Clearly, the external aspects of national sovereignty, as they have developed in the interstate system since the seventeenth century, depend on some sense of the modern system of commonly agreed rules governing political reciprocity between sovereign states. Contrary to its much-vaunted reputation as the source of the modern system of sovereign states, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, as Osiander shows, said very little about sovereignty. It was far more concerned with stabilizing relations between the politically autonomous entities within the Holy Roman Empire. This has been obscured by the triumphalist retrospective accounts of nineteenth-century nationalist writers, seeking to find origins for the ideas of sovereignty that had come to the fore in their own times. These depended far more on the successful industrial and technological change of the industrial Revolution, together with the French revolution and the idea of national citizenship. These gave national sovereignty its modern form, linked with both enhanced capacities to administer territories, while connecting sovereignty with notions of democratic self-determination. It is this conception any legalistic outcome of the Peace of WestPhalia.