Austro-Italian ironclad arms race
Seizing upon the decline of the Regia Marina in the years immediately after the Battle of Lissa, Tegetthoff worked to continue the efforts of Archduke Ferdinand Max of expanding the ironclad fleet of the now Austro-Hungarian Navy. Tegetthoff found political allies in the Austro-Hungarian Minister of War Carl von Franck and retired Admiral Bernhard von Wüllerstorf-Urbair. Wüllerstorf's and Franck's primary arguments in favor of continuing with the ironclad program Austria had engaged in prior to the Seven Weeks War lay largely along economic grounds. The two believed that constructing new ironclad warships would rejuvenate Austria-Hungary's economy following the defeat at the hands of Prussia and Italy, and that such a fleet would help to open up new commercial opportunities in the Levant and the Middle East. These proposals would be shelved however while Austria continued to reel from the military defeats inflicted by Prussia, and several cabinet reshufflings by Emperor Franz Joseph I resulted in a government more interested in pursuing revenge against Prussia than constructing new ironclads, which would be of little use in a hypothetical second war with Prussia.
Battle of Hochkirch
Although the Seven Years War was a global conflict, it took a specific intensity in the European theater based on the recently concluded War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gave Frederick II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great, the prosperous province of Silesia. Empress Maria Theresa of Austria had signed the treaty to gain time to rebuild her military forces and forge new alliances; she was intent upon regaining ascendancy in the Holy Roman Empire as well as recovering the Silesian province. In 1754, escalating tensions between Britain and France in North America offered France an opportunity to break the British dominance of Atlantic trade. Seeing the opportunity to regain her lost territories and to limit Prussia's growing power, Austria put aside its old rivalry with France to form a new coalition. Britain aligned herself with the Kingdom of Prussia; this alliance drew in not only the British king's European territories held in personal union, including Hanover, but also those of his relatives in the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. This series of political maneuvers became known as the Diplomatic Revolution.