Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

WARacres, happened to have no superior lord. Each of these in turn, if largeenough, showed the same lack of territorial unity and standardization,depending on the vagaries of a long history of piece-meal acquisitionand the divisions and reunifications of the family heritage. The complexof economic, administrative, ideological and power-considerationswhich tend to impose a minimum size of territory and population onthe modern unit of government, and make us today vaguely uneasy atthe thought of, say, UN membership for Liechtenstein, did not yetapply to any extent. Consequently, especially in Germany and Italy,small and dwarf states abounded.The Revolution and the consequent wars abolished a good many ofthese relics, partly from revolutionary zeal for territorial unificationand standardization, partly by exposing the small and weak states tothe greed of their larger neighbours repeatedly and for an unusuallylong period. Such formal survivals of an earlier age as the Holy RomanEmpire, and most city-states and city-empires, disappeared. The Empiredied in 1806, the ancient Republics of Genoa and Venice went in 1797and by the end of the war the German free cities had been reduced tothe four. Another characteristic medieval survival, the independentecclesiastical state, went the same way: the episcopal principalities,Cologne, Mainz, Treves, Salzburg and the rest, went; only the Papalstates in central Italy survived until 1870. Annexation, peace-treaties,and the Congresses in which the French systematically attempted toreorganize the German political map (in 1797-8 and 1803) reduced the234 territories of the Holy Roman Empire—not counting free imperialknights and the like—to forty; in Italy, where generations of jungle warfarehad already simplified the political structure—dwarf states existedonly at the confines of North and Central Italy—the changes were lessdrastic. Since most of these changes benefited some soundly monarchialstate, Napoleon's defeat merely perpetuated them. Austria would nomore have thought of restoring the Venetian Republic, because she hadoriginally acquired its territories through the operation of the FrenchRevolutionary armies, than she would have thought of giving up Salzburg(which she acquired in 1803) merely because she respected theCatholic Church.Outside Europe, of course, the territorial changes of the wars werethe consequence of the wholesale British annexation of other people'scolonies and the movements of colonial liberation inspired by theFrench Revolution (as in San Domingo) or made possible, or imposed,by the temporary separation of colonies from their metropolis (as inSpanish and Portuguese'America). The British domination of the seasensured that most of these changes should be irreversible, whether they89