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.

In the history of the events which changed the face of Europe around 1500, we must distinguish two interlocking developments. Besides the cultural transformation from which the term ‘Renaissance’ has been borrowed to describe the whole period, there was the emergence of the states-system of modern Europe. During the last decades of the fifteenth century, England, France, and Spain, after long and complex preparation, had attained national unification under strong monarchies. In addition, a bilingual state had grown up in the rich border-lands of France and Germany—the State of the dukes of Burgundy. Since France, with an estimated fifteen million inhabitants, was potentially far superior to any of her competitors and, indeed, represented a type of Great Power not yet realised elsewhere (there were only about three million inhabitants in England, six million in Spain, and hardly more than six million in the State of Burgundy with the inclusion of industrial Artois, Flanders, and Brabant), France's neighbour-states of necessity combined their resources. The German empire, France's only equal in population, could not serve as a piece on the new European chess-board because it was a loose federation of territorial states and half-independent cities under the Habs-burgs, who had little power as German emperors. In its Austrian and Alpine dominions, however, this house possessed the largest and strongest of the territorial states, and so the anti-French counterpoise was built upon a system of princely marriage alliances, first (1477) between Habsburg and Burgundy, and subsequently (1496) between Habsburg-Burgundy and Spain.

The so-called Saxon period of Polish history, from 1697 to 1763, was after 1717 one of uneasy peace, illusory prosperity and bad leadership, an era of decline during which Poland degenerated into Sarmatia—an earthly paradise for a minority of its inhabitants and a wild benighted squirearchy in the eyes of the outside world. The term ‘Gentry Democracy’ (demokracja szlachecka), sometimes used to describe Poland's Constitution between 1572 and the second half of the eighteenth century, is a complacent and self-contradictory misnomer, especially when applied to the years 1697–1763. This system at the best of times had never been a democracy but an aristocracy disguised as an elective monarchy which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, assumed the form of oligarchy and, in the first half of the eighteenth century, sank to the level of anarchy.

One of the principal defects and a distinctive feature of the Saxon period was the constant and fruitless attempt on the part of the leading families in the land to seize power for themselves. Their failure and the Crown's inability to subdue its enemies and enforce its own authority prolonged the struggle, absorbed the energy of the parties and finally brought the machinery of government to a standstill.

In the initial stages of the development of the Polish Republic, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the szlachta, although an aristocracy in relation to the country as a whole, enjoyed equality within their own class. By the beginning of the Saxon period, however, the szlachta were freer than ever but no longer equal.

Within twenty years of Charles VIII's invasion, Italians had begun to speak regretfully of the happy days which preceded the coming of the French. They looked back on the years before 1494 as an age of peace and prosperity, when endless opportunities were open to men of talent, and when life in court and city was marked by a round of novel and refined pleasures. Their view of the past was nostalgic, yet the second half of the fifteenth century may rightly be considered the heyday of Italian civilisation. During the forty years which lay between the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the French invasion, the rulers of Italy had done much to establish peace and order within their dominions and friendly relations with their neighbours. Quarrels between the various states were of less significance than the common interests which united them. Petty wars did not place serious hindrances in the way of the pursuit of wealth or the cultivation of the arts. Although the challenge to Italy's commercial supremacy was already formidable, the merchants had money to spend on pictures, books and building, whilst the princes used their earnings as mercenary captains to make their capitals centres of the art and learning of the Renaissance. The individual contribution to civilisation made by each state at a time when it was still independent and at peace bore fruit in the splendours of the early sixteenth century. A reverse side of the picture is the growing interest shown by foreign Powers in Italian affairs.

The mid-eighteenth century was a period when much thought was devoted to the nature of government. Probably the best known of the commentators was Montesquieu, who produced his De l'esprit des his in 1748; but the same kind of problem occupied many other writers, including Bielfeld, who produced his Institutions politiques between 1759 and 1774, d'Argenson, who wrote his Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France in 1765, and F. K. von Moser who discussed the duties of a prince in his Der Herr und der Diener in 1759. Yet the problems which interested these contemporaries are not always those which seem most important to later observers, who have to consider the political and administrative developments which have taken place in Europe since 1789. To the modern observer the most characteristic features of the governmental institutions of the period 1713-65 are the very general acceptance of more or less absolute monarchy, the increasing administrative specialisation at the centre and the increasing effectiveness of governmental control in the provinces.

The inspiration behind the very generally held eighteenth-century idea of monarchy was still the belief that kings ruled by a right derived from God himself. This view had found expression in the sixteenth century, when Bodin had described the king as the image of God on earth, and in the seventeenth century, when the Parlement of Paris assured Louis XIV that the seat of His Majesty represented the throne of the living God, and that the orders of the kingdom rendered honour and respect to him as to a living divinity, or when Bossuet had declared that princes were sanctified by their charge as being representatives of the divine majesty appointed by Providence to carry out its purposes. It was still familiar and acceptable in most of Europe until 1789. Even the Encyclopédistes, though they did not hesitate to question the authority of the Church, did not, for the most part, criticise the excellence of monarchy as a form of government.

One problem of government which much interested politically-minded observers of the early eighteenth century was posed by England. In Sweden the elected Diet had, since 1718, made good its claim to control the king, but Sweden had thereafter declined as a Power. Poland, where the Diet could block any unpopular royal policy, was a by-word for weakness and anarchy, but England, though the parliament shared the government with the king, was steadily increasing in wealth and prestige. At the end of the seventeenth century the English were not regarded as models of political wisdom, yet these turbulent and seditious people had proved themselves the most formidable opponents of Louis XIV, were fast becoming the world's greatest colonial Power, increased yearly in wealth and nourished such geniuses as Locke and Newton. Locke's Essay concerning Humane Understanding, published in 1690 and immediately translated into French, had a formative influence upon the thought of a generation which hovered between traditional Christian metaphysic and the outright scepticism of Bayle; Newton's European reputation was achieved more slowly, but at no distant time he would be hailed as the prophet who had revealed the harmony of rational law behind the mysterious and chaotic face of nature. The time could not be long delayed when men would ask whether there might not be some link between these achievements and the political institutions of the country which produced them. In a more superficial way curiosity was stimulated by the influence of British party politics upon European affairs during the War of the Spanish Succession, and by the arrival, after 1714, of a new crop of Jacobite exiles who had, nevertheless, accepted the principles of limited monarchy.