Friedrich List was a German journalist and thinker who wrote about how the government played a larger role in industry in continental Europe than in England. He was a strong supporter of the growth of industry as he believed that industry and manufacturing were a great way to increase the overall well-being of people and increasing the overall wealth of a country. He believed that the "backward" and "advancing" countries as he called them were starting to separate from each other faster and faster, and the longer a country was "backward" the more dangerous it would be for it as a whole. A backward country would be poor and weak as it based its economy off agriculture and not off industry. Basically List believed that to promote industry was the same as defending the nation. He argued that the formation of a customs union in the German States, which he called the Zollverein, would help the economy greatly. His ideas led to the formation of such a union in 1834 . List's idea of economic nationalism as it came to be known would become very popular in German and other places on continental Europe. List was important because he was the first to truly develop an economic system that would rival the laissez-faire system used in England, and provided a way for many young countries to get started in industry and develop their own manufacturing systems.
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