Superficially, the peninsula of Italy is a unity, bounded by sea and mountain. A closer look at the map reveals an agglomeration of regions, rather than a geographic whole; its structure is dominated by the Apennine chain and the great contrast between north and south. In the eighteenth century, its diversity was very great. Italy contained societies almost isolated one from another and shaped by climate and topography into startlingly different forms. The rich Po valley had little in common with the semi-desert of the Apulian Capitanata; the Legations were rich while the papal territories west of the Apennines were poor. Potenza is sixty miles from Salerno but has one of the coldest climates in Italy. The lives of Italians varied as much as their landscape and climate; at a time when Arthur Young found the farms around Lodi fat and prosperous, men were living in caves near Otranto. Even language helped to divide the peninsula. Twenty-odd dialects made it uncertain that a man speaking Italian—the speech of Tuscany—would be understood in the countryside. Nor were these differences blurred by eighteenth-century communications. The one good road in the kingdom of Naples led out of it, to Rome. In some parts, the towns were barely linked to one another; they often represented yet other divisions, historical and political, which had broken up the peninsula still more. There were more great cities than in other countries but no metropolis drew the cultural life of Italy to a focus.

By the end of its existence the ancien régime had reached the limit of its powers in military no less than in other spheres. The size of armies and the scale of warfare had greatly increased, but there was a fatal clumsiness in the means by which this was achieved and the uses to which the expanded resources were put. The rigid line formation adopted to get the best out of mediocre weapons and troops made it hard to concentrate force for a telling blow at key points on the front. The large armies with their ponderous supply-trains could only move slowly and were not readily able to force an engagement on an inferior opponent. Consequently battles were either evaded by the weaker side or failed to be decisive. Wars dragged on without result until the huge expense which their expanded scale involved led the combatants to desist. From this impasse only an occasional stroke of luck or genius afforded escape.

Between 1763 and 1792 there was little fighting on land between the major European powers. In this breathing space, means were devised of making decisive victory the normal, instead of the exceptional, outcome of a major war. The new military thinking was an integral part of the general movement of criticism of established institutions; inspired by the same ideas, it triumphed only when the general cause of reform did so.

In the generation between the Revolutions of 1793 and 1830, the community of science and technology outgrew the posture of the Enlightenment and assumed the stance of the nineteenth century. The old rationale of Condillac and the associationist psychology developed into that of Comte and positivism, which would know in order to predict and predict in order to control. Condorcet, last of the philosophes, left the testament of the eighteenth century to appear in 1795 after his death—Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. In that moving little book, science figures as the bearer of progress. It is the instrument which educates the human understanding in the order of nature. But the revolutionary generation was more messianic than naturalistic, and it transmuted this benign educational mission into something closer to engineering—civil engineering, social engineering, and perhaps the engineering of humanity itself. The Encyclopedists had already prided themselves on freeing science from metaphysics. Now the positivists would consummate the emancipation by liberating science even from ontology and, indeed, from every pretence to lay hold on a reality beyond observation, experience and act. Comte wished to abandon absolute in favour of relative statements. And for this reason, he looked to human history rather than to some outer reality as the repository of experience. In his philosophy, rationalism turned attention to historical thinking, which had hitherto been the resort of romantics hostile to exact science. Man in history replaced matter in motion as the natural process par excellence, and science, rising in history, served it also as dynamic motor, the factor which made all the difference between one age and another, and which, graduating into knowledge of its own methods, held the promise of regeneration.

Public opinion first became a major force in Europe in the period of the French Revolution and of the Restoration. First of all the revolutionaries carried their gospel all over Europe. Later the opponents of French hegemony carried on the war against Napoleon through the press as well as on the battlefield. When peace returned again to Europe in 1814–15 the traditional rulers found that the tempest could not be stilled. Through the press and through the societies open and secret the struggle between the old and the new worlds went on. The old world was powerful and resourceful, but it could never strangle the demon of change. The ferment was European. Philhellenism, which appealed to the classical background of educated Europeans, aimed at aiding the Greek patriots; it also aroused the question why the fight against the oppressor should be limited to the shores of the Aegean. Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association won the vote for Catholic Ireland from Protestant England; it was admired and copied by Catholic Belgium for use against Protestant Holland. The press became more and more the vehicle of political and of economic change, and the chief means of expression of a middle class avid for political and for economic power.

As opinion in all European countries grew more confident and more vocal, so did the activity of government in controlling it increase. Napoleon saw the importance of this; so did Metternich. Even in liberal countries like England and Restoration France governments showed great activity. For if this was the period of revolution and of the clamant popular will, it was also the period of growing state power.

The ‘Near East’ is a term sometimes used to denote only the Islamic lands between the Mediterranean and the variously defined countries of the ‘Middle East’. In this chapter it is used to cover all the coastlands of the eastern Mediterranean—roughly, what was known, a century and a half ago, as the Levant; and any survey of changes in European relations with these lands must include some reference to other parts of the Ottoman Empire and its immediate neighbours in Asia. The fortunes of this decaying but still tough-cored Empire were so closely linked in every part that it is difficult to separate the affairs of Egypt sharply from those of Greece, the Balkans and the lower Danube, or from those of Turkey in Asia. Penetrating all these regions were the commercial and strategical activities of the European powers—of the French and English mainly through maritime interests in the Mediterranean, of the Austrians and Russians chiefly on the landward fringes of Turkey, but with many overlapping contacts and rivalries in each direction. Finally, arising out of this penetration (perhaps even inspiring some of it) and in turn accelerating it, was the influence, both dissolving and reviving, of the technique, habits and ideas of contemporary Europeans upon the older ways of life throughout the Near East.

In this gradual process, the differences between the nations of Europe were much less important, in relation to Islam, than were their similarities. In spite of their rivalries or open enmities, the embassies at Constantinople had more in common with each other than with the intricate maze of officials at the Porte; the western consuls and merchants, there and at Smyrna, were still all ‘Franks’ in the eyes of Turkish pashas and even of Greek and Armenian traders; to the Mameluke beys of Egypt around 1800, the French and British armies were simply alternative brands of the same totally foreign medicine.

Between the Peace of Paris 1763 and the outbreak, thirty years later, of the war of the first European coalition against revolutionary France, the outlines of a Western civilisation which was recognisably ‘modern’ in most of its characteristic attitudes and attributes rapidly emerged. A civil war between the English colonists in North America and the imperial government at Westminster, unparalleled industrial and commercial expansion in Britain, radical social and political reforms in France and a steady but uneven increase in population imposed on the western world a momentum of revolutionary change which has never since slackened. On a comparatively minor scale, but with results which helped to determine the trend towards greater social and political equality at this period, there occurred in western Europe another series of revolutions—such as the struggles in the small city republic of Geneva between 1768 and 1789 for the political and economic emancipation of the middle-class représentants and the socially inferior and unprivileged natifs, the Dutch ‘patriotic’ movement of 1784–7 and the schismatic revolt of the Belgian democrats in the Austrian Netherlands between 1789 and 1792. Even in conservative England the radicalism inherent in the ambivalent Whig creed received a fresh emphasis in the county ‘association’ movement of 1779–80 in favour of parliamentary reform and the agitation in 1787–90 for the relief of the Protestant Dissenters from their civic disabilities under the Test and Corporation Acts. The closer study of these radical movements and of their connections with the American and French revolutions has led some historians to see in this period a pattern of radical reform and revolutionary change common to many parts of the western world.

The defeat and abdication of Napoleon did not automatically mean the restoration of the Bourbons. That solution had secured the more or less reluctant consent of those who could have any influence on the decisions–that is to say, the Allies on the one hand and on the other the leading figures in the government of the Empire, represented by the Senate and by the provisional government over which Talleyrand presided. But, even after that, the exact nature of the future regime was still undecided. Monarchy, no doubt, but what brand of monarchy? The pre-1789 monarchy, with the king ruling by divine right, his good pleasure limited only by his own conscience and by the traditional privileges of the various groups and collective bodies of State? Or the 1791 monarchy, the king ruling only with the authority delegated by the nation and as the nation's principal servant, by virtue of a contract freely entered into by both parties?

The senatorial party, including as it did the surviving members of the revolutionary assemblies, clearly hoped to secure the triumph of the second solution. They had the support of Tsar Alexander of Russia, who had announced his intention of securing a regime in France corresponding to the enlightened spirit of the age. The very day the emperor abdicated, the Senate adopted a constitution in conformity with the principle of popular sovereignty. It was stated therein that the late king's brother was freely called to the throne, and might reign only after swearing to observe this constitution.

At Valmy, on 20 September 1792, the first of the many victories of the armies of the Revolution marked for Europe the start of a twenty-year war, only interrupted from 1802 to 1804 by two years of precarious peace. For France, this meant the beginning of a new regime—the Republic. Democratic at first, then middle-class and, later, Consular, it finally turned into a military dictatorship which, from 1804, adopted the name of Empire. This new regime sprang from the big social, economic and administrative changes which had occurred since 1789. The democratic republic, in 1793 and 1794, tried to fulfil the ambitions of the Revolution by combining economic equality with the equality of civic rights that had been secured in 1789. In so doing, it was to give the world an example which would inspire future socialism. But these ideals were to be short-lived. The bourgeois republic, like the military dictatorship, was to be content with consolidating the achievements of 1789, now firmly established even against the reaction of 1814.

No doubt the administrative and social achievement of 1789–92, and the socialist experiments too, would have taken shape differently if France had not been in an almost permanent state of war which dominated internal policy during the next twenty-two years. The war, and the dangers to which France was exposed by repeated defeats during the first five months of the struggle (April to September 1792), developed in the people an exalted patriotism along with the fear of enemy invasion and of seignorial reaction.

In the generation before the French Revolution the two Scandinavian kingdoms and their appendages—except for Iceland, whose population fell to 40,000 after the great volcanic eruption of 1783—continued to enjoy the relative calm and prosperity which had followed the end of the Great Northern War in 1721. Copenhagen flourished as the political and economic capital of the ‘twin kingdoms’ of Denmark and Norway, with the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein loosely but (after 1773) completely attached to the Danish crown. Stockholm, though overshadowed by St Petersburg, was still the centre of what was probably the foremost second-class power of Europe, one which stretched eastwards across the Grand Duchy of Finland and retained a lodgment on the south shore of the Baltic, Pomerania west of the River Peene, together with the island of Rügen.

Since the death of Charles XII of Sweden neither of the Scandinavian powers had been strong enough to conduct an independent foreign policy of much importance to the rest of Europe, but they were regarded as useful assets in any major combination. Thus Catherine the Great in March 1765 concluded an alliance with Denmark which was not seriously interrupted for more than forty years, one of its original purposes being the maintenance of the free constitution of Sweden, the form of government by the four Estates which gave free play to party politics and foreign subsidies. For ten years (1762–72) Catherine held Sweden too within her ‘northern system’, a position in which the Swedes could continue good relations with Britain but not with France.

‘Go calmly and look English.’ Bagehot's formula for immunity in Parisian insurrections might well serve as a guide to his countrymen who study the historiography of the French Revolution, for party strife and inherited prejudices have branded their mark upon most French histories of the Revolution, so that the Anglo-Saxon student automatically enjoys the advantage of comparative detachment. Yet it is dangerous to presume upon this immunity and overemphasise the relationship between the disagreements of French historians and their particular political prejudices. A good deal depends on what we choose to include in our definition of ‘historical writing’. If, on the one hand, we consider all the journalism which offers interpretations of the Revolution, or, on the other, confine ourselves to comparing the broad conclusions of general histories a close correlation with contemporary politics is bound to emerge, as surely as the cup from Benjamin's sack. By either of these methods, and indeed, by the mere concentration upon developing interpretations (which are the necessary themes of any historiographical study), a mass of research, opinion on details, and narrative slips through our net. The main corpus of real historical writing is useful to everybody. ‘Progressive’ historians remain indebted to the vast collections of information made by ‘reactionaries’ like Mortimer-Ternaux, Wallon and Lenôtre; Gaxotte's attack on the Revolution leans heavily on Mathiez's labyrinthine investigation of the underworld of corruption.

But the problem is still not solved by admitting that there exists a wide no-man's-land of ‘fact’. The strong personal opinions of an historian are not just his ‘bias’, to be discounted; very often they also constitute the essential groundwork of his originality and insight.

There was a revolutionary era at the close of the eighteenth century somewhat as there had been an era of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth. In neither period did the same things happen in all countries. Everywhere, in the sixteenth century, there had been dissatisfaction at conditions in the church, but only certain places turned Protestant, each in its own way, Lutheran, Anglican or Calvinist, with no acceptance even of the common designation of Protestant until long after the event; some Protestant regions went back to Catholicism, and in the end most Europeans remained in the Roman church. Similarly, in the revolutionary era, by which the last third of the eighteenth century is to be understood, there was a widespread dissatisfaction at conditions in government and society. There were similar ideas in many countries on the direction of desirable change. The same vocabulary of political key words appeared in all European languages: ‘aristocracy’ and ‘feudalism’ acquired a bad sense for those who favoured a new order, for whom ‘sovereignty of the people’, ‘equality’ and ‘natural rights’ had a good sense, with a few terms, such as ‘constitution’, ‘law’ and ‘liberty’ favoured by all, though with different meanings. But only in two countries, the British American colonies and France, did revolution reach the point of permanently destroying the older authorities. Only in France did the revolution make social changes of the deepest kind. Only the French made a successful revolution entirely by their own efforts, since even the American Revolution owed its decisive outcome to French intervention.

Virtually all the changes and adjustments in educational thought and practice during the period of the revolutions sprang from the intellectual foundations of the Age of Reason which was just drawing to a close. Notions about the practice and content of teaching were highly articulate, even if they sometimes smelt more of the salon than the schoolroom. It was during these years that the discussion of education became conscious of its central place in all thinking about what d'Alembert referred to as ‘our minds, our customs and our achievements’. But to hold that the developments in educational thought were linked to one or two of the major themes of the Enlightenment would be to oversimplify the issues. Perhaps no one was in a better position to appreciate the range covered by the intellectual stimuli than Victor Cousin, who made contact with the thought of the Idéologues in the newly opened École Normale in Paris under the Empire, then made contact with transcendentalism in the German universities, and lived on to promote the reconstruction of French elementary education in the quite different philosophical atmosphere in which planning was accomplished under the Orleans monarchy. The eighteenth century, he remarked, had submitted everything to critical examination. This was the period that ‘made of education at first a problem, then a science, finally an art; hence pedagogy’. Pedagogy, he was prepared to concede, was a ridiculous word, but the thing itself was sacred, and its full flowering as a subject of scientific import had been accomplished in the age of revolution.

Confronted with the problem of regenerating society in decline, Iberian liberalism professed two conflicting ideals: reform by an enlightened minority within the traditional constitution, and radical revolution, deriving its political theory from the sovereignty of the people. The origins of these programmes must be sought in the later eighteenth century, when foreign influences were grafted on to the traditions of earlier diagnosticians of decline. The Iberian Enlightenment, although it revivified intellectual life, was, by European standards, a derivative and second-rate affair: its significance lies in its influence on the reforming civil servants who controlled the Spanish monarchy in the later years of Charles III; whether they drew on outmoded mercantilism, on more modern physiocratic influences or, later, on the ideas of Adam Smith, they were committed to the proposition that civil society was not an unalterable, sacrosanct structure, but susceptible of rational improvement by legislation based on political economy. Since their aim was the increased prosperity of the state, their emphasis was on useful arts, practical reform, and the elimination of useless classes, useless scholastic education and economically harmful charity. Compared with the Spanish reformers, Pombal's tightening of effective state control in the interests of increased revenue, effected by the exertions of an over-worked sole minister, was an old-fashioned programme, inspired by Colbert. Nevertheless, to the Portuguese liberals this suspicious autocrat became the picture of the enlightened reformer.

The reform programme was to be spread all over Spain by government-sponsored Patriotic Societies. Their activities were often puerile, a naive parade of scraps of scientific knowledge picked up in foreign journals. Nevertheless, these government servants and their local supporters staked out a programme: the recasting of university education on lines inspired by the regalian claims of the state; the promotion of public works, by which some provincial capitals were transformed; a network of roads from Madrid; the rationalisation of administrative divisions and the removal of obstructions to efficient government caused by municipal sloth and corruption and by provincial privilege. Apart from a few deists they were not heterodox, least of all were they revolutionaries.

By the later eighteenth century, Europeans were looking at Africa with new expectations and hopes. Malachy Postlethwayt, citing Leo Africanus, claimed that the continent and its peoples could produce not merely precious metals but ‘all the richest articles of the East and West India commerce’; ‘if once a turn for industry and the arts was introduced among them, a greater quantity of the European produce and manufactures might be exported thither than to any other country in the whole world’. Merchants and manufacturers seeking new markets, statesmen whose colonial systems had been damaged in war, dreamed similar dreams; and, in this period, some took tentative steps to discover what substance might lie behind them.

The primary need, if speculations based on Leo Africanus were to give way to credit-worthy enterprises, was for precise geographical knowledge. The aspiration to extend trade powerfully reinforced the interest which students of the developing natural sciences showed in Africa, as in other unexplored regions. Inspired by Linnaeus, many Swedish botanists made modest journeys into unfamiliar country, noting, like Sparrmann at the Cape, what economic potentialities the land seemed to hold, together with much miscellaneous sociological detail. Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and sponsor of botanical studies at Kew, also encouraged botanical collectors in Africa; among his correspondents was James Bruce, whose observations during his journeys in Abyssinia (1768–73) were inspired by a widely ranging scientific curiosity.

The Low Countries did not remain unperturbed by the political unrest which affected Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Both halves of them were involved in the 1780's in reform movements, some aspects of which were forerunners of the French revolutionary ideas.

Dutch intervention in the American War of Independence (1780–4) had only brought the United Provinces economic losses and a feeling of impotence. The naval reverses they suffered were imputed to the stadholder William V's neglect, and gave new impetus to the opposition against the hereditary stadholderate, restored in 1747. At the same time, certain quarters, inspired by the ideology of Enlightenment, criticised also with increased vigour the inefficiency of the selfish urban oligarchies, upon which the whole system of provincial and federal representative assemblies was based, and demanded actual elections by the substantial citizens instead of de facto cooption of magistrates. Thus, at the very beginning, the ‘Patriot’ movement was split into two wings: a conservative one whose sole aim it was to count the stadholder out and revest the plenitude of authority in the patrician oligarchy, and a democratic one which intended a limited progressive reform of power. The latter was the more active. It even organised militias to resist, if need be, the stadholder's standing troops. The Conservatives used them at first for their own purpose as a pressure group against the stadholder. However, their unnatural alliance could not last. It broke down after the Democrats had seized power in Utrecht in 1785 and increased elsewhere their influence so as to counterbalance the Conservatives.

By the last decade of the eighteenth century, a national consciousness had developed among educated people in Germany, ‘unsought and as if by accident,’ as Meinecke says, owing to the recent outstanding achievements of German poets and thinkers, but it was a cultural, not a political, nation to which this small minority of the population felt itself to belong. As Goethe and Schiller expressed the feeling of the intellectuals in their satirical Xenien (1796):

In the century just drawing to a close, the two outstanding features in the history of Germany outside the Habsburg territories had been the establishment by Frederick William I and Frederick the Great of Brandenburg-Prussia as a centre of political power of European importance, and the creation by a number of writers, mostly residing outside Prussia, of a body of literature and philosophy that already made nonsense of the earlier French assertion that no German could be a man of wit, and that was to gain for Germany, after the inevitable time lag, a position of intellectual leadership in Europe. The way in which these two new factors in German history, in origin almost entirely separate, now helped and now hindered each other's further growth, and in which the ruling classes, in general obstinately conservative, reacted under these and other influences to the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, must be the main topics in any account of German constitutional and social history between the Peace of Bale (1795) and the French Revolution of July 1830.

In 1763 Spain emerged from the Seven Years War a weaker and a wiser power. It was now clear to Charles III and his ministers that there was no short-cut to strength and security, and that the survival of Spain as a colonial power and her recovery of status in Europe depended on her own political and economic resources, the decline of which the earlier Bourbons had done something to arrest but little to reverse. Already be-fore his accession to the throne of Spain in 1759 Charles III had displayed his reforming ideas as duke of Parma and king of Naples and had declared his intention of leading Spain back to greatness. He had considerable qualifications for the task. In spite of his own limited intelligence—seen perhaps in his childish obsession with hunting—he impressed foreign observers and his own subjects with his seriousness and application to business. His religious devotion was accompanied by a sober personal life and a chaste loyalty to the memory of his wife, María Amalia of Saxony, who died soon after their accession to the Spanish throne. He was highly conscious of his own sovereignty, and his absolutist views can be seen in the advice which he gave to his son: ‘Anyone who criticises the actions of the government, even though they are not good, commits a crime.’ Above all, however, he showed his talent for government in his ministerial appointments: he chose his advisers not from the aristocracy, who were politically inept, nor, as is sometimes alleged, from the middle classes, who were not yet a recognisable force in Spain, but from a group of university-trained lawyers among the lower ranks of the nobility, who were devoted to absolute monarchy and whose minds were open to the practical applications of the Enlightenment.