After the defeat of Napoleon the major European powers met at Vienna in 1814–1815 to redraw the political map of the continent and restore a conservative balance of power. The settlement redefined state borders, restored several monarchies and created the German Confederation and an enlarged Kingdom of the Netherlands, while establishing a 'concert' of great powers to manage future disputes. The relative peace it secured among the major states lasted, with interruptions, for a century. That stability underwrote the railway age, industrial expansion and the rapid growth of nineteenth-century cities.
It set the inter-state order within which Europe industrialised and urbanised, and its emphasis on managed great-power diplomacy prefigured later international institutions.