"As the countries of today's European Union advance toward a common currency, there is a sense that history is being made. Few commentators seem aware that these efforts toward economic unity represent not the first but the second major attempt to establish a common European marketplace. This book retrieves from disparate archives a comprehensive account of an earlier, forgotten attempt at pan-Europeanism that regulated most of European trade between 1860 and 1892. Peter T.

Marsh describes the rise and fall of this first common market, an initiative that resonates in many intriguing ways with the experience of the European Monetary Union more than a century later."--BOOK JACKET.