This video offers a comprehensive recount of the year 1816, famously dubbed the "year without a summer." It dives into the severe climatic anomalies triggered by volcanic eruptions, leading to catastrophic agricultural failures and widespread famine across Europe, particularly in countries like France and England. Despite the peace following 25 years of warfare, this environmental catastrophe severely tested European governments’ ability to respond to internal crises, further deepening public discontent, especially in France where socio-political tensions were already at a peak.

Furthermore, the video explores the complex political dynamics in Europe post-1815, showcasing the strategic interactions among major powers like France, Austria, Prussia, and Britain. It illuminates how Richelieu's diplomacy enabled France’s re-integration into the global political system, and the fervent debates surrounding German nationalism and empire were reignited. Additionally, it highlights the Spanish crisis of the 1820s as a pivotal moment, reflecting the fragile peace and the rising threat of liberal uprisings across Europe.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. reprieve [rɪˈpriːv] - (noun) - A temporary relief or escape, especially from trouble or pain. - Synonyms: (pardon, respite, relief)

The reprieve had been a blessing.

2. catastrophic [ˌkætəˈstrɒfɪk] - (adjective) - Involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering. - Synonyms: (disastrous, calamitous, devastating)

But in others, the changes were catastrophic.

3. constitution [ˌkɒnstəˈtuːʃən] - (noun) - A body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. - Synonyms: (charter, code, law)

As part of the compromise that restored the king to power, France operated under a new liberal constitution.

4. diplomatically [ˌdɪpləˈmætɪkli] - (adverb) - In a manner that is tactful and sensitive in dealing with others or maintaining international relations. - Synonyms: (politely, tactfully, prudently)

And it had all been done diplomatically.

5. nationalism [ˈnæʃənəlɪzəm] - (noun) - Identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. - Synonyms: (patriotism, allegiance, loyalty)

Riding the wave of German nationalism, the Prussians wanted to revive talks of a united German empire.

6. colonizer [ˈkɒlənaɪzər] - (noun) - A person or entity that establishes a colony in a foreign country, settling it and applying control over the indigenous people and land. - Synonyms: (settler, occupier, invader)

Northern Italy turned Austria into an occupier and a colonizer, a role that Austria was ill-equipped to handle.

7. geopolitically [ˌdʒiːoʊpəˈlɪtɪkli] - (adverb) - In a way that relates to politics, especially international relations, as influenced by geographical factors. - Synonyms: (strategically, globally, politically)

This was not a thing that the conservative icon Metternich could contemplate, even geopolitically

8. abolitionist [ˌæbəˈlɪʃənɪst] - (noun) - A person who favors the abolition of a practice or institution, especially slavery. - Synonyms: (emancipator, liberator, anti-slavery campaigner)

There's one other thing that set Canning apart. He was a deeply committed slavery abolitionist.

9. skepticism [ˈskɛptɪˌsɪzəm] - (noun) - A skeptical attitude; doubt as to the truth of something. - Synonyms: (doubt, disbelief, cynicism)

Of all the great powers, Britain greeted the calls for a Spanish intervention with the most skepticism.

10. revolutionary [ˌrɛvəˈluːʃənɛri] - (adjective / noun) - Involving or causing a complete or dramatic change. - Synonyms: (rebellious, innovative, insurgent)

Similarly, student associations at universities, traditionally a friendly home to revolutionary thought, would be outlawed across the Confederation.

The Year Without a Summer (1816 to 1824)

It was 1816, and after almost 25 years of unrelenting warfare, Europe had been at peace for one year. The reprieve had been a blessing. In England, one could see a familiar sight. The wind was still bitterly cold and the sky was still gray, but the snow was finally starting to retreat from the hills, and the trees had just begun to bloom. Farmers shuffled about in their fields, fretting over whether they planted too early. They took inventory of their winter stores and wondered if they might go hungry before the first harvest came in. These were all normal sites for the early spring. But this year, something had gone terribly wrong. This was all happening in June.

They called 1816 the year without a summer. It happened for complicated reasons, but basically there was an unlucky combination of volcanic eruptions that altered global weather patterns for two or three years. In some parts of the world, the changes were relatively minor and went by unnoticed. But in others, the changes were catastrophic. In Europe, they happened to be catastrophic. That July turned out to be the coldest July on record. That summer turned out to be the coldest summer on record. That decade of the 1810s would be the coldest decade in 500 years. All the way back to the 1300s, you might be thinking to yourself, okay, so it was unusually cold.

But the problem wasn't just that it was cold. The problem was that nothing grew. Most plants don't really grow unless the temperature is above 10 degrees Celsius. In London, England, it's below 10 degrees for about 66 days on the average year. In 1816, it was below 10 degrees for 146 days, which meant that there were significant non-growing periods scattered throughout the spring and into the summer. That fact alone would have been enough. But there was another issue. The changes to the weather caused most of Europe to be unusually overcast and rainy. Farmers in France usually had to deal with eight days of rain per month in the summer. In 1816, they had 20 days of rain per month. In England, crops had just begun to sprout when they got eight straight weeks of rain. The rain led to flooding, and wherever there was flooding, crops failed.

Northern France and the Netherlands basically turned into one giant swamp. On average, the cold temperatures and the rain pushed the harvest one month later than it should have been. In France, it was more like two months. Farmers relied on early harvests to replenish their stores and get them through the summer. But this year, with the harvest pushed back a month or more, you instead saw widespread famine. In the early summer, it became common to see people picking through abandoned fields that had been lost to flood, eating unripened or rotten plants straight out of the mud. This was how Europe's century of peace began. After 25 years of war, after sending an entire generation of young men into the meat grinder, people were reduced to picking through the fields for rotten food.

What was it all for? The environmental catastrophe was nobody's fault. But people were furious at their own governments for allowing this to happen. And nowhere were they more furious than in France. France was broke, the people were starving, and the country was in the middle of an environmental catastrophe. The restored King, Louis XVIII had come to power, promising to lift a bunch of unpopular taxes on the poor. But he was immediately forced to break that promise. The grumbling began immediately. Conditions in France had never been this bad under Napoleon.

As part of the compromise that restored the king to power, France operated under a new liberal constitution. But the constitution was weak. France now held regular elections, but the king had the power to throw out the results whenever he wished. His ministers did not answer to the public, they answered to him. This actually made the new system weak and fragile. Say what you will about the British system, but at least the British prime minister took most of the heat. If things were really going badly, replacing the prime minister was an uncomplicated and yet meaningful act.

Now the French had a prime minister too, but their prime minister was just an extension of the king's will. If things were really going badly, replacing the prime minister would not be enough. They may need to replace the king. The restored king, Louis XVIII wisely selected a liberal named Richelieu as his first prime minister. The centrists in France at this time were extremely supportive of the new French constitution, were comfortable with many of the reforms of the French Revolution, and also favored the restoration of the monarchy. They were trying to split the difference between the ultra conservatives, who favored increasing the power of the king and the aristocracy, and the republicans, who wanted to disseminate more power to the people and continue the work of the French Revolution.

The king favored the ultra conservatives, but he correctly assessed that there would be a popular uprising if he came out of the gates, pushing their agenda. The centrists would have to do for now. The selection of Richelieu was perhaps the wisest decision the king ever made. Richelieu was a steady hand and inspired trust abroad. In 1818, he successfully negotiated with the great powers for the removal of the armies that were occupying France, and for the end of France's reparation payments. In only three years, Richelieu had returned France to its rightful place as an equal great power. And it had all been done diplomatically. France didn't even have to fight a war to reestablish itself on the international stage. A small miracle.

But Richelieu was not rewarded for his hard work. For three elections in a row, the French Republican left made substantial gains in their annual elections. The King was forced to dismiss Richelieu in favour of a prime minister who could draw support from the republicans. Obviously this went against everything that the King stood for. And without the King's support, this new prime minister was not able to achieve anything meaningful. Let's pause there for now.

France had successfully reintegrated itself back into the international system by forging a moderate path led by centrists like Richelieu. France's politics had settled around a grand compromise between the royalist ultra conservatives, the liberal centrists and the radical republicans. France would have a monarchy and a liberal constitution and it would keep the reforms of the French Revolution. France would have an aristocracy, but it would also have elections. It wasn't quite a democracy yet, but it was on that path. Hold all of this in your head because it will become important in a future video.

While liberalism was taking hold in France, that wasn't necessarily true for the rest of continental Europe. Over in the newly formed German Confederation, German nationalism was on the rise and the other great powers were getting nervous. The two German great powers had different reactions to the nationalist movements within their borders. In the multiethnic Austrian Empire, the instinct was to tamp it down. In the mostly German speaking Prussia, they decided to lean into it. The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg, his prime minister and foreign minister, to meet with Metternich, the Chancellor and foreign minister of Austria.

The Prussians wanted to reform the German Confederation to which both Prussia and Austria were members. Riding the wave of German nationalism, the Prussians wanted to revive talks of a united German empire uniting the German speaking peoples of Central Europe under one state. This new state would instantly become a new great power with enough strength on their own to rival France. Hardenberg proposed that Prussia and Austria roll their territory into this new empire. But if that proved to be impossible, he alternately proposed that they could create a smaller German empire from the various small German states. In this scenario, Prussia and Austria could remain independent and control this new smaller German empire as allies from the outside.

Metternich was horrified by this idea. After such careful and difficult negotiation at the Congress of Vienna to create the German Confederation, Prussia wanted to blow it all up after only three years. Why? What was wrong with how the Confederation was working. The German states had agreed to band together for military defense and to resist outside meddling. It was working. Central Europe was at peace. Prussia and Austria had the strength and the leverage to force their tiny German allies to do whatever they wished. Wasn't that enough? Why on earth would Prussia want to start negotiations all over again?

Metternich's analytical mind went to work. Both Prussia and Austria controlled substantial Polish speaking provinces in the East. If their new German empire was home to a large Polish population, it's obvious what would happen next, isn't it? Poland would ask to join the German Empire. Don't you think the Tsar of Russia would have something to say about that? The Tsar of Russia was the King of Poland. And he had threatened a war in order to pull Poland into Russia's sphere of influence only three years earlier. The new German empire would instantly be on the brink of war. To what purpose? Because a bunch of young Germans in Berlin got caught up in the nationalist mood of the moment and thought that a German empire sounded cool. What a message.

In order to appease Hardenberg and the German nationalists back in Prussia, Metternich proposed some minor reforms to the existing German Confederation. So that it might feel a little more like a unified empire. The Confederation would operate a federal secret police to monitor any revolutionary activity. To the same end, freedom of the press would be standardized across the different German states and heavily restricted. Similarly, student associations at universities, traditionally a friendly home to revolutionary thought, would be outlawed across the Confederation. To allow for all of this, the Confederation as a whole would now be able to force individual states to modify their domestic laws in the name of preserving order. Of course, in practice, these modifications would not be coming out of the small German states. The modifications would be coming out of Prussia and Austria.

All of these reforms have a certain flavor to them, don't they? Metternich was the conservative architect of the post war order. And it's clear where his priorities lay. His singular focus was on preventing a French style revolution from breaking out in Germany. An understandable fear, having just lived through 25 years of war. But I would argue that it was a preoccupation that drove him to distraction. We have the advantage of knowing what would happen in the future. And we know that debate over a potential German empire would be one of the key questions of the 19th century. Metternich had no way of knowing this, but there would be three wars fought over this issue, to say nothing of the 20th century.

My God, I have no idea if Metternich's intervention at this point could have prevented any of those wars. But I do know that Metternich was a lot smarter than me. And when presented with this problem, he totally shrugged it off. He was so distracted thinking about 18th century France that he wasn't really thinking about 19th century Germany. As part of the 1815 post war settlement, Austria got control of northern Italy. As the Austrians moved into northern Italy, it fundamentally altered their national priorities.

Before the war, Austria had been a pretty conservative and inward looking power. Northern Italy turned Austria into an occupier and a colonizer, A role that Austria was ill equipped to handle. Historian Paul W. Schroeder argued that Austria's expansion into northern Italy forced Austria to lead and organize Italy, yet did not really empower her to do so. Austria had to pump Italy for taxes just to offset the massive costs of occupying it in the first place. It was like a snake eating its own tail. The more difficult the occupation became, the more they taxed. The more they taxed, the more difficult the occupation became.

Metternich was the mastermind of the occupation of Italy. And as the occupation began to deteriorate, he began to micromanage Italy's domestic policies. Another distraction. He brought in a wave of Germans from Austria to help administer the Italian occupation, which only further alienated the Italians and made the situation deteriorate even further. On the one hand, he was telling the German administrators to defer to the Italians whenever possible, while on the other hand, he was having the Austrian bureaucracy micromanage everything from Vienna. Colonization makes hypocrites of us all.

Dissent was growing and soon Austria found itself sitting atop a genuine nationalist movement calling for Italian unification. This was way more than the Austrians had bargained for. Metternich set up a robust spy network targeting Italian nationalists. But this did not make the Austrians any more popular. Even the more moderate Italians who were willing to tolerate the Austrian occupation, began calling for a liberal Italian constitution. This was not a thing that the conservative icon Metternich could contemplate, even geopolitically. The occupation of Italy made a mess of things for Austria.

The Italian kingdom of Piedmont had been set up as a kind of neutral buffer state so that Austria and France didn't have to share a border. But Austrian paranoia over Italian nationalism and their goonish spy network had soured relations with their Italian neighbors. For their own protection, Piedmont sought to establish deeper relations with France. This sent the Austrians into a paranoid tailspin. The French were establishing a beachhead in Italy. In Austria's backyard were the French behind the rising tide of Italian nationalism. The occupation of Italy had made Austria totally neurotic. This was a lesson that every great power would have to learn.

In the 19th century. The Austrian expansion into Italy may have looked good on a map, but the occupation did not generate any income, did not increase Austrian military prowess, and did not benefit Austria geopolitically. In the end, it was a total distraction from the important issues in Europe that were threatening the fragile peace. With Metternich up to his eyeballs with problems of his own making, it would fall to others to prevent the next great power conflict. The post war international order faced its first major test in the 1820s. The king of Spain, restored to power after the defeat of Napoleon, turned out to be an absolutist ruler.

In the old 18th century style, this turned out to be a problem. 18th century Spain was dead and gone. When Napoleon was in power, he imposed a liberal constitution upon Spain, one that granted real political rights to its citizens. Virtually all adult men were given the right to vote. And with this change, political life within Spain flourished for the first time. Elections, newspapers, political debate, all of these things popped up within a few years and the people loved it. So when the absolutist Spanish king was restored to the throne, his first move was to tear up the Spanish constitution and return things to how they had been in the 18th century.

The Spanish legislature, which was full of proud Spanish liberals who loved their new constitution, were extremely vocal in their opposition. Radical republicans and revolutionaries quickly joined forces with the more moderate liberals, which created a genuine political movement. Pretty soon, even generals in the royal army were coming out in support of the liberal legislature and the constitution. The king was losing control of the country virtually overnight. Spain was on the brink of civil war. At the urging of his advisors, the king reluctantly, very reluctantly, stepped back from his position. He would sign on to the liberal constitution. The King of Spain would become significantly less powerful, and most of the business of the country would be run through the Spanish legislature, which would be freely elected by the people. Spain would become one of the most liberal countries in Europe, with stronger political institutions than even Britain.

The king said all of that, but he lied. Instead, he began exerting his power by vetoing every little thing that came out of the liberal Spanish legislature. He fired all of his elected liberal ministers and replaced them with unelected men who were only loyal to him. He then appealed to the five great powers and called for an international coalition to march into Spain and restore him to his full powers. A civil war now seemed inevitable. And by making an international appeal, the Spanish king was taking an awful risk. Once the great Powers got involved. Spain could turn into the arena for the next great power conflict. The country could be destroyed.

Inspired by the courage and the success of the Spanish liberals, there were uprisings in Naples and Piedmont calling for liberal constitutions of their own. This movement had jumped international borders, which freaked out the great powers. It was their worst fears realized. It reminded them of the French Revolution. Everybody needed to be careful here. Metternich was particularly freaked out by the uprisings, not only because of his conservative ideology, but also because the countries in revolt happened to be Austria's neighbors. In correspondence with the other great powers, he expressed his fears that this may spark a wave of revolution across Europe. Since Italy was in Austria's sphere of influence, the other great powers agreed to give Austria a free hand to deal with the uprisings however they wished.

In 1821, Austria marched into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the south, and the Kingdom of Piedmont, Sardinia to the west. In both cases, they came to the rescue of the existing conservative regimes. In short order, they put down the uprisings that were calling for new Spanish style liberal constitutions. The copycat uprisings were resolved, but the central problem of Spain remained. Of all the great powers, Britain greeted the calls for a Spanish intervention with the most skepticism. The liberals in the British Parliament wholeheartedly supported the Spanish liberals. But even the British Conservatives were sympathetic to their cause. They had gone through their own crisis with the monarchy in the 17th century, and even the most hardcore conservatives believed that Britain was better off for it.

They viewed what was happening in Spain as part of a natural political evolution that every country must go through at some point. The Conservatives were in government in Britain and the Conservative Foreign Secretary Castlereagh, was dead set against any Spanish intervention. He publicly declared that he had never intended the quadruple alliance by which he meant the four great powers that had brought down Napoleonic France to be a union for the government of the world or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other states. He argued that the Spanish situation was not a threat to the peace in Europe. Prime Minister Liverpool agreed.

The Emperor of Russia, Tsar Alexander, was on the opposite end of the spectrum. He believed that the uprising in Spain was the result of a coordinated international conspiracy and that this conspiracy was an active threat to European stability. He was fully prepared to mobilize the Russian army and march it all the way across Europe in support of the Spanish king. This freaked everybody out even more than the uprisings in Italy did. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted this. Metternich was particularly disturbed. He wanted to restore the Spanish king to his full powers. But not if it meant having the Russian army muddy their boots all over Europe.

For some time, nobody was quite sure what to do about Spain. The great powers were afraid to do anything and hoped that maybe Spain would just come to a compromise on their own. During this pause, something unexpected happened. British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh unexpectedly took his own life. He was replaced by a politician named George Canning. Internationally, the news came as a thunderbolt.

Castlereagh and Metternich had a special relationship and the two were kind of co authors of the post war international system. Now Metternich was on his own. He had no idea how this new fellow Canning might approach the post war settlement. This news was equally distressing to Britain's political class. The current government was a moderate conservative government and Castlereagh had been thought of as a pragmatic conservative that had good relations with the British liberals. Canning had a different reputation. He was known as a conservative conservative, kind of an attack dog, rabidly ideological and not that well disposed toward the moderates currently leading the government.

Castlereagh and Canning never really saw eye to eye. In fact, Castlereagh, how do you say this? Shot him. Things got so heated at one point during the war that the two exchanged pistol shots. Canning lost. So you can understand everybody's surprise when Caning replaced his longtime enemy as Foreign secretary. Many legitimately wondered whether Canning would tear up all of Castlereagh's peace agreements and throw British foreign policy into chaos. But everybody was wrong about Canning. Everybody. In the immortal words of Robert Caro, power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.

What did Canning's newfound power reveal about him? Well before Castlereagh's death, Castlereagh had been consumed with the project of disentangling Britain from continental European affairs. Castlereagh didn't want to be sending the British army all over Europe to put down minor uprisings from people that were only asking for quite sensible reforms. To the surprise of all of his contemporaries, the supposed ideological attack dog, Canning shared that vision. No armies in Europe. In fact, Canning went even further. He shared Castlereagh's belief that British prosperity depended upon how well they did out in the colonies. But unlike Castlereagh, he thought that trade, rather than colonialism, was really the thing that set Britain apart. Colonies were only useful insofar as they facilitated trade. They were not an end unto themselves.

To that end, British interests lay in the pursuit of peace. Peace facilitated trade and trade made Britain prosperous. Unlike his predecessor, Canning was agnostic when it came to the Colonies and outright non interventionist when it came to war. This makes Canning pretty unique in an era that was dominated by colonial obsession. Colonialism can make a country prosperous, but it can also be a trap. Canning was one of the few people who could see this clearly. There's one other thing that set Canning apart. He was a deeply committed slavery abolitionist. This didn't make his life any easier. It was a controversial stance for a British conservative to take, and in fact, most abolitionists lived in the liberal Whig party. Canning just felt it deep in his bones, which makes him cool. Or at least as cool as a 19th century British politician can be.

British politicians of this era liked to talk a big game when it came to political rights. But unlike many of his contemporaries, including his predecessor, Castlereagh Canning wasn't a goddamned hypocrite. Canning had just become Foreign Secretary when the Spanish crisis finally boiled over. In 1823, the Spanish legislature, backed by the military, removed the King from power. The victorious Spanish republicans got very excited by this move and began calling for a revolutionary Spanish Republic. This was bad. A Spanish Revolution.

So soon after the French Revolution threatened to plunge all of Europe into war again. The great powers would have preferred to sit back and wait for Spain to resolve its own crisis. But they couldn't ignore this development. France acted first. After briefly consulting with the other great powers, the conservative King of France sent the French army into Spain. Every other great power signed off on this intervention. Everyone except Britain. Metternich signed off on the intervention, but he wasn't happy about it. The international system was on the brink of collapse. One false move and all of Europe would be at war.

France restored the Spanish king to the throne and then urged him to hammer out a compromise with the Spanish liberals. This was their big plan to resolve the crisis, give the King everything he wanted and then say, pretty please, will you do the thing that you have been refusing to do all along? Why would he do that? It was an incoherent plan and it turned out to be a catastrophic failure. Having received from the French everything he wanted, the Spanish King refused to even meet with his political opponents. Not only that, but now the Spanish liberals, republicans and revolutionaries knew that there could be no political solution to this crisis. Any negotiated settlement would just be thrown out by the Spanish king and the French army.

Now the only way forward was through force of arms. It really was a bone headed move by the French. They had hoped to force a compromise, but instead they had picked sides in a civil war and were now stuck occupying parts of Spain. This was the first great test for the new British Foreign Secretary, Canning. In a speech before Parliament, he reaffirmed British neutrality over this matter, but noted at the end of his speech that he dearly hoped that the Spanish Liberals would be victorious in their struggle against the tyrannical Spanish King and the French army. This was a shocking statement to the other great powers. They had all assumed that they were all on the same page, but apparently not.

Apparently the Conservative government in Britain was sympathetic to the Spanish Liberals and Republicans and revolutionaries. It was a clever move by Canning. It sent a strong signal to the other powers that they could not necessarily count on British support court if they wanted to march all over Europe putting down liberal uprisings. If they pulled a stunt like this again, they might find Britain on the other side of the fight. British Liberals, who up until now had looked at Canning with trepidation, heaped praise upon the Conservative Foreign Secretary for orienting Britain as a defender of liberal movements all across Europe. British Liberals were now confident that they had one of their own in the Foreign Office. Out on the streets, the people rushed to support Canning's declaration. Only eight years after the end of the Napoleonic wars, the question on everybody's mind was, would France's recklessness lead to another great power conflict? The consensus on the streets was that by standing up to France and those other European tyrants who were eager to conveyed their neighbors over petty political disputes, Canning was the only person working to prevent another war. This made him unexpectedly popular with the British people.

Before the speech, there had been a whisper campaign to remove Canning from power. After the speech, he was untouchable. In the midst of all the chaos, something special was happening out in the Spanish colonies. In rapid fire succession, the following Spanish colonies declared independence. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay would declare independence a little bit later, as would the Portuguese colony of Brazil. South America was having a moment, you might say, while all of this was going on. The Spanish king, backed by France, refused to negotiate with any of the South American revolutionaries. He refused to make even symbolic concessions that might have kept them under the Spanish crown.

Canning saw an opportunity. He wanted Britain to be the first to recognize these newly independent states. He believed that having some friends in South America might prove to be a useful counterbalance against any other power trying to push into the region. And there was one other thing. Canning mistrusted the French. When it came to Spain, their true intentions were not yet clear. Why would they recklessly march into Spain like that? It made no sense. Canning feared that they may try to restart the lost French empire by seizing all of Spain's colonies in the name of stability. If Canning saw to it that these newly independent states were recognized by the British government and supported by the British fleet, maybe France would think twice before doing something foolish like that. Canning began the process of recognizing the new South American states and sent a message to France saying that any French adventurism in South America would be interpreted by Britain as an act of war.

The French fell all over themselves, assuring Canning that this was never their intention. Regardless as to whether that was true or not, they heard the message loud and clear. Canning's diplomatic maneuver was remarkably successful. At a later international conference, the question of reconquering Spain's lost colonies was floated. When France informed the other great powers of Britain's threat, the matter was immediately dropped. Canning's threat worked. Peace in South America was preserved at no cost to Britain. The other great powers were also put on notice. If they wanted to go around the world opportunistically snapping up colonies, they would need to go through Britain first. Pax Britannica at its finest.

At this time, I would like to ask all Americans to leave the room. Hot dog is my favorite meat. My favorite meat. I love hot dogs. Love hot dogs. Love hot dogs. Shortly after the wave of revolutions in South America, Canning began collaborating with the American Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. What came out of this collaboration was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The Monroe Doctrine, really developed by Secretary of State Adams, stated, the American continents are henceforth not to be considered as future subjects for colonization by any European power. The funny thing about this declaration was that at the time, it was completely unenforceable, or I should say it was completely unenforceable by the Americans.

But you know who could enforce it? The British. The Monroe Doctrine declared no new colonization of north or South America. No new colonization meant that the current colonization was locked in place. Who did that help? Britain at this time was by far the number one European power in North America. And with these new revolutions in the Spanish colonies, it was fast becoming the number one European power in South America. If Spain or France or any other power attempted to move back into South America, the Monroe Doctrine stated that the United States would resist, which in effect meant that the United States would defend British interests. Pushing the Americans in this direction was a masterstroke by Canning.

They didn't really understand at the time that this declaration committed the American Navy to defending British sugar plantations on Jamaica, but it did. And in exchange for this, the British gave the Americans nothing, Canning said of the Monroe Doctrine when it was first announced. The effect of the ultra liberalism of our Yankee cooperators on the ultra despotism of our allies gives me just the balance I wanted. By this he means that, yes, the British and the French were playing nice at the moment. But if that ever changed, the Americans would serve as a useful counterbalance against French overseas expansion. Canning felt free to speak more plainly. A year later, after all the dust had settled, he described the Monroe Doctrine as an act which will make a change in the face of the world almost as great as the discovery of the continent now set free.

The Yankees will shout in triumph, but it is they that lose most by our decision. It must be said that Canning didn't get everything he wanted. The Monroe Doctrine contained a massive loophole that allowed for American colonialism, which did make Canning nervous, especially when he looked at the American ambitions toward the Caribbean and the newly independent Mexico. But as a general principle, Canning had secured American support against any European power moving into north or South America. It was a diplomatic coup for the British. Okay, the Americans can come back into the room now. I love hot dogs. I love hot dogs. Hot dog is my favorite meat.

The great powers never went to war over Spain, but it was a very near thing. France would end their misguided occupation after five years, and political instability within Spain would persist for the next 40 years, or 80 years, or 120 years, or let's just say that political instability within Spain would persist. However, the Spanish crisis proved that the post war peace was more fragile than anybody realized. The great powers walked away having learned several lessons. First, Metternich was beginning to lose his grip on Europe. He had been the great man during the post war settlement, but after eight years, he was becoming increasingly distracted by the Austrian occupation of Italy and by the festering issues within the German confederation. The international system that he had helped design was still intact, but with France's reckless invasion of Spain, it had entered a new phase, one where he was no longer the main character.

Second, Britain, under Canning's stewardship, had fully emerged as the greatest of the great powers. The Spanish crisis taught everybody that when Britain put its foot down, every other great power hesitated. It was a new world. And then lastly, there was France. What to say about France? They got off to such a good start by successfully reintegrating themselves back into the international system under Richelieu, but after that, it seems like they were bonked over the head with an idiot stick. Well, in a way they were. I've talked around this point up until now. But right around the time that France recklessly invaded Spain, the government of France underwent an abrupt ideological shift. They abandoned the grand compromise that had restored the monarchy to power and decided to lurch quite suddenly in a conservative and autocratic direction. This decision set up a chain of events in France that would have profound consequences for the rest of the 19th century. And we'll discuss all of that in the next video.

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