Three main developments may be seen in Europe's relations with Asia during this period—the rise of the English East India Company as one of the strongest governments in India, the expansion of English trade further east, and the widening and deepening of European knowledge of Asia. In the struggle for power that followed the disintegration of the Mughal empire the English company emerged as the ruler of the rich and fertile provinces of Bengal and Bihar and succeeded not only in excluding the French from effective participation in Indian politics but also in meeting the challenge of its chief rivals, the Marathas and Mysore. The company was now an Indian power, ruling those provinces on behalf of the Mughal emperor and reforming the administrative system that it found there. If its reforms had the effect of excluding Indians from high office, they also gave rise to a class of Indian landholders endowed with property rights and loyal to its rule. Indian investors were among the purchasers of its bonds to finance its campaigns against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Indian goods were exported not only to Europe but also in the expansion of British trade to the eastern seas, past Dutch opposition, and to China, thus helping to pay for its rapidly growing tea exports to Europe. Although it was disappointed in its expectations of the profits of empire in India and had to seek the home government's help and submit to a measure of control, the profits of its China trade came to over-shadow its losses elsewhere and it was saved from extinction.

As Napoleon's fortunes declined, those of his enemies rose; and a coalition, destined to be finally victorious, began to emerge in the chaotic winter of 1812–13. While remnants of the Grande Armée stumbled westward out of Russia, Tsar Alexander I decided to pursue Napoleon beyond Russian soil and out across Europe, seeking allies as Russian arms advanced. Prussia became the first by the Treaty of Kalisch of February 1813, which provided for obvious war needs, and promised to restore Prussia to her former proportions. Austria was slower in responding to Russian advances, but Great Britain signed treaties of alliance and subsidy with both Prussia and Russia at Reichenbach in June. Following a fruitless armistice and a singularly barren ‘peace’ conference at Prague they resumed the struggle against Napoleon in August, this tune in the Germanies and with Austria finally in the coalition. After several secondary engagements, the battle of Leipzig, 16–18 October 1813, demonstrated the impressive power of the coalition by smashing Napoleon's position in Central Europe. His last German allies deserted him, and his army of nearly 200,000 was utterly routed, two-thirds of it killed, wounded, sick or captured. Before the end of the year the French had been confined to territory west of the Rhine for the first time since their eruption in 1805.

The autumn of 1813, so successful in allied military affairs, was a singularly frustrating period for Britain's foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh. Although his country had been constantly and actively in opposition to Napoleon for years, although she had driven the enemy from Spain, rendered his fleet useless and financed the coalition, scant attention was paid to her counsels by remote allies preoccupied with Napoleon in Central Europe.

The later eighteenth century saw the emergence of systematic economic analysis of a sort which was to provide the core of economics for the next century. This analysis was, in the main, conducted in the course of attacking practical problems and prescribing measures of policy. Programmes of economic policy were nothing new: what was new was their number, range and connection with a general view of the working of the economy, and with organised thought as opposed to intuition. There were economic writers of intelligence and penetration earlier in the century— Cantillon and Montesquieu for example—but in quality and range the works of the later decades of the eighteenth century are without precedent.

In France, to take the most conspicuous examples, there was Quesnay's Tableau économique (1758) and the large volume of physiocratic writing, and Turgot's Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (written in 1766); in Spain, Campomanes, Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular (1774), and in Italy, Genovesi's Lezioni di economia civile (1765), and Economia nazionale (1774) by Ortes.

The development of this body of economic thought was due partly to internal developments, to a cumulative increase in intellectual capacity to analyse economic problems, and partly to the appearance of problems of a complexity which required to be dealt with in an analytical fashion. These two influences interacted; intellectual habits predisposed men to frame explanations in general terms at the same time as the problems of practical administration required to be treated in this way.

The period of warfare when it was possible for Gibbon to speak of forces as being employed in ‘temperate and undecisive contests’ came to an end in the era of Nelson and Napoleon. Wars in which decisive victories were won were now fought on an unprecedented scale. Nelson, who embodied the art of the admiral, and Napoleon who embodied that of the general, agreed on the fundamental tactical principle of the concentration of force because under prevailing conditions, as Nelson said, ‘Only numbers can annihilate’. Moreover the tactical freedom which he enjoyed now that the old Fighting Instructions had been replaced by the new signal books (notably Sir Home Popham's Marine Vocabulary) enabled him to improvise brilliantly as he did at the battle of the Nile, or plan with minute care an unusual mode of attack, as at Copenhagen and Trafalgar. His successes were made possible by the high number of officers of unusual ability in the British navy at that date. The fleets which he led to victory had been trained by Lord St Vincent, and his ‘band of brothers’ had already seen service in the War of American Independence. A new spirit of leadership atoned for whatever shortcomings there were in the administrative machine, whereas the efficiency of his enemies was impaired by their lack of combat experience and the consequences of earlier revolutionary excesses.

If sea power under sail may be said to depend on the three factors of an efficient battle fleet, a flourishing merchant marine, and overseas bases from which attacks on colonial possessions could be launched, Britain was in a favourable position at the start of the war.

In the twenty-five years which preceded the outbreak of the French Revolution, the intellectual condition of Europe was one of exceptional complexity. In some of the more backward countries, and also in some of the more backward social strata, old orthodoxies still held sway, such as the belief in the divine right of kings and in the providential character of universal history. Side by side with it there existed a new radicalism which has come to be known as the Enlightenment. It appealed above all to the intelligentsia and to the grande bourgeoisie, but made increasing inroads into the thinking of the other social classes. Its watchwords were: rationality, not tradition; happiness in this life, not salvation for the next. It was this movement, with its insistent demand for the revaluation of all social institutions, which prepared the great cataclysm of 1789. But the most interesting feature of this period is the presence within it of yet a third tendency which was both revolutionary and reactionary at the same time: revolutionary in relation to the old orthodoxies, reactionary in relation to the Enlightenment. The philosophy of the Enlightenment was essentially a rationalistic philosophy, that is to say, it regarded man as, in the first place, a rational animal, and, consistently with this, looked to abstract ratiocination for the answer to all human problems, great and small. But man is more than an animated calculating machine. The very one-sidedness of the philosophes was bound to evoke, sooner or later, a vigorous reaction which was to emphasise the non-rational elements in human nature, the power of sentiment and passion, the glory of the imaginative faculties, and the need to confront, and indeed to accept, the mysteries of existence which surround us on all sides.

Our acquaintance with musical developments in the closing decades of the Age of Enlightenment has come about only gradually and is still far from complete. Haydn and Mozart are among our best known composers, and Haydn was known internationally in his own time. But in spite of the attraction to scholar and layman alike of this great period in musical history a definitive assessment has, so far, not been achieved. This is not true of German literature, which has elicited excellent monographs on the corresponding decades of the eighteenth century. Among these H. A. Korff's Der Geist der Goethezeit makes a conspicuous contribution by stressing the importance of Rousseau and Kant for the work of Herder and Goethe. He would be a churlish musician who would deny the relevance of Goethe's poetics and aesthetics for music, the art which is so peculiarly tied to its own technique. For this reason, Korff's searching quest for the criteria of ‘classicism’, and his attempt to define the term as a uniquely balanced blend of eighteenth-century ‘enlightenment’ and nineteenth-century ‘romanticism’ deserve to be applied to music in extenso.

Of the general histories of music written since the first World War, two deal with the period of the Enlightenment. Ernst Bücken's Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1931) is the relevant volume in the series known as Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, edited by the same author. Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, edited by Guido Adler (2nd ed., 2 vols., 1930) contains several chapters on the eighteenth century, notably Adler's ‘Die Wiener klassische Schule’, Robert Haas’ ‘Die Oper im 18.