When on 16 August 1823 the British Foreign Secretary, with unwonted affability, suggested to the American Minister in London that the two countries might go hand in hand in disapproving French interference with the independence of Spanish America, George Canning was swallowing his distaste for republican principles in deference to the logic of British interests as interpreted by the Liberal Tories. The gesture was motivated both by the problem set by the friends of legitimacy and by a consciousness that British industrialism needed American markets and raw materials. In Washington, President Monroe's first reaction to this proposal was to follow Jefferson and Madison in encouraging a rapprochement with Britain which would benefit American interests in the Atlantic; but the decisive voice was that of the secretary of state. John Quincy Adams ignored Canning's offer and drafted that independent declaration warning the European Powers off the Western Hemisphere which the world came to know as the Monroe Doctrine.

And the Message went on to explain:

The conclusion of the Seven Years War inaugurated a period of recovery and reform in many German states. Large areas of central Europe—Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, the Rhinelands—had suffered severely through devastations, looting, requisitions and heavy impositions. Everywhere extraordinary war-taxation had brought about a state of economic exhaustion. For many states reconstruction and reform were a condition of survival.

In Vienna, the exigencies of the war clearly revealed the inadequacy of Haugwitz' work of reform. The effects of the loss of Silesia had indeed been overcome, and a most remarkable increase in revenue had been achieved. Nevertheless, after four years of war, the finances of the Habsburg monarchy were utterly exhausted, the administration had become chaotic, and the brilliant diplomatic perspectives of 1756 were displaced by the fear that Austria would sink to the status of a second-rate power.

The lesson was clear: the reform work of Haugwitz would have to be extended. The initiative for further changes came from the Chancellor of State, Kaunitz, who felt that his foreign policy had been robbed of the success it deserved because of the breakdown in the internal administration. At this stage, Kaunitz confined himself to purely administrative proposals. To promote a greater measure of unity among the diverse Habsburg provinces, more administrative coherence and continuity of policy, he proposed an advisory Council of State (Staatsrat), competent to consider ‘from the centre’ all internal affairs. The Council of State began its work in 1761.

The last, but not the least of Napoleon's victories was won at St Helena. There he created the Napoleonic legend, and there he lived long enough to see his own career in perspective, and to reinterpret it in tune with the forces of liberalism and nationality which were to shape the Europe of the nineteenth century. Bonapartism was thus preserved as a living force, and the foundations of the Second Empire were laid. Though he often complained in exile that his career should have ended at Moscow, the Hundred Days and the ‘martyrdom’ of St Helena gave it the proportions of Greek tragedy, of hubris followed by nemesis. Like the music of Mozart's ‘Don Giovanni’, (which Napoleon heard shortly before the battle of Jena and, rather surprisingly, admired) his personality and career combine classical proportions with a wilder note of romantic, daemonic and unlimited ambition.

The mists of St Helena and the legend still obscure the figure of Napoleon. It is the task of this chapter to present him as the product of his age and also the moulder of it, and to analyse the interaction between his personality and the forces, moral and material, at work in Europe.

Napoleon was born at Ajaccio in Corsica in 1769, the year in which the French occupied the island. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, abandoned the cause of General Paoli, the patriot leader, and rose to high office in the French administration. Through the good offices of the French governor he obtained a place for Napoleon at Brienne, from which he proceeded to the École Militaire in Paris.

To the nineteenth-century historian the French Revolution was largely a battle of ideas and its outbreak the more or less fortuitous climax to a series of political crises—the rejection of Calonne's proposals for tax reform by the Assembly of Notables of 1787, the convocation of the Estates General, and the king's dismissal of Necker on 11 July 1789; while, in the background of events, an undifferentiated mass of peasants and turbulent town-dwellers, prompted by age-old grievances or hopes of easy spoils, waited to settle accounts with seigneurs, tax-collectors and city authorities. During the past half-century, however, this general thesis has been largely modified by the work of such writers as Jaurès, Mathiez, Lefebvre and Labrousse, all of whom have been more or less influenced by Marx's historical methods. As the field of research into the origins of the Revolution has widened, it has been found necessary to pay more attention to social and economic factors in general and, above all, to the particular grievances and social claims of an extremely heterogeneous peasantry and urban menu peuple, whose intervention, therefore, no longer appears as a mere echo or reflection of the actions or speeches of aristocrats, lawyers and journalists at Versailles and in Paris. More attention has also been paid to the ‘feudal reaction’ of the last twenty-five years of the old régime in France and to the aims of the parlements and provincial noblesse, who staged the famous révolte nobiliaire, or aristocratic revolt, of 1787–8; in fact, it has even been claimed that this episode was not merely a curtain-raiser to the events of 1789, but marked the opening shot of the Revolution itself.

The settlement of 1763, which ended the Seven Years War in Europe and overseas, was in many ways the most important of the eighteenth century. The Peace of Paris established Britain as, with the exception of Spain, the greatest colonial power in the world. She was now clearly dominant in North America and had at least the possibility of dominating much of India. Simultaneously the Treaty of Hubertusburg saw the consolidation of Prussia's position as one of the major powers of Europe, if not yet as a great power in the fullest sense of the term. Her retention of Silesia appeared to many contemporaries the greatest military achievement of the age; and the leadership of Frederick II seemed sufficient to counterbalance many of her material weaknesses.

A long period of peace, however, could hardly be expected, and indeed was not expected by most observers, after 1763. Neither Britain's colonial and maritime predominance over France nor Prussian security against the Habsburgs was as yet beyond challenge. France's pride had been deeply wounded by her failures during the war. Humiliation and anger were little reduced, desire for revenge on Britain little weakened, by the reflection that much of commercial value—most of her West Indian islands and her trading-posts in Africa and India—had been salvaged from the wreck of her overseas empire. Moreover Britain's successes had aroused everywhere in western Europe a real fear that her sea-power might now be used to give her a monopoly of Europe's overseas trade, and of possibilities of overseas expansion.

When, after the October crisis, the National Assembly followed the French court from Versailles to Paris, it was able quickly to come to grips with the task of devising a new constitution. The danger of counter-revolution had once more receded and by November the food shortage in the capital was over. The timely surrenders of feudal privileges made in the August decrees, officially promulgated on 3 November, allayed peasant discontents at least temporarily and bought time for the lawyers of the feudal committee to consider how total the alleged ‘destruction’ of the feudal régime was to be in fact. A hiatus in the administration of justice and in the conduct of local government was averted by the provisional continuation of existing office-holders. The suspension, on 3 November, of the activities of the parlements removed a possible spring-board for counter-revolutionary resistance in the provinces. Though the October crisis prompted Louis XVI to send a secret and solemn protest against the restrictions forcibly imposed on the crown's authority to Charles IV of Spain, and though, by contrast, it encouraged the Belgian democrats to launch a revolt against the Austrian government in the Netherlands, neither of these repercussions involved much danger of European intervention in France. Most European governments were content to feel that France's political influence on the continent had been extinguished for some time to come. The first serious difficulties in France's foreign relations were in fact delayed till May 1790 and culminated in a solemn renunciation by the National Assembly of aggressive warfare and territorial conquest.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the dominant influence on all the arts was that form of idealism known as Neoclassicism. In France and Germany the ‘excesses’ of the rococo style had, by the middle of the century, produced a general reaction against exuberance and frivolity. That tendency towards classical restraint and harmony which is an essential part of the French tradition of Corneille and Racine, Poussin and Mansart, reasserted itself decisively under the influence of new ideals—the Enlightenment of the Encyclopaedists—and of the new aesthetic theories centred on Rome and best expounded by the expatriate German, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Neoclassicism is, however, more than a resurgence of the eternal classic tendency in European art. The essential thing is that neoclassic theory advocated the return to classical principles by way of a strict imitation of antiquity, now made easier by the increase of archaeological knowledge and especially by the discovery of, and excavations at, Herculaneum and Pompeii. Greek art, though still almost entirely unknown in the original, was now given a leading place in theory, and the climate of nineteenth-century opinion that used the fifth century B.C. as a touchstone of all artistic excellence was prepared in the 1750s. It is evident that so much enthusiasm expended on so few available examples of Greek art led to a kind of hyperdulia—an enthusiasm which is in itself far more romantic than classical; and indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of Neoclassicism is precisely this romantic approach to antiquity, and especially to ruins.

By the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 the North American mainland was shared between Britain and Spain. France retained only two small islands, St Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland, at which her fishermen could dry their fish. By 1793 Britain had lost her colonies south of Canada: to the original thirteen, which became independent in 1783 and, hesitantly, united in 1787, two new states had been added (Vermont, 1791, and Kentucky, 1792); and the Floridas, East and West, had been returned to Spain in 1783.

In 1763 the British colonies of the North American mainland extended for sixteen hundred miles along the seaboard, from stormy Cape Breton Island to the humid Okefinokee swamps. At either extremity there was a military outpost. Nova Scotia, which had been captured by Britain in 1710, had been for fifty years a weak imperial base against the French in Cape Breton. Halifax was founded in 1749 as a counterpoise to Louisbourg, and 3000 colonists were sent out. In 1755 the French were expelled from the Acadian settlements on the Bay of Fundy and the Annapolis river. Helped by immigrants from New England, the British numbers grew to 11,000 in 1766 and 20,000 in 1775. A representative assembly was granted to Nova Scotia in 1758. In 1769 Prince Edward Island (formerly Isle St Jean) was given a separate government, and its assembly first met in 1773. There were only a few settlers at St John (originally Parrtown) in 1784 when an influx of 3000 American Loyalists led to the erection of New Brunswick into a separate colony.

In the eighth book of his classic On War Clausewitz describes what he understood to be the revolution in warfare which had taken place in his own lifetime. The wars of the eighteenth century, he says, were wars of kings not of peoples. National existence was not at stake (as certainly it was for Prussia after Austerlitz and Jena) but simply the conquest of an enemy province or two. Wars of this kind were affairs of the State, an autocratic State, and entirely separated from the interests of the people. Violence was restricted by calculation. In fact, this was what the twentieth century has come to call ‘limited war’.

After 1789, however, there was a profound change. Clausewitz goes on: “Whilst, according to the usual way of seeing things, all hopes were placed on a very limited military force in 1793, such a force as no one had any conception of made its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State….

After all this was perfected by the hand of Buonaparte, this military power, based on the strength of the whole nation, marched over Europe, smashing everything in pieces so surely and certainly, that where it only encountered the old-fashioned Armies the result was not doubtful for a moment. A reaction, however, awoke in due time. [Elsewhere] the War became of itself an affair of the people….

The pattern of trade

Before the application of steam to transport the cost of all types of carriage was very high, and therefore trade was small in relation to total output. Moreover, before the building of railways the costs of carriage were much lower by water than by land, so that much more trade was done between regions, even regions far apart, which were linked by sea or river than between regions, even regions of the same country, which were connected only by land. There was some long-distance trade in European products within Europe itself, for example the exchange at Leipzig of the industrial products of Saxony and Silesia for the primary products of eastern Europe, and a substantial trade in Zurich, Basle and Strasbourg which acted as intermediaries between Germany, Italy and southern France. But the main areas of trade were concentrated around the great seas— the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Baltic—and the main European trading cities were those which mediated the exchange of goods between the more densely settled areas of western and central Europe and the regions on the periphery.

The most important complex of trade was that between Europe and the Americas. The West Indies had a large surplus of products which were in demand in Europe, principally sugar, coffee and some minor products such as cotton, indigo, pimento and ginger. The hybrid colonies from Maryland to Carolina also had staple crops. The northern colonies had few staples of value in European markets, but a surplus of food and lumber.

An age so full of dramatic reversals of fortune and so big with consequences as that of 1793 to 1830 may seem to defy any attempt to compose in one volume a survey of Europe and some of its links with distant regions. Yet the very effort to survey the field in perspective, astride the ‘natural frontier’ of 1815, presents a challenge and provokes questions sometimes obscured. This volume is intended to offer a portrait or survey rather than a compressed record. Stirring episodes, locally decisive battles, commanding personalities may receive no more than passing mention or may even be sought in vain in the index. But the problem of compression is not the only or the most interesting one. More surprising is the uncertainty about some of the foundations. There is still plenty of room for debate. The printed records are bulkier than for the eighteenth century, but many of them relate to kaleidoscopic changes, blurred for us by political scene-shifting and by the fog of war. Moreover, the voices of articulate contemporaries were more strident, more at cross-purposes with each other, than in the apparently calm and confident age before 1789, more even than in the short period when the Revolution in its first stages seemed, not only in French eyes, to signify clearly a few universal principles applicable to all Europe and perhaps to all mankind. On the other hand, in the following period after 1830, aptly described as the zenith of European power (Vol. X), the records, though even bulkier, were becoming more systematic, and the basic social data were either more regularly collected or at least collected in ways more capable of statistical analysis.

For the political historian the period in North American history between the end of the Seven Years War, or ‘French and Indian War’, and the outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution is divided into two parts by the successful establishment of a new nation—the United States of America. The constitutional historian may concern himself rather less with this break in continuity. The constitutional problem before the American Revolution was that of providing an acceptable framework of common institutions within which the individual colonies could continue to exercise their characteristic inheritance of internal self-government; after it, it became a question of whether the several states into which the colonies had been transmuted could supply themselves with such organs for common action as their new situation in the world seemed to require. The new national government had to find solutions that had eluded the advisers of George III. From this admittedly limited point of view, the story has an underlying unity which it is the object of this chapter to present.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen British colonies that were to form the nucleus of the new United States all enjoyed some form of representative institutions, as did indeed eight other island colonies in the western Atlantic and Caribbean sea. Despite the important differences in situation and in the economic and social make-up of the colonies, their institutions had a family likeness. They were indeed the product of two features that distinguished British colonisation in North America from the comparable activity of rival European powers.

The end of the eighteenth century was an era of fulfilment in Russia even if the abuses of the regime were becoming as in grained as its habit of success. As much of the Petrine vision had been realised as was possible through the imitation of Europe's political and social superstructure rather than through the basic transformation of Russia. The richer nobility had been entirely westernised, the diplomatic and military tools of raison d'état had been acquired with the narrow industrial basis which contemporary warfare demanded and with effective if wasteful methods of conscripting man-power. Even some of the cultural insignia of national greatness were apparent. With the last two partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795, the empire had reached territorial limits in the west that were hardly to be extended until the mid-twentieth century. In the south the Black Sea coast-line had been won from the Dniester to the sea of Azov and to the northern rivers of the Caucasus. Odessa was founded by 1796, and beyond the Caucasus the Christian kingdom of Georgia was becoming a voluntary protectorate. From the Caspian sea to the frontiers of Chinese administration the nomads of Central Asia were increasingly submitting to the political influence of Russian arms, trade and even culture.

As far as can be ascertained from the periodic and unreliable census of males for fiscal and military purposes, the population in 1800 within the new frontiers was probably nearer 35 than 40 million. This population seems to have begun to surge in time with the similar phenomenon in central and western Europe, although conditions were dissimilar.

During the late eighteenth century there was a movement common to many European countries towards powerful and efficient central government. This movement was the counterpart of the more spectacular endeavour to increase the liberty of the individual. Thus, the era of the American Declaration of Independence, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, the charter of economic liberalism, was also the time when the modern state began to consolidate its forces. Just as the thinkers of the Enlightenment attempted to define the nature of the state as well as the nature of man, so their ideas were reflected during the ensuing years in a clearer identity of both. The growth of central authority and individual liberty hand in hand is shown by events such as the destruction of Jesuit power in Spain, Portugal, Austria and France, and the destruction of the power of the church and the nobility in the French Revolution. In France and England, the great social, political and constitutional changes which eventually gave the middle classes control over the central government tended to obscure the growth of bureaucratic power; and the liberal tradition has sometimes led to the belief that during the great age of revolution the state increased in strength only in countries where ‘enlightened despots’ flourished: the Prussia of Frederick II, the Austria of Joseph II, the Spain of Charles III, and the rest. But Henri Pirenne, by his definition of enlightened despotism as ‘la rationalisation de l'État’, diverted attention from the enlightened despots themselves to the nature of their work of reforming the state, which was remarkably similar in its intentions and results to contemporary reform programmes being carried out in England and France.

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.