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In what senses and to what extent was this a period of government growth?


This was a period of government growth in the very literal sense of the size of government
increasing but also because the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period in which
strong, centralised states became the source of national identity and legitimacy. Strong,
interventionist, government as the exclusive source of legitimate political and judicial authority was
universally accepted across Europe. Distinctions should be drawn between national (involving
absolute rulers and constitutional assemblies), municipal and local governments, and there are
differences in the development of each of those levels. However, the overriding picture is of national
government expanding, even at the expense of local or municipal executive autonomy.

In the first instance the nineteenth century was a period of the numerical growth of states, in terms
of numbers of people involved in it and in terms of budgets, above and beyond what was called for
by population growth. While this approach is a fairly limited level of analysis, the scale of increase
that the statistics show is an indicator that this was a period of significant government growth in
diverse areas. For example, German central government spending doubled from the 1880s to the
1890s alone, while Spanish spending doubled between the 1850s and the 1880s. At the lower end of
the scale, Russia and Great Britain spent two thirds more in 1880 than they had in 1830, while
Belgium and France tripled their state expenditure in the same period. The extreme example of
Switzerland remains, though, which doubled its 1850s spending in the 1860s, doubled it again in the
1870s and by 1912 Swiss government spending had reached twenty times the level it was in 1850. In
terms of numbers of individuals which were employed in state-related functions, the number of
magistrates in Prussia tripled between 1836 and 1848, while civil servants increased by ten percent
between 1800 and 1850 but then tenfold between 1850 and 1911 to 250,000 people. There were
1,200,000 government officials in Germany by 1914 and as many more state employees under them.
The population of Great Britain increased by 32 percent from 1806 to 1901 but the number of state
officials disproportionately increased by 600 percent. There are obviously some caveats as to using
these figures as proof of government growth. They dont include local government spending and it is
difficult to determine how effective increased spending actually was. However, it is extremely
difficult to reconcile these figures with a hypothesis that this is a period of little expansion of central
government. In the simplest terms, greater central government spending requires more organisation
and more employees, which not only physically increases the size of the state but also increases its
presence in society. To this end (at the central level, at least) this period was one of government
growth.

Yet government also grew in terms of the roles it performed, the responsibilities which it undertook
and the effectiveness of its actions in those areas. Absolutist states tended to limit their areas of
concern to royal involvement, such as foreign policy, monarchical expenses and the taxation to
support those expenses. Over the period, states tended to follow movements from absolutist to
constitutionalist rule with a shift from these largely external activities to more domestic concerns -
the primary one being the maintenance of order and the preservation of the established society.
This led to the developments of more detailed and more complex legislation and so to the creation
or modification of agencies to effectively enforce those laws through punishment. Developing police
forces, courts, prisons as well as the bureaucracy required to run them involved significant amounts
of government growth and expenditure. Governments were called as never before to consistently
defend private property and civil rights; to guarantee contracts and govern labour relationships; to
maintain a solid currency; to regulate a financial system to allow an adequate framework for the
borrowing and payment of debts and to supervise the flow of capital; to encourage economic
growth with subsidies, effective education and local stimulation through investment; to improve the
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nations infrastructure including the vital task of developing a railway system; to navigate the
increasingly complex waters of international relations and laws; to run public services such as
agricultural ownership, the mining and forestry industries, the postal service, the education system,
and many other demands. A concept developed of the state as the shepherd of the national
community, providing guidance but also serving the people, which a duty to improve social
conditions with innovations such as lighting, sewers, housing regulations and welfare allowances.
These new requirements are the reason why government size increased so much, as seen in the last
paragraph, and they clearly reflect a growth in government through a multiplication of the
expectations placed upon it.

In addition, this expansion of the role of the national state was accompanied by improvements in the
general effectives in the states activity within society. To take two disparate examples, the Prussian
state derived a large amount of income from state-owned lands, which was augmented by revenues
generated by the development of heavy industry and the profits from railway creation. The income
earned from the productive sector of the government increased from 57.9 percent of total
government income in 1875 to 75.4 percent in 1913, while public expenditure related to the
administration of said productive sectors over that time increased from 39.8 to 58.5 percent of state
spending. The significant increases in absolute expenditure noted earlier show that this increase was
not merely a change in government approach but rather part of a general trend of growth in
government and bureaucracy at the national level. The second example is that of education, where
illiteracy in Germany had nigh on disappeared by the 1860s to be expected given the political drive
towards making primary education a minimum standard for all citizens, but student numbers at the
secondary and tertiary levels also increased substantially more than population increases would
account for. In both of these areas, government activity not only increased, but was also successful.
Although this was less true of local government, national government across Europe was able to
perform its roles effectively and so gained influence to match an increase in size. Efficiency was
actually aided by an acceptance of the limitations of state power, partly because of the influence of
liberalism on governmental philosophy. States tended to limit themselves and either withdraw or
refrain from intervening in areas where such intervention would have weakened state power,
authority or stability. These areas included the accumulation and expenditure of capital, individual
wage and price levels and private religion, among others. While there were exceptions to these
general patterns, during this period states were able to not just carry out the extra demands placed
on them more effectively but they were also able to delegate power or recognise where state
intervention would be injurious.

When we look at popular conceptions of the state, we see that that ideologies and popular thinking
emphasised the role of government in national life and this led to more support for the government
as an entity as well as greater expectations of expansion of activity of that entity. While considering
the empirical measurements of government, we must be careful not to forget the importance of the
fact that the state is also an idea: it exists because it is imagined, and because imagination shapes
behaviour
1
. A crucial component of state growth in this period is the extent to which it came to
embody the nation in the mind of its citizens and was seen as the sole source of legitimate, secular
power. Statemakers such as Bismarck, Cavour and Kossuth had a good deal of popular support,
which they were able to use to enact reforms favourable towards a larger and more coherent
national government. Ideologies ranging from Conservativism to Nationalism, Christianity, and
Socialism all stressed to a certain extent the importance of the social role of the state as a vehicle for
societal reform and the keeper of law and order. The state was expected to shape religion and
national culture, which it did through state-sponsored institutions and high culture (such as
academies, theatres, libraries, etc), and nineteenth century societies increasingly defined themselves
along lines drawn by the state. State growth meant more encountering of the institutions of

1
Feldman and Lawrence (2011) p. 81
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government by ordinary people, and this increased visibility led to an automatic expansion of the
political community. The end product of this expansion by the end of our period universal male
suffrage gave legitimacy to the established, mostly liberal, governmental systems, while political
activity centred around the state was further increased the mobilisation of labour movements in
unions and the growth of political subcultures such as Catholic or Socialist groups with their own
organisations, campaigning agendas and newspapers. Ultimately the state grew because the
institutions of government seemed important enough to people who had, or desired, power that
they were willing to sacrifice degrees of liberty, money and time to obtain those institutions, and this
popular feeling is important because it represents the growth of the ideal of government and gave
legitimacy to the expansion of government.

However, there were ways in which government growth was either not effective or even not a
reality in particular, local government (as distinct from the national state) was a major area with a
lack of governmental development. This was especially true in Eastern Europe, where serfdom was
the dominant political system in which most individuals existed. Before emancipation, the source of
legal authority and local government was the feudal lord of the area where the peasant happened to
live. Villages and small towns had some semblance of independent government in the form of their
councils and mayors, but their politics was so localised and devoid of wider ideological principles
that they did not encourage a culture of political interest or activism among the people and they
could not effect social and political change on a wider scale. After emancipation, the authority and
procedures of local government slowly began to transfer to a more centralised bureaucracy but this
was hindered at every stage by the old regime of nobles and local magnates. For example, the 1848
revolutions and the Constitution of 1850 abolished patrimonial judicial systems in Prussia but the
nobles continued to control local government by taking on the roles of state officials. They carried
out the same functions, but as delegates of the state, as a means of preserving their prestige and
privilege yet these state positions eventually became the goal in themselves for the power that
they offered. This shift represents an expansion of national state power and influence by proxy, but
at the same time the means by which local autonomy and self-government was shackled. Even
larger local governmental organisations such as municipal councils failed to hold meaningful
executive power even the French communes were forced to obtain the approval of the prefect
before being able to put in place social or public works programmes. Finally, there were even
limitations on the power of the national government. The precarious constitutional balance between
the federal Reich and the 26 individual member states of the newly unified nation is an illustration of
the potential for limitation: in being financially dependent on the states, the German Reich was
limited in the power it was able to wield.

Despite these limitations, we must note that towards the end of our period there was a definite shift
in attitudes which led to unprecedented levels of state growth. Wars, economic crisis and political
events such as the fall of Bismarck and the Dreyfus affair combined to form a general turning point
from then onwards the growth of the state became less indirect. Imperialist competition between
nations led to more vehement nationalism and extraordinary military expansion. The size of the
German army increased from 401,000 to 791,000 from the period 1881-1913, with colossal hikes in
naval spending as well. The overall state expenditure of the Reich increased from 717.6 million
marks in 1876 to 3103.8 million by 1913 and it should be noted that German public debt and military
expenditure was relatively small compared to that of Great Britain or even France. As a different
illustration of the Europe-wide shift in governmental attitude, by 1870 laissez-faire liberalism was a
widely accepted principle in Sweden governments explicitly refused to intervene in the markets
either to spur or to regulate the economy. Yet by the end of the century, Swedish politicians were
prepared to forbear their liberal ideas and put more conservative measures (such as protectionist
tariffs and fixing the currency to the gold standard) in place as a reaction to the agricultural crisis of
the 1880s. The Swedish state began to actively address social problems more thoroughly, while
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universal male suffrage was introduced in 1909 and complemented by the rise of more organised
national parties with comprehensive political agendas after 1900. Sweden had undertaken a sharp
change of direction from being run by a relatively small government to having an expansionist state.
Overall, in the last couple of decades before the First World War there was a clear trend towards
centralisation of fiscal authority and a redefinition of how states regulated society. Governments
began to recognise labour movements as legitimate political forces, a process of secularisation took
place, a greater emphasis on the social welfare responsibilities of the state emerged, dramatic
militarisation was embraced, higher taxes were imposed and the state became more involved in the
economy through tariffs, subsidies, regulation of the financial sector and investment.

In conclusion, while there were some limitations to state expansion, especially at the local level, the
nineteenth century was overwhelmingly a period of government growth. All over Europe numbers of
state personnel rose, the resources and expenditure of the state were greatly increased, the
expectations of the state and the areas in which the state was active multiplied and the popular
support for central governments as an entity grew. The fundamental reason for this growth is that
strong central government was seen as the best safeguard against the chaos that radical social
change could bring. The still further expansion of the state after the First World War was rooted in
the structural change of the nineteenth century.


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