This study is representative of a renewed interest in the politics of individual states in nineteenth-century Germany. It attempts to ascertain where Württemberg fits in a wider discussion of nationalism and nation-building, with the kingdom's role as a “middle state” making it more characteristic than Prussia of the course taken by other German states—“inasmuch as there can be a typical experience of so many disparate states” (5) [emphasis in original]. Given such aims, it is odd that Bodie Ashton neglects to mention—even in the bibliography—many of the most important works in this field, not least Dieter Langewiesche's investigations of and theoretical reflections on “federal nationalism” and various other forms of identification, from the locality to the Reich.

Instead, the introductory section on “the methodology of unification studies” focuses on A. J. P. Taylor's Course of German History, which supposedly became—after its publication in 1945—“one of the most influential German history texts ever written,” and which “popularized a thesis known as the Sonderweg (special path)” (3). Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Fritz Fischer are placed within this putative Taylorian paradigm in quick and bewildering succession, with Wehler allegedly using “the Sonderweg as the central plank for his argument that Germany's unique internal tensions led inexorably to the outbreak of the First World War” (3). Fischer is said to have deployed the argument about a special path, “perhaps more ambitiously,” to propose that “there had been a continuity in German war aims between 1914 and 1939,” Ashton continues, “while more recently Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, arguing the Germans were imbued with a unique and almost genetic drive to destroy Jews, adopted the Sonderweg approach to explain German ‘eliminationist antisemitism’” (3).

This detour through the historical debates about Imperial and Nazi Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s contributes little to an understanding of Württemberg's role in the nineteenth century. The author does go on briefly to examine Abigail Green's Fatherlands: State-Building in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001), but partly to suggest that such works “tend to fall into the trap of removing Prussia from the German Question,” only to find “a proxy replacement” in the guise of Bavaria or Saxony (4). Ashton's grasp of the historiography seems tenuous, in short. His concession that the Borussian school is “perhaps … dead and buried,” as Green has rightly suggested, is undermined by his conclusion in the same sentence that the spectre of the school “haunts studies of Germany like a malevolent Poltergeist, and the best efforts of the new acolytes of German history have yet to exorcize it” (4). Ashton would have to examine the efforts of such “acolytes” in greater depth to make this case.

The main chapters of the book, organized chronologically, are better than the Introduction and first chapter, which provides an uneven examination of “states and the nation” before 1815, might suggest. The overarching argument, that “the southern states (or, indeed, any of the German states beyond Prussia or Austria) may have played a far more active role in the unification of Germany than has previously been allowed” (159–60), is plausible. As Ashton points out, it was “Württemberg's king who enacted a constitution that subverted Austria's attempts to muzzle German liberal-nationalism”; it was Württemberg, in conjunction with Bavaria, that made the first efforts to form a pan-German customs league; and it was Württemberg, “once it became apparent that Austria was once more ill-disposed towards German unity,” that “facilitated the meeting between the French and Russian emperors that would eventually lead to France going to war with Austria” (159) in 1859. In 1866, the government in Stuttgart “actively undermined the Austrian war effort” in the hope of attaining a federation of South German states and, in 1870, it chose to become a constituent state of Germany. Drawing on newspaper reports, as well as on a limited number of treatises, correspondences, and archival sources, the chapters examine the development of South German particularism, popular nationalism in Württemberg, the case for Greater Germany, relations with Austria and Prussia, and “Third German regionalism” (131).

It is difficult to understand, from a reading of the chapters, how such sets of ideas and policies were connected to each other. The author's most original proposition concerns the championing of regionalism in the Third Germany. Yet, to what extent did attempts to establish lasting political, military, and even economic agreements (in the form of a South German Customs Union) overlap with efforts to use and renew the structures of the German Confederation? Since Ashton appears not to have read the seminal works on the Bund (Jürgen Müller, Deutscher Bund und deutsche Nation 1848–1866 [2005]) and on the confederal army (Jürgen Angelow, Von Wien nach Königgrätz [1996]), it is not surprising that many of the critical relationships among the German Great Powers, the Confederation, the individual states, and “Third Germanism” remain unexplored. The “driving force” behind programs for a “Third Germany” was, it is claimed here, Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust, the foreign minister and minister of state of Saxony (1849–1866), but he was also a leading voice calling for a reform of the Bund, with varying degrees of Prussian and Austrian involvement. How did his adoption of Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen's plan in 1860, “with Beust insisting that all German states (except Austria and Prussia) should belong to a Third German bloc in a reconstituted confederal authority” (114–15), relate to the Saxon statesman's other proposals for the Confederation in the early 1860s? Did any minister genuinely believe in “Württemberg's ability to stand as a military power in its own right” (106), as Ashton implies, rather than as a constituent part of the army of the Bund?

Without a clearer indication of the political and diplomatic frameworks in which policymakers operated, it is hard to make sense of the various initiatives and competing positions that are described in this book. A South German bloc (Südbund)—which was discussed extensively in 1866–1867 and which purportedly, as a plan for “an independent, regional federation” (136), informed Württemberg's and Bavaria's conduct in the war of 1866—is labelled an “inevitable failure” (141) because of domestic opposition to Bavarian dominance, as well as because of the recognition by many ministers of the Südbund’s economic and political weaknesses. What light does this failure cast on previous attempts to create a separate “Third Germany”?

Ashton fails to answer such questions, at least in part, because his topic is poorly defined. The “lesson of the work”—as “a timely reminder that our current historiographical model is flawed and requires revision to free it from the Borussian school that defines Germany only in terms of Prussia” (160)—ignores much of the literature on the Third Germany over the past three decades by scholars such as Jürgen Müller, Andreas Fahrmeir, Jürgen Angelow, Jonas Flöter, Andreas Neemann, James Retallack, Michael John, and Malte Ritter. The research itself compensates for this historiographical deficit, but even here there are gaps (coverage of the press, correspondence, memoirs, and treatises is patchy), anachronisms (“ethnic nationalism” and “European geopolitics,” for instance, are not defined), and insufficiently qualified or confusing claims. For example, “public traumas” are said—without further evidence—to have merged with “popular calls for national unity” after 1815 “to create a nascent, …. nationalist groundswell” (33); the Coalition is described as having “co-opted the language of human rights for its own purposes” (37) in the Napoleonic Wars. Much of the most original material, which is quoted at length, comes from British diplomats, giving an intriguing portrait of the politics of Württemberg from the perspective of outsiders. What is needed here is the perspective of insiders. In this respect, A. J. P. Taylor is an unreliable guide.