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The chapter gives a short but extensive autobiography of Friedrich List. He contributed greatly to the movement for economic and political unification of Germany. He was mostly remembered as a promoter of the railroad. He considered the railroad as an essential precondition for Germany's economic unification. Even when he was young, he shared the ideas and values of political and cultural nationalists which can be shown clearly by his reform plans for the German confederation. List was an ideologist of industrialism and industrialization. He was the only thinker who welcomed the Industrial Revolution and its political, social, and cultural consequences. He called for reform and not revolution. He wanted to give the Germans a new life and a sense of purpose. The last major cause that he participated in was the movement for raising the Zollverein tariff to stimulate industrial growth.

This chapter examines the period of neoliberal hegemony from 1982–1990. The discussions cover the global political-economic context and the establishment of neoliberalism in St. Lucia; the role of the St. Lucian state under hegemonic neoliberalism; regional political unification as the state response to neoliberalism; the domestic challenge to neoliberalism; and neoliberalism and general elections, 1982–1992.

The short-lived attempt at the political unification of the early nineteenth century, which was followed by balkanization, is analyzed in this chapter, which portrays these as formative experiences that continued to inform the minds and political projects of the isthmus in later times. In this text, it is asserted that as separate states were constructed, they were not able to disengage completely from one another, thus projecting a peculiar trans-state and transnational dynamics through generations. The early nineteenth century witnessed developments of long-lasting effects in the region: i.e. the short-lived attempt of political unification followed by balkanization. These developments would turn into a formative experience, continuing to affect the historical memory and political projects of the region in later times as these societies developed their distinctiveness while at the same time being unable to completely disengage themselves from the sister republics of the isthmus.

This chapter looks at the volatile debate about the future of German youth and the ability of the schools to turn them away from nationalism and toward a vision of international understanding. After the resignation of Heinrich Brüning in May 1932, a battle over the future of national education exposed a dangerous ideological rift running through Germany. Although conflicts over constitutive issues such as the separation of legal powers and political economy had been fierce in the preceding years, German journalists began writing about the actual possibility of “civil war” in the summer of 1932. It was the precise point at which a new national government, led by chancellor Franz von Papen, began laying plans for a radical centralization of educational policy. It was the first time since Germany's political unification sixty years earlier that the national regime in Berlin took administration of schools and curriculum away from the individual states and began centralizing decision making in the capital.

A 13-year-old today is some 25 centimeters taller than a working-class boy of the 1870s. The increasing stature of Italians neatly summarizes a whole range of improvements in children’s living conditions, from quality of diet to exposure to disease and incidence of child labor. The history of height also has some new lessons to teach us about the timing and location of improvement in wellbeing. During the tumultuous decades from 1910 to 1950, for example, heights increased steadily and at the fastest rate outside the economic miracle years. On the other hand, over much of this period regional mean heights were diverging, the gap between north and south widening. Looking further back in time, Italian unification seems to have had little effect on children’s lives: heights continued to improve at the same rate in the twenty years before and after 1861.