A New Decade in a New Europe
The deep breath of quiet in the interregnum between 1809 and 1814 had never truly been seen as an age of peace; statesmen and soldiers alike across Europe sensed that another shoe was about to drop, as it did with the dawn of the Fifth Coalition and then the Peace of Aix in early 1815. As the "Year Without Summer" and its commensurate agricultural depression drew to an end with the return of more typical crop yields in 1817, though, the spirit of optimism in Europe was perhaps the highest it had been in decades. The Revolutionary and subsequent Napoleonic wars were at an end; crop yields were improving again after the calamity of 1816-17 ended, and the upside of growing urban demographics that it had produced now left a large pool of workers to be employed in growing businesses and public works alongside demobilized soldiers. The Peace of Aix was producing, perhaps a few years late, a real peace dividend for the first time, and this had reverberating effects across Europe.
The economic triumphs of the period 1818-23, or thereabouts, were felt fairly unevenly across Europe. With British blockades ended and at the only entrance to the Baltic, Denmark-Norway's economy flourished, with Copenhagen regaining lost population and wealth to quickly reemerge as the entrepot of Baltic trade, linking northern Germany, Russia, Warsaw and Britain together through its docks on the Kattegat. Northeastern France, thanks to the strategic Channel port of Anvers, boomed as the early industrial revolution took root, with factories popping up across the Seine, Escaut and Meuse basins, regions that before long would become known as the workshops of the Empire and part of a
sillon industriel with the highest industrial concentration in the world outside of Britain's Black Country, rich with riverine transport networks, coal and iron deposits, and cities and financing. The capable administration of Giuseppe I of Naples, Napoleon's closest brother personally and politically, continued its tremendous progress of the previous fifteen years in building new roads, schools, colleges, and other public works; Napoleon, certainly for the most part well-liked in France personally, remarked that his brother "has made himself not just the model enlightened monarch but the most popular sovereign in the whole of Europe and the world." So impressive was his transformation of Naples from a feudal, Bourbonist backwater to one of the most modernizing states in Europe that the "Neapolitan Model" soon became one of his kingdom's chief exports, particularly to Italy, Etruria, the liberal-Bourbon kingdom in Portugal, and even Warsaw and Saxony.
Of course, this continental boom that marked the early Pax Napoleonica was hardly evenly distributed. The uneven governorship of the Rhine Confederation - general competence in Hieronymus Bonaparte's Westphalia and Wettin Saxony, less enlightened rule in Bavaria, Berg and Oldenburg - and the polarized nature of the union left each member state largely to its own devices and left some parts of Germany approaching French standards of living while others were poorer than they had been under the HRE. Holland was perhaps more depressed than anywhere else in Europe, without the return of the East Indies and its substantial revenues to fill its tax coffers which the Cape Colony could not come close to replacing; by 1823, the Dutch were essentially at the tail end of essentially a quarter-century economic crisis and destruction of the economic prestige they had enjoyed the previous two centuries, having been stripped of much of the southern Netherlands and their crown jewel colony. This, more than anything, explains the mass exodus of Dutchmen from their impoverished homeland to the New World, particularly the United States, throughout the end of the 19th century. Sweden was in similar economic dire straits, having lost Finland and laden heavily with debt, subservient now to Denmark-Norway and Russia alike and a effectively a commercial satrapy of the Baltic League as a whole.
The dawn of the 1820s then saw an emerging urban bourgeoisie taking root in many continental cities and new commercial networks being established, reinforcing for a great many that in the last fifteen years, save the hiccup of 1814-16, Napoleon's victories over the Fourth Coalition and then the Peace of Stockholm had essentially ushered in a peaceful, new innovative era that promised a transformation technologically, culturally and socially as cities bloomed and farms looked fertile again...