During the period extending from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century monarchy in most of the States of western and central Europe represented a compromise between medieval and modern conceptions of government; medieval ideas of the divine sanction of kingship were combined with an increasingly absolute form of rule. This phase in the history of European polity reached the completest development possible within its own limits in France. In his capacity as a Divine-Right monarch, Louis XIV embodied a tradition that went back to the rois thaumaturges; but the rays that darted from the roi soleil were not the effulgence of a setting sun. The new absolutism, allied to the old Divine Right, had given the French monarchy a renewed and more vigorous life. It must be remembered that the effete and decadent system of 1789, the ancien régime of the historians, only a century before was the new deal of Louis XIV and Colbert. At the close of the seventeenth century, by the efficiency of its administrative and governmental structure, France was in advance of every other country in Europe. True, Louis XIV did not leave his country at the height of her greatness. He outlived his own glory both at home and abroad and bequeathed more problems than solutions to his successors. In France distress and discontent were widespread before he died; and in Europe, during his long reign, Louis had first used and then abused the power with which the cardinals had endowed France, until the Treaty of Utrecht registered his defeat and opened what has been called, though hardly with justice, the age of ‘the English preponderance’.

As the eighteenth century began, the white man's efforts at formal colonisation in Africa had come to a standstill. Indeed, some of these projects, the missionary kingdom in the Congo, the Portuguese holdings along the East Coast, the Jesuit beginnings in Ethiopia, had broken completely against the hard facts of Africa; the only surviving white settlers were the traders of Angola, and the farmers of the Cape, whose impact was as small as their prosperity. But if European flags or bibles made small headway, commercially a great connection was being built. The work of white traders, the play of the market, the needs of countries far away, were dragging West Africa into the world economy. This was not for the sake of its raw materials, for the gold and ivory of the West Coast would not by themselves have attracted much attention, had there not been a more fundamental commodity for sale.

The trade in African labour is very old, but the development of the New World in the seventeenth century had switched it from a northerly into a westward, transatlantic direction, and made slaving a more spectacular, as well as a more massive type of Raubwirtschaft. For the plantation economies of America a regular labour supply was vital, and only immigration could provide it, while the profitable geometry of the Triangular Trade benefited both African slave brokers and European traders. Herein lay the reason for the gigantic population transfers made by the slave trade.

On 19 August 1493 the old emperor Frederick III died. His long reign, ever since 1440, had been marked by a rising consciousness of German nationality. This had been nourished by the controversies of the conciliar period, stimulated by the invention of printing amongst an increasingly wealthy and German-reading public in the courts and towns, and expressed in the newly current phrase ‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. But the reign had witnessed territorial losses on all sides. The estates of Holstein had accepted the rule of the Danish king (1460). The Teutonic Order had come under the control of Poland (1466). The Austrian duchies were overrun at intervals by the Turks. The Swiss had ceased to regard themselves as having duties to the Reich. On the collapse of the Burgundian power (1477) the French monarchy resumed its efforts at eastward expansion; and French diplomacy stimulated centrifugal movements from the Netherlands to the Alps. Frederick's son, Maximilian, took over a Reich diminished and threatened.

Indignation was felt at the helplessness of the Reich. But what could be done? Machiavelli wrote truly ‘Of the power of Germany none can doubt, for it abounds in men, riches and arms….But it is such as cannot be used’. The supreme authority was the king acting with the advice and consent of the Reichstag, the assembly of his estates or direct tenants. At full strength it could consist of the six electors, some 120 prelates, about thirty lay princes and 140 counts and lords, and eighty-five towns.

With the end of the Great Northern War the Scandinavian countries entered upon a period of much-needed peace after more than a century and a half of bitter though spasmodic inter-Scandinavian warfare. This struggle had fundamentally been one between the two more powerful nations, Denmark and Sweden, for political and economic control of the Sound and the Baltic, but the other Scandinavian countries had also been vitally affected by it: Norway because of its dynastic union with Denmark, Finland because that duchy formed part of the kingdom of Sweden. In its last phase, during the Great Northern War (1700–21), this inter-Scandinavian rivalry had become inextricably intermingled with the wider struggle of many Powers against the Baltic empire conquered by Sweden; Denmark-Norway's allies in the war had at one time or other included Saxony, Russia, Poland, Prussia and Hanover.

As far as the long inter-Scandinavian conflict was concerned, the Great Northern War imposed a settlement which lasted in its entirety for nearly a century, while the specific Dano-Swedish-Norwegian borders established have survived to the present day. Denmark gave up all hopes of reconquering the provinces Scania, Halland and Blekinge, lost to Sweden in the seventeenth century, while Norway similarly reconciled herself to the loss of Härjedalen, Jämtland and Bohuslän. The Swedish attempt to conquer Norway was abandoned immediately after the death of Charles XII in 1718, and the project of a Swedish acquisition of Norway was not revived till the very end of the century (and then along lines which excluded plans for direct conquest).

In 1714 some six million people lived in England and Wales and though this fact was unknown to contemporaries their number was increasing more rapidly than in any previous period. More than half the people and considerably more than half their wealth were found south of a line from Worcester to the Wash and almost one-quarter probably lived in London and the adjacent counties. According to the predilections of the observer England might be viewed as a rural paradise disfigured by a rank growth at the centre or as a small world of wit and wisdom surrounded by rural barbarism. Bristol and Norwich might boast commercial institutions which rivalled those of London, but financial control was passing to the metropolis, and one had to go north of the border to find at Edinburgh a culture comparable to that of London. Moreover, London was not only the national capital but also the metropolis of an imperial domain of islands, trading posts and coastal settlements scattered over the face of the world. The interests of her merchants ranged from the fur of the North American wilderness to the tea of Canton, from slaves, sugar and spices to textiles, hardware and nails. London merchants, together with those of Bristol and the lesser trading ports, were concerned with the export of British manufactures, with the import of many luxuries and some necessities, and with a world-wide carrying trade; but the greatest single source of wealth was the re-export of colonial and Indian goods to Europe.

‘If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we… must never forget that the country of which we read was a very different country from that in which we live.’ Lord Macaulay's dictum is certainly true of Europe on the eve of the Great Discoveries. Could the landscapes of that time be set before our eyes, we should find them very different from those of today. The countryside, although tamed by the pioneering activity of the Middle Ages, would still look wild to our eyes—or much of it would. If the great forests had been reduced, much of the marsh and heath still remained untouched. The medieval city had risen to prominence, yet most of the towns and cities would appear small to us, and their industrial and commercial activities limited.

But although much has changed, the bold facts of physical geography have remained much the same. Europe is a peninsula of peninsulas; and on either side of the great peninsula itself lie, and lay, the two maritime worlds of the Mediterranean and of northern and western Europe, with their contrasting histories and climates and commodities. Towards the broad base of the peninsula, where it is attached to Asia, Europe loses its identity. Vast plains replace the variety of mountain and lowland, and the temperatures on these plains fall below freezing point for most of the winter.

But the human geography of Europe in the fifteenth century must be considered not only against the variety of its physical setting, but also in the framework of its time. One of the most notable achievements of the Middle Ages was the clearing and reclamation and draining by which the countryside was tamed and transformed. But this great expansive movement did not continue uninterruptedly right up to the dawn of modern times. In places it slowed down; in some places it ceased; in yet other places the frontiers of cultivation even retreated.

After the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht, Charles VI carried on the war against France single-handed for some months; but on 7 March 1714, Prince Eugene signed, in Charles's name, the Peace of Rastatt, under which Charles held his Italian possessions and the Spanish Netherlands, subject to agreement with Holland on a Barrier Treaty. The treaty with France was ratified for the Empire in the following year and the Barrier Treaty concluded at Antwerp on 15 March 1715. No agreement was yet reached with Spain.

Meanwhile, Charles had to regulate the position in his own dominions. His election to the imperial throne had at least been unanimous, even though the Perpetual Capitulation which he was required to sign left him with powers more limited than those of his father or brother. In the Austrian and Bohemian Lands, the Estates possessed neither the power nor, in most cases, the wish to query either his succession or the continuation of the now established system of government, which not only left the determination of central policy to the monarch's free discretion but also abandoned the main administrative functions to his Statthalters in the different lands. It was only in Hungary that the position was still unregulated. Joseph I had lived long enough to see the negotiation of the Peace of Szatmár in 1712, which put an end to the long and bitter fighting led by Ferenc Rákóczi, but the Peace was actually signed only after Joseph's death, and still awaited ratification. It was, moreover, rather an armistice than a true treaty of peace: it provided for the cessation of hostilities, and for a general amnesty, and it continued in general terms the rights and liberties of Hungary (including Croatia) and of Transylvania; but it reserved discussion of all specific points for a Diet to be convoked in 1712.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the identification at about the same time in Italy of a medium aevum separating the ancient from the contemporary world were in themselves sufficient to account for the subsequent adoption of the Renaissance as a turning point in the history of western society. Bacon claimed further that printing, gunpowder and the magnet ‘have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world’. The political historians of the nineteenth century, led by Ranke, saw in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the emergence of phenomena regarded as characteristically ‘modern’, nation-states, bureaucracy, secular values in public policy, and a balance of power. On top of that came the acceptance in Europe at large of the views of Burckhardt on the civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. First published in 1860, Burckhardt's analysis gave aesthetic and psychological conviction to the same attitude: the cultural achievements at this time of the Italians form the pattern of western values in the centuries to come. By 1900 the current view of the break between modern and medieval had hardened into a pedagogical dogma, and historians in each western nation had found a convenient date round which to manipulate the universally accepted categories. For France the invasion of Italy (1494), for Spain the union of the Crowns (1479), for England the establishment of the Tudors (1485), for Germany the accession of Charles V (1519) were plausible and readily accepted lines of demarcation.

The discoveries of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were remarkable, among other peculiarities, for the way in which geographical scholarship burst the bonds of nationalism in a strongly nationalistic age. The explorer was in almost the same class as the mercenary soldier, the painter, the sculptor or the goldsmith of that period. His approach to his problems and his technical skill were moulded by his national background; but they were at the disposal of whichever prince or country would pay for them. The Cabots were Venetians in the service of the English king; Columbus the Genoese would have served the same king most willingly, or the French or the Portuguese, instead of the queen of Castile; Verezzano the Florentine carried the French flag to the mainland of America; Magellan the Portuguese sailed in the service of Spain. In a slightly later period Henry Hudson the Londoner set out from Amsterdam in the service of the Dutch East India Company on his voyage of 1608, while later still the English Hudson's Bay Company owed its origins to the persistence and the experience of two French Canadians, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseillers, and Pierre Esprit Radisson.

These men drew on a common fund of cartographical knowledge and of geographical surmise. There was much that was cosmopolitan, even if it was not international, in the ‘Period of Discovery’. But cosmopolitan as the scientific and navigational skills might be, the direction to which they submitted and the finance to which they owed their successes, were markedly nationalistic.

Between 1640 and 1786 four generations of Hohenzollern rulers transformed Prussia from a collection of scattered and loosely combined provinces into a European Power. The labours of Ranke, and of the German scholars who continued his work in the Prussian State archives, particularly Schmoller, Hintze and Hartung, have left us in little doubt as to ‘how things really were’ in the field of internal administration in this century and a half, and the evidence can readily be checked in the well-edited volumes of the Acta Borussica. About the personalities of the Great Elector, King Frederick William I and Frederick the Great, and their claims to the admiration and imitation of later generations, the views expressed by historians have naturally been as various as their political backgrounds and ethical convictions, but it is generally agreed that among the presuppositions governing the actions of these monarchs three were never questioned: that kingship is a sacred trust, that authoritarianism is the only rational form of government and that its primary aim is the increase of the power of the State. ‘The happiness of the king's subjects does indeed appear alongside power [in the political testament of Frederick the Great], but the spirit which governs the whole system is that of power politics, not welfare legislation.’

To appreciate the achievements of the Prussian rulers we must remember what they started from in 1713. Brandenburg-Prussia was then one of the many composite ‘territories’ which, along with many smaller and some very small States, went to make up the ramshackle Holy Roman Empire.

A study of the Old Regime might reasonably be expected to go back as far as 1648 and continue to 1789. The choice of 1713 and 1763 as the limits of the period at once stresses the importance of military, diplomatic and political considerations. But in addition to international diplomacy and domestic politics, which show the emergence of Prussia and Russia in central Europe and the increasing rivalry of France and England in the West and on the high seas, the present study makes an attempt to tell this story in the context of the appropriate economic conditions, governmental institutions, social structure and prevailing ideas, even though these may have developed before 1713 and persisted after 1763

The half-century before 1760 showed an increase in the volume of international trade which might be described as revolutionary: it also showed a change in the relative importance of the chief trading nations (ch. II). The increase in trade already owed something to technological progress, but the chief reason for the spectacular increase in the volume of international trade in the first half of the eighteenth century was the rapid expansion of trade between countries in Europe and settlements in America, Africa and Asia. The re-export of colonial products came to be a very valuable part of the trade of England, France and Holland: it was an essential part of the economic life of Spain and Portugal. The Atlantic trade, especially that with the islands of the Caribbean, was greatly prized in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it naturally became a chronic cause of friction between the four European Powers with colonial possessions in that area.

In a changing world, France, at the close of the fifteenth century, found herself faced with problems different from those of the past. These were to force her governments to take the necessary measures to adapt their policy and were to have repercussions throughout society. The Hundred Years War, whose outcome assured France of national independence, had already freed her from threats arising from the existence of a Flemish-Burgundian state. After the war, the kingdom, which had been partly reconstructed in the reign of Louis XI, had to shape a course for its policy among the new nations that were being established, to put the State into working order at a time when its functions remained ill-defined, to work out a definitive status for the Church, which was still shaken by the upheavals of the Great Schism, and to restore its economy, on which the fate of the various social classes depended.

Louis XI's political mistakes had been offset by a sometimes incoherent capacity for action and by almost miraculous strokes of chance. He was succeeded by kings of feeble intellect whose enterprises were inspired by foolish ambitions and who were bound to be mastered by the most skilful of their rivals. Except in rare cases, moreover, there was no statesman at the French court capable of taking over the reins of government. Such were the conditions under which French policy, already jeopardised by the mistakes made by Louis XI, was about to move in a direction which influenced the future of Europe for years to come.

Sultan Mehemmed II (1451–81) had striven throughout his reign to realise one dominant aim: the consolidation of the Ottoman State. In 1453 he had conquered Constantinople which, impoverished and greatly depopulated during the last years of Greek rule, was to become once more, under his guidance, the proud capital of an empire. The sultan repaired the ancient walls and peopled the empty spaces of the city with groups of Muslims, Christians and Jews taken from all parts of his realm. Public buildings were erected, like the great mosque which he founded, with its baths and hospital, its accommodation for travellers, and its colleges where students were trained in the law of Islam. Constantinople was transformed into Istanbul, an imperial city which, reflecting in itself the rich and complex character of the Ottoman State, bound together the provinces of Anatolia and the Balkan lands as Adrianople, the former capital of the empire, could not do.

Consolidation was also the objective behind the ceaseless campaigns of the sultan. In 1459 the last remnants of independent Serbia were converted into the Ottoman frontier province of Semendria, the strong bridgehead of Belgrade, besieged in vain by Mehemmed in 1456, being left however to the Hungarians. Bosnia was overrun in 1463–4. The Bosnian aristocracy largely embraced Islam and played henceforth a great role in the defence of the frontier and in the attacks launched against Hungary and Austria. In Greece, the principality of Athens, held by a Florentine family, the Acciaiuoli, and the Greek Despotate of the Morea, ruled by the Palaeologi, were subjugated in 1458–60; while in the Aegean Sea the islands of Thasos and Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos were taken over in 1455–6, and Lesbos in 1462.

The settlement of Spanish America began with Columbus's second voyage. The first voyage had been a successful reconnaissance, carefully planned and ably executed. Making, by good fortune, the best of the North Atlantic wind system, Columbus had sailed from the Canaries to the Bahamas before the north-east trades, and back to the Azores in the zone of the westerly winds of winter. He had discovered the two largest islands of the Antilles, Cuba and Hispaniola. He claimed, and believed until his death, that he had found islands lying off the coast of eastern Asia, and possibly part of the mainland too. We cannot be sure whether these claims agreed with Columbus's original intentions and promises, nor whether Ferdinand and Isabella entirely accepted them—some intelligent contemporaries certainly did not. But beyond doubt Columbus had discovered an extensive archipelago of hitherto unknown islands which yielded some gold and were inhabited by a peaceful and tractable, though extremely primitive, people. Whether these islands were really within striking distance of the settled parts of Asia remained to be seen; but they were certainly worth careful investigation.

The first voyage, though successful, had been expensive. Columbus had lost his flagship and had been compelled to leave half his men behind in Hispaniola to face an uncertain fate. The plunder he had secured was negligible in proportion to the cost of the enterprise. It was now essential to follow up the discovery and to produce a return on the investment.

The economic activity of Europe in the Far East (excluding India) in the eighteenth century was mainly concentrated in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where the European nations had established their trading centres. Japan had withdrawn herself into almost complete seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogans since the fourth decade of the preceding century and was to remain thus isolated until the appearance of Commodore Perry's squadron in 1853. Meanwhile her one eye on the external world was the settlement of Deshima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, not more than 300 paces at its greatest extent, on which a few Dutch merchants lived a life of abject indignity, and which was the only channel of foreign trade. Therefore in this chapter it is in Canton, Batavia, Manila and their environs that our interest chiefly lies. One fact, at least, is common to these diverse areas of economic activity, and that is the independence of the natives of European manufactures and their indifference thereto at this period in their history.