The Russia into which the Tsarevich Peter was born in 1672, and of which he became joint ruler ten years later, was a poor, thinly populated and backward country. She had few towns of any size, no large-scale industry; her economic life was based on the production of timber, furs and salt, and on an inefficient agriculture. Vast areas were still undeveloped and virtually uninhabited. The only direct geographical outlet to the West was the port of Archangel, frozen for half the year; from the Baltic Russia was severed by Sweden's possession of Finland, Ingria, Estonia and Livonia; her frontiers were as yet several hundred miles from the Black Sea, the Crimea being a tributary state of the Ottoman empire and the raids of its Tatar inhabitants still a serious menace to the security of south Russia and the Ukraine. From the second half of the fifteenth century, however, soldiers, doctors and skilled workers of many kinds from western Europe had been active in Russia, and western ideas and techniques slowly taking root there. In the, seventeenth century this process was accelerating, but even in its last decades Russia was far from being a part of Europe in any true sense. She was isolated not merely by geography but also by her distinctive and in many respects unfortunate history, by a national pride so intense and arrogant as to attract the comment of almost all foreign visitors, and above all by deep-rooted religious differences. The Orthodox Church, her wealthiest and most powerful institution, had inherited from Byzantium a profound feeling of superiority to western Christendom and was in general a most formidable opponent of foreign influence.

The years following publication of the Principia Mathematica in 1687 saw a gradual but definite change in the character and spirit of the European scientific movement. Newton's masterpiece showed for a fact that the ‘new philosophy’ could solve the most imposing of problems. No longer was it necessary, as in the heroic days of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes, to convince contemporaries by argument of the power of experimental and mathematical science. Scientific deeds had spoken for themselves. At the same time the Principia brought to a conclusion the great cosmological debate opened by Copernicus, and established mechanics as a model for all the sciences. With these developments, a period of adventure in ideas and organization gave way to one of systematization, fact-collecting and the diffusion of scientific ideas. Science became for a time distinctly less original. In 1698, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and the aged John Wallis (1616–1703), discussing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ‘the cause of the present languid state of Philosophy’, found that among their younger contemporaries ‘Nature nowadays has not so many diligent Observers’. Two years later the Council of the Royal Society regretfully recorded that neglect and opposition had thwarted their plan to produce a series of useful inventions. Yet at this very time the influence of science was spreading as never before. A new profession had grown up. Scientific societies of high technical standards were soon to multiply, governments investing in science with the expectation of a profitable return. An expanding scientific journalism was spreading a new philosophy among a wide lay public.

France was at war from November 1688 until October 1697, so that the name of the Nine Years War accords almost exactly with the facts. It is also less likely to mislead than the other names which have been used. ‘The War of the League of Augsburg’, which originated with French writers, seems to impute responsibility to the Augsburg alliance of 1686. This alliance was, indeed, one of the preliminary steps towards the organizing of a coalition against France but, strictly speaking, it was abortive. Its signatories never acted upon it. A third name, ‘King William's War’, may be misunderstood to mean that King William III was chiefly responsible for the outbreak of the war.

Except for the short war with Spain in 1683–4, France was legally at peace or in truce with all the states of Europe for the ten years following the treaties of Nymegen in 1678–9; but during these years Louis XIV took possession of various towns and territories beyond his borders. His methods were various; they ranged from the legal pretexts of the Réunions to the purchase of Casale from the duke of Mantua; but the lordships and revenues so acquired were not as miscellaneous as might appear. The French moved forward from the points where their armies had halted at the peace settlement. They acquired three first-class fortresses. Strasbourg, with Kehl to support it, commanded the crossing of the Rhine on the road to the Danube; Luxemburg was the point d'appui on the left flank of the defence of the Spanish Netherlands; Casale stood on the Po, above the point where it entered the Spanish duchy of Milan.

The rise of historicism which distinguishes the end of the eighteenth century yielded, among others, the first great histories of music. Works of corresponding comprehensiveness were slow to follow in the wake of these initial achievements, and for this reason a proper understanding of the musical scene in the age of Louis XIV has not been possible until the comparatively recent past. The writings of Charles Burney and John Hawkins, when set in this perspective, become the more remarkable for their precocious sweep and penetrating insights. Burney, in particular, amazes one by his ability to bring to completion the task he set for himself—an account that runs from ancient Greece to his own day. This cannot be said of his distinguished successors in the nineteenth century: the antiquarian completeness of F. J. Fétis and the independent judgments of A. W. Ambros unfortunately were never brought to bear on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; like their fellow romanticists, these scholars were much too fascinated by the more remote past. Lacking modern tools of research to aid him, Burney's narrative, on the other hand, suffers from a disproportionate treatment of the eighteenth century, to the neglect of earlier periods. One cannot wholly blame his enthusiasm for Handel: the paucity of available documents concerning earlier composers like Lully and Scarlatti precluded a corresponding consideration of their achievements. No work comparable in scope with that of Burney appeared until the beginning of the present century, when Henry Hadow edited the Oxford History of Music.

The factors involved in the relationship between the artistic achievement of a nation and success in its other endeavours are complex and often obscure: there have been great powers with little culture, more rarely great cultures with little power. There can be few periods in history, however, in which the cultural influence of the major European nations corresponded as closely to their political standing as the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first two of the next. The France of Louis XIV reached the summit of its power soon after 1680, and its ascent had been accompanied by a coruscation of literary and intellectual brilliance which continued to light up the European scene long after the decline of French political domination and the death of the Grand Monarque. The literary tradition perfected by Moliere and Racine, La Fontaine and Madame de la Fayette, La Rochefoucauld and Bossuet, provided aristocratic standards of taste which dominated the polite literature of Europe for the best part of a century: and the intellectual qualities of rationality, clarity and order implied by that tradition themselves lie at the root of much in the Enlightenment, however deep the gulf may seem between the piety of Fénelon and the irreverence of Voltaire. Alongside continuing French predominance, however, there emerges at this time a new intellectual and literary influence, that of England, characterized by a strong emphasis on factual observation and a new deference to middle-class tastes, which runs parallel with the steady growth of British wealth and power.

In the summer of 1714—when Her Majesty's effective government consisted of Abigail, Lady Masham, Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, and Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke—the duke of Buckingham, on his dismissal from office, penned this summary of English history in the preceding half-century:

The frankness of these words well illustrates the freedom permitted to dukes and denied to pedants. Looking back from the standpoint of the year 1714, the last of Stuart rule, the observer must have been impressed by the variety of race, religion and occupation among those who, in succession, had come to possess the confidence of the Crown; surely, there can be few periods of history abounding in such mutations of colour as these fifty-four years between the eager, joyful accession of a young, restored king and the last pathetic moments of a dying queen. Can it be wondered at that these kaleidoscopic externals have concealed the matter-of-fact but momentous changes which transformed the insular England of 1660 into the Great Britain of 1714?

British colonial policy in the months immediately following the landing of William of Orange was determined less by a change of objectives than by circumstances outside the control of London. The Lords of Trade, a Privy Council committee which had contributed since 1675 more constructive thought towards the political organization of the empire than either Charles II or James II, remained in being. But the loss of vigour occasioned by James's interference was never fully recovered. The king who had helped initially to create a favourable atmosphere for imperial centralization unwittingly did more than any other person to destroy it for ever. In addition, his flight thrust upon the Privy Council the grave task of ensuring that the accession of William and Mary did not precipitate a more radical revolution in the colonies. The speedy onset of war added to the distractions of government. Thus England was unfavourably placed to bargain with her colonies, let alone to impose her will. In particular, the imperial unity which war made imperative would be meaningless if Old and New England pursued sharply diverging paths.

For New England the Glorious Revolution provided the opportunity to overthrow a detested régime: with the imprisonment of General Governor Andros and Edward Randolph the short-lived Dominion of New England collapsed, and men of perceptible imperial sentiment associated with it were discredited. There were revolutionary disturbances also in New York and in Maryland. Protestant hysteria was a feature common to them all, but is not a sufficient explanation of them in itself.