Historical outcomes in retrospect seem foreordained, the product of constricting structures and harsh necessities. But the past is also the province of chance and free will. The territories now known as Italy and Germany were not predestined to suffer the dictatorships of 1922–43 and 1933–45. Yet those dictatorships nevertheless had deep historical roots. The trajectories of the two societies through the “long nineteenth century” from the French Revolution to the First World War were parallel in vital ways, and significantly different from the paths of the two great powers of western Europe, France and Great Britain. And the Italian and German Sonderwege also differed significantly from one another in ways that affected the nature, goals, and fate of the two regimes that ultimately ruled in Rome and Berlin.

PECULIARITIES OF THE OLD ORDER

At the highest level of abstraction, Italy and Germany in 1789 were “belated nations” that had suffered crushing setbacks while the powers of western and northern Europe had pressed forward. The Ottoman Turks largely closed the eastern Mediterranean to trade, just as the discovery of the New World slowly shifted the center of gravity of the European economy to the Atlantic. Simultaneously, the “military revolution” of gunpowder and ruinously expensive standing armies condemned to impotence all who failed to follow the example of Spain, France, and the other large territorial states.

The brilliant civilization of northern and central Italy had led Europe in art, technology, and commerce.