Prussia’s reward for its part in France's defeat had come at the Congress of Vienna, where Prussia had been granted most of its lost territories and considerably more, including forty percent of the Kingdom of Saxony and much of the Rhineland.

Much of the territory annexed in the Third Partition of Poland had been granted to Congress Poland under Russian rule.

With these gains in territory, the Prussian kingdom had been reorganized into ten provinces.

Most of the kingdom, aside from the Provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, and Posen, had become part of the new German Confederation, the association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to serve as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which had been abolished in 1806.

Prussia had in 1818 established an internal customs union throughout their state.

Anhalt had joined in 1821; Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in 1826.

Over the objections of Austria’s Metternich, Prussia extends its customs union to include the neighboring Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Rhine, thereby laying the foundation for economic power based in free trade.