Editing Unification of Germany (section)

== Early modern era and Eighteenth century ==

Since the 15th century, with few exceptions, the Empire's [[Prince-elector]]s had chosen successive heads of the [[House of Habsburg]] from the [[Duchy of Austria]] to hold the title of [[Holy Roman Emperor]]. Although they initially sought to restore central Imperial power, preserving a weak and fragmented Empire was convenient for France and Sweden, and therefore, their ensuing intervention led to the [[Peace of Westphalia]] which effectively precluded any serious attempts to reinforce the imperial central authority and petrified fragmentation and leading to the existence of more than 300 German-speaking political entities, most of them being parts of the [[Holy Roman Empire]], as the [[Napoleonic Wars]] dawned. Still though, portions of the extensive [[Habsburg Monarchy]] (exclusively its large non-German-speaking territories: [[Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen]] and the Austrian partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) or of the [[Hohenzollern]] [[Kingdom of Prussia]] (both the German-speaking former [[Duchy of Prussia]] and the non-German-speaking entire territory of the Prussian partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) as well as the German-speaking Swiss cantons were outside of the Imperial borders. This became known as the practice of {{lang|de|[[Kleinstaaterei]]}} ("small-statery") As a further consequence, there was no typical  German national identity as late as 1800, mainly due to the highly autonomous or semi-independent nature of the princely states; most inhabitants of the [[Holy Roman Empire]], outside of those ruled by the emperor directly, identified themselves mainly with their prince rather than with the Empire or the nation as a whole. However, by the 19th century, transportation and communication improvements started to bring these regions closer together.<ref>See, for example: {{Cite book |last=Vann |first=James Allen |title=The Swabian Kreis: Institutional Growth in the Holy Roman Empire 1648–1715 |date=1975 |series=Studies Presented to International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions |volume=LII |publisher=Editions de la librairie encyclopédique|location=Bruxelles |oclc=2276157 |ol=OL4590654M |author-link=James Allen Vann}}; {{Cite book |last=Walker |first=Mack |title=German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 |date=1998 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-0-8014-8508-4 |location=Ithaca |ol=466977M |author-link=Mack Walker}}{{page needed|date=May 2025}}</ref>