascendancy’ after 1815. Jonathan Sperber chose to headline its ‘revolutionary’ character for the first half of the century and described the decades after 1850 as shaped by ‘progress, participation and apprehension’. Eberhard Weis and Theodor Schieder, who covered the century within the grand Propyläen history of Europe series, declared the ‘breakthrough of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘system of states as global hegemon’ to be the epoch’s defining themes. Finally, in his magisterial global history of the century, Jürgen Osterhammel recently credited the era with having achieved ‘the transformation of the world’.¹