It is impossible to understand the following pages if it is not first realised that the French in 1871 were dominated by memories of the peculiarly eventful three-quarters of a century since 1789. The peasants, who remained by far the largest social group, only slowly absorbed new ideas. They still feared the re-establishment of an aristocratic and clerical regime that would reimpose feudal dues and tithes on them; conversely, they had acquired a very acute sense of their property rights and, particularly since 1848, it had become easy to rouse in them an irrational fear of ‘the Reds’ or the partageux (redistributionists), by whom they meant the politically more advanced town-dwellers who would come and take away their land or at least their savings (kept in the famous woollen stockings). Undoubtedly the landed nobility, still very important in certain regions, and the upper middle class did not dream of challenging, yet again, either the freedoms proclaimed in 1789 or even the civil equality consecrated by the Code Napoléon; but they remembered with dread the Terror of 1793–4, the rising which brought in the July Monarchy, the February Revolution of 1848 and the rising of June 1848. They consequently refused all compromise with the new ideas and the popular aspirations of the nouvelles couches, in which they were incapable of seeing anything other than purely destructive forces. As for the convinced republicans (industrial workers, artisans, and many in commerce and the liberal professions), their ideal was 1793: the Constitution of the Year One, which had provided for a very liberal, very democratic, very decentralised regime, but also the supremacy of the convention and the great committees ; in other words an all-powerful assembly acknowledging no limit to its power.

It is convenient to regard 1868 as marking a turning-point in the modern history of Japan. In January of that year a group of new leaders seized power in the then imperial capital of Kyoto, men who became, despite subsequent shifts in both policy and personnel, responsible for initiating changes which revolutionised the country's political, economic and social institutions and eventually raised it to a high level of international power and prestige.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century government had been in the hands of a line of feudal rulers, the Tokugawa family. As shogun, nominally the emperor's military deputies, they had possessed the hereditary de facto authority of monarchs, exercising direct control over their own enormous domains and effectively subordinating the lords of the great feudal territories into which the rest of the country was divided. They sought, with remarkable success, to preserve their power by preventing change. After about 1640 Japan was by their decree almost entirely cut off from contact with the rest of the world, while at home political relationships were frozen in their seventeenth-century form, rigid social distinctions developed and were enforced for all classes of the population, and attempts were made to inhibit even economic change.

It was in its economic aspects that this policy was least successful. By the eighteenth century domestic commerce had expanded and the feudal class, the samurai, for the most part resident in castle-towns, had become accustomed to a higher standard of living. They had not, however, secured a commensurate increase in revenue or income. As a result, both domain governments and individual samurai became steadily more indebted to city rice-brokers and financiers.

By the time of the Civil War the first American expansive drive was over. The most obvious objectives of manifest destiny had been achieved, and the frontiers of the United States were logically satisfying. The country stretched from sea to sea. To the north lay Canada, a region which, it could be argued, must some day inevitably fall to the United States, but whose accession it was neither necessary nor desirable to hasten. To the south lay Mexico, arid and uninviting, and peopled by men whose stock, language, religion and traditions were suspect to most Americans.

Within the United States itself there was ample land to occupy the energies of a vigorous people. Even before the Civil War manifest destiny and the lure of the West had not been the only impulse to expansion. Competition between North and South for the control of the West, as a source of both economic and political strength, had been as important in determining the urgency of the rush to the Pacific. The genuine expansionists had hoped to divert Americans from their sectional quarrel by invoking the imperial dream; but their failure to do so did not slow an advance which the quarrel itself turned into a race. When the Civil War was won and lost, the most obvious goal of expansion had been achieved and the most impelling motive of expansion removed.

The Franco-German War of 1870–1 completed the political movement which had aimed at bringing the unity of a national state to both Italians and Germans. In both cases the state had had to gain control over a national revolutionary movement which had come to grief when it opposed the states in 1848. In Italy this movement had done more than in Germany towards consolidating the nation into a whole; but in Germany too, led politically by middle-class liberals, it had supplied the chief stimulus in the great cause, even though representatives of the liberal movement had been denied any appreciable share in the actual foundation of the empire. At decisive moments in his trial of strength with Austria even Bismarck had not hesitated to employ national revolution as a political means; in 1866, if arms had not brought quick results, he would have mobilised it with a call to the Germans—as also to the Czechs, Magyars and other nationalities—within the Habsburg monarchy. But the rapid and complete victory of Königgrätz meant that diplomatic and military activity largely obscured the share that national revolution had had in the founding of the empire. This had been precisely Bismarck's design: he meant to make use of liberal and democratic leanings only in so far as they helped him to overcome the conservative and particularist forces opposing him in Germany. The less Bismarck needed popular support, the more he could and indeed had to consider the principalities which in Germany, unlike in Italy, remained a constituent element of the national state.

Before the Peace of Westphalia Italy was an organic part of a vast network of European interests. It was the centre of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and one of the main bases of Spanish imperialism. Spanish-Catholic political interests were connected with widespread economic interests in which the shipping, banks, industry and merchants of Genoa, Milan, Tuscany, Naples and Sicily played an important part. The Peace of Westphalia maimed Spanish imperialism and halted the Counter-Reformation. As an indirect result, Italy was relegated to the margins of European history and confined to a very minor place among the countries of Europe. Thus the Peace of Westphalia was also a date of fundamental importance in the history of Italy, although its effects came to be seen only with the passage of time. It did not at once terminate the conflicts in which the peninsula and its States were involved, the war between France and Spain and the War of Candia between Venice and the Turks; nor did it change the political map of Italy, the essential features of which were settled by the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and modified in some details by subsequent events, in particular by the Treaty of Cherasco (1631).

Spain remained mistress of her traditional domains, Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. By means of a series of strategic points she retained control of the Tyrrhenian Sea, which was vital to imperial communications, and of the States along its coast. The Genoese republic, with its own territories of Liguria and Corsica, continued to be a pawn of Spanish policy; it was watched over by the strategic strongholds of the Marquisate of Finale (on the Ligurian coast and under direct Spanish rule) and of the Lunigiana valley (between the Po valley and the Tyrrhenian, an area dotted with fiefs of the Malaspina family, who were theoretically vassals of the Empire, but in practice dependants of the Spanish governor at Milan).

Sultan Mehmed IV who ascended the throne in 1648 inherited a vast empire which had been conquered by the sword of his ancestors and stretched over three continents. In Europe the frontier of the Ottoman Empire was a mere eighty miles from Vienna; in North Africa only Morocco did not belong to it; it included Upper Egypt and extended to Aden; the Black Sea and the Red Sea were Turkish lakes; in the east it stretched to the shores of the Caspian and of the Persian Gulf. It is impossible to give the exact figure of its population, but in the seventeenth century it amounted to approximately 25 or 30 millions. The Turks, although the dominant race, were only a minority. Probably the Muslims —Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples of the Caucasus—were stronger than the Christians—Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians, Bulgars, Wallachians and Moldavians. Outstanding among the Turks of this period were the famous historian, geographer and bibliographer Kâtib Tchelebi (1609– 57) and the renowned traveller Evliya Tchelebi (1611–78), who described the cities, customs and peoples of the Ottoman Empire in his huge ten volumes. Its heart was the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), the seat of the military and administrative institutions of the empire, the centre of commerce and culture as well as amusement and pleasures. It was inhabited by more than half a million people, Muslims, Christians and Jews, all living side by side for centuries, observing their own customs. The city contained the palace of the sultans, the Serail, the splendid mosques of Sultan Ahmed, Suleymaniye, Bayezid, Selimiye and Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, many Medresse's (colleges), libraries, public baths, hospitals, inns and food distribution centres, maintained by pious endowments.

The period between 1648 and 1688 was one of acute crisis for Spain: demographic, economic, social, political and spiritual. In 1648 the economic depression of the seventeenth century was in one of its most serious phases, while by 1688 recovery was already perceptible, especially in the eastern parts. This change, which reflected the general European development, operated also in demography, with a rise in population on the coasts, and stability or even decline in the interior. This was also a period during which the outlying areas, especially Catalonia, asserted themselves, and centralising tendencies suffered a setback. When the Catalan rising was put down in 1652, Philip IV (1621–65), instead of imposing the full authority of the absolute monarchy, re-established the special position of Catalonia. This was in accordance with the new legalism which can be noticed in the Spanish State of Philip IV and Charles II (1665–1700) and parallel with the demographic and economic importance of the periphery.

In the international sphere, the Peace of Westphalia marked the collapse of the Spanish plan for a Habsburg hegemony. Spain abdicated her position as a great power and withdrew within herself. She was concerned only with defending her colonies, and especially her own territory, from the imperialism of Louis XIV, while Charles II's lack of an heir drew the covetous eyes of all western Europe towards Spain. This change had a powerful effect on intellectual life, stimulating meditation on the meaning of Spanish history, and rousing controversy between those who welcomed new ideas and those who remained faithful to the spirit of the sixteenth century.

It is sometimes said that the landmarks of political history, such as those which serve to delimit the period to which this volume is devoted, have little or no relevance to economic history. This is a half-truth. And it is especially mischievous if it leads to the supposition that the economic history of nations can somehow be written without reference to the actions of governments, as though economic life existed in a vacuum, emptied of political contamination. It remains true that in certain aspects of economic life political events and personalities made no real mark. In the day-to-day or year-to-year life of English husbandman or Spanish peasant it mattered little then that Charles of England should lose his head or Charles of Spain his empire. In the forty years between the Peace of Westphalia and the English Revolution, no innovation significantly altered costs, output, or methods of production in any of the main economic activities of Europe. It was not always for want of effort: what science does today, the State tried vainly to stimulate then. This is not to say that economic life remained wholly static; it is simply to stress both that continuity and change have to be carefully balanced, and that if at certain levels a slow evolution paid little heed to the explosions of political history, at others those explosions were real enough. And for all the inventions of ingenious men, there is no set of historical laws to guide us.

The first section of this chapter consists of a broad survey of the main trends in population, agriculture, industry, trade, and finance. Here the impact of State policy is virtually ignored. The second section examines the nature of certain economic and social problems as they presented themselves to the governments of the time, and the efforts made to solve those problems.

The Peace of Westphalia considerably strengthened Sweden's position in Scandinavia and the Baltic. To the earlier conquests in the east—Ingria, Estonia and Livonia—were added western Pomerania, Bremen, Verden and Wismar in the Empire; the total population amounted to about 2,500,000 people, half of whom were Swedish. The peace did not, however, solve Sweden's problems at home and abroad, but created fresh problems. The new German provinces made Sweden a member of the Empire and she became more deeply involved in the intrigues and negotiations between the princes and the Emperor. Moreover, the new provinces were coveted by others. Brandenburg remained discontented because she failed to gain western Pomerania. Denmark and the Lüneburg princes wanted Bremen and Verden. In the east the fear persisted that Russia—after the ‘Time of Troubles’—would renew her attempts to break through to the Baltic.

Furthermore, Swedish successes in the Thirty Years War had not terminated the struggle for hegemony in the north between Sweden and Denmark, which dated from the fourteenth century. By the Peace of Brömsebro (1645) Denmark ceded to Sweden freedom from customs dues in the Sound as well as the Baltic islands of Gotland and Ösel, Jämtland, Härjedalen and Halland (the latter for thirty years). The gains of 1648 also meant that Sweden could attack Denmark from the south; but even so Denmark still constituted the greatest threat to Sweden's position. Denmark was eager to reconquer the provinces lost in 1645 and—since the struggle was fundamentally one over hegemony in the north—she necessarily considered it a fight for existence. Thus the Scandinavian countries, during the whole period to the outbreak of the Great Northern War in 1700, attempted to isolate each other by concluding alliances with each other's enemies among the European powers.

When the Peace of Westphalia was signed on 24 October 1648 and the warring parties finally laid down their arms, a settlement was reached which, in its essential features, was to last until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. For a century and longer civil war had been endemic in Germany, and there were to be many minor upheavals in the future; but until 1740, when Frederick II of Prussia chose to invade Silesia and to break the peace of the Empire, that peace was not disturbed by any major internal war. Yet, while the conditions of the Empire were settled by the peace of 1648, the same did not apply to the conditions of Europe. Wars continued in the west and in the east, against France and against the Turks; and Louis XIV found it easy to find allies among the German princes and to use them against the Empire which he was fighting. Internally, however, an equilibrium was reached between the Emperor and the princes, between Protestants and Catholics, between the centrifugal forces and those aiming at more centralisation. A compromise solution was found which, by its very durability, proved that it was not unsatisfactory.

In practice the Empire now consisted of Germany and the Habsburg hereditary lands: its frontiers had contracted; but Switzerland and the Netherlands had long ceased to be parts of the Empire, and the official recognition of this fact was an advantage, and not a loss. It was much more important that parts of Alsace were ceded to France, and western Pomerania with Stettin, Wismar and the duchies of Bremen and Verden to Sweden.

In the history of philosophy the seventeenth century is associated with the names of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke. The doctrines of these philosophers mark a momentous turning-point in European thought: they were developed in close interrelation with the contemporary ‘scientific revolution’; they introduced new basic concepts and methods of knowledge; they also had a profound effect upon the course of modern philosophy as a whole.

The process which led to the Cartesian interpretation of the world had two main aspects. In the first place, the conception of nature as an organism, characteristic of the early phase of Renaissance thought, gave way to the view that all phenomena are to be conceived on the analogy of the movements of a machine. Accordingly, on this view, causes were antecedent motions and, as such, efficient causes: all physical change was explained as the effect of the motions and impacts of matter in space and time. In proportion as the mechanistic view prevailed, the appeal of the traditional doctrine of final causes, namely the doctrine that processes in nature are directed by a tendency to attain a specific end, diminished. The new method of explanation was also attractive because it seemed particularly successful. It enabled a scientist not only to interpret but, in Francis Bacon's phrase, to dominate nature. The underlying assumption was that, if it is known how phenomena are generated, it is possible to predict them on any particular occasion and in this sense to gain power over nature.

For both Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Westphalia was a bitter disappointment. Recourse to the sword, instead of bringing final victory as the extremists of each confession had hoped, had merely ensured the perpetuation of religious division; and now Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists had to accept co-existence in a Europe where ideas, and the institutions embodying those ideas, were markedly changing. But the forty years after the peace were not characterised only by interdenominational hatred and attempts to end it; they were also years of tension between Church and State in several countries of western and southern Europe. In some the conflict was a simple one between the secular authority and one officially recognised Church; in others the situation was complicated by the existence of religious minorities, either Catholic, or Protestant, or both.

At first sight there might appear to be little reason in this period for an intensification of, or even a notable alteration in, this endemic problem of the relationship of Church and State. The mid-seventeenth century was not shaken by an acute and general crisis, such as the Reformation. Yet important if not spectacular changes were taking place. One of the most significant was the tendency in several countries, Protestant as well as Catholic, for government to become more absolute and thus less inclined to tolerate rival or extraneous authorities, of which the churches, with their claim to men's deepest loyalties, were the most important. Louis XIV put the case for the State thus: ‘Kings are absolute seigneurs, and from their nature have full and free disposal of all property both secular and ecclesiastical, to use it as wise dispensers, that is to say, in accordance with the requirements of their State’; and again, ‘those mysterious names, the Franchises and Liberties of the Church… have equal reference to all the faithful whether they be laymen or tonsured, who are all equally sons of this common Mother; but… they exempt neither the one nor the other from subjection to Sovereigns, to whom the Gospel itself precisely enjoins that they should submit themselves’.

The year 1660 was notable in the annals of French civilisation. Molière's Les Précieuses Ridicules was performed in the presence of the young Louis XIV, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry published the tenth and final volume of her Clélie, thus ending the four years of expectancy and suspense in which her many readers had been held. In the following year, France, disillusioned by civil wars and emancipated from the dominion of an unpopular minister, Mazarin, eagerly welcomed her young, energetic king, who gave promise of providing, in abundant measure, that military glory and national prestige which were the best antidotes to the national malady of l'ennui. In literature, a brilliant school of writers, endowed with intelligence and wit and supported by royal patronage, was to discredit the more prolix and sententious of their predecessors and to confer an enduring lustre on a court, the most magnificent in modern times.

Yet the glory was to prove short-lived. Thirty years later most of the great men had gone or had retired into obscurity. Molière died in 1673; Racine, who survived until 1699, was unproductive in the last decade of his life; Boileau, on retirement to his suburban house at Auteuil in 1685, could look back on his best achievements; La Fontaine, having lost his patroness in 1693, sought refuge in repentance and theological studies; even Madame de Sevigne wrote few letters after 1691, for in that year she joined her beloved daughter in Provence. At court, the buoyancy and vivacity of earlier years were replaced by a régime of sombre pietism, and France seemed to follow the mood of her king. There was still, it is true, much intellectual activity in France—who could prevent Frenchmen from thinking?—but the lead was no longer taken by Versailles.

During the two years that followed his election as Emperor in 1519 Charles V handed over to his brother Ferdinand all the hereditary Habsburg lands in central Europe. By securing his own election to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526 Ferdinand I completed the Habsburg Empire. His was the cadet branch of his House and his dominions were remote from the Atlantic seaboard, economically backward, riven by social and domestic strife, devastated and crippled by the Turks. During the Thirty Years War, except for Wallenstein's brief heyday, Austria played only a secondary part and emerged from that war maimed, depopulated and impoverished. But by the end of the century the Habsburg monarchy became one of the great powers, hailed as the saviour of Christendom in the last and only permanently successful crusade, wooed as an ally by the maritime powers, feared as a rival by France. It is true that the Habsburgs climbed to this position of power by destroying the Bohemian nation and abrogating the liberties of Hungary, but the means and the persons engaged in this achievement make the history of the Habsburg lands in the second half of the seventeenth century an important and illuminating chapter in the history of European society.

Few dynasties have bred more truly to type than the Habsburgs. The three rulers whose reigns, uninterrupted by dynastic disputes or debilitating minorities, extended from 1619 to 1705 all exhibited the virtues and weaknesses typical of their line; they were conscientious, convinced of the dignity, rights and responsibilities of the office to which they devoutly believed themselves to be divinely appointed; they were sincere Christians and devoted Catholics; their private morals were impeccable.

In the middle of the seventeenth century Poland-Lithuania (that is, the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania) covered some 350,000 square miles and was, after Muscovite Russia, the largest State in Europe. It extended from the basin of the Warta to the most westerly tributaries of the Volga and probably had about 10 million inhabitants, of whom less than half were Poles. To the east of the Polish Bug and the San there lived Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians, each settled in separate regions. The Poles in this eastern territory were chiefly resident in the towns, but elsewhere they were scattered throughout the country. Poles were strongly represented among the nobility of the eastern regions, owing partly to the Polonisation of the native Lithuanian, White Russian and Ukrainian nobility in the seventeenth century. Of the remaining non-Polish nationalities only the Jews and the Germans were of numerical significance. The Jews, estimated at 5 per cent of the total population of Poland-Lithuania at that time, were predominantly to be found in the eastern regions of the country; the Germans, on the other hand, resided chiefly in the western districts, particularly in Greater Poland and Polish Prussia. The German element in the population increased during the seventeenth century as a result of further immigration from Germany. The ratio of the nationalities corresponded by and large to that of the creeds. Apart from an insignificant percentage, the Poles and Lithuanians were members of the Roman Catholic Church, whilst the White Russians and Ukrainians belonged partly to the Uniate and partly to the Orthodox Church. Amongst the Germans Lutheranism had a strong following.

To the year 1648 belongs one of the dramatic experiments of the scientific revolution. F. Perier, brother-in-law of Blaise Pascal by whom the experiment had been proposed to him, climbed the Puy-de-Dôme in Auvergne bearing some glass tubes and a quantity of mercury. He found as he ascended the mountain that at each successive station the height of the mercury in his barometer was less, until at the summit it stood at only 23 inches. This was ocular testimony to the truth of the view that the column of mercury within the barometric tube was supported by the pressure of the atmosphere outside the tube: the column fell as it was carried higher in the ocean of air, so reducing that pressure. The phenomenon itself had been discovered in Italy; there was nothing very original in Pascal's prediction that the height of the mercury would decrease above sea-level; the experiment to test it was simple in the extreme. Yet it had not been made before, it was made in France, and it was widely publicised. It was characteristic of the time that it should be so, for this was the peak of one of the great creative periods in French science. The transformation of science had been first undertaken in Italy and in Germany; religious fanaticism had stultified the promising renaissance of the sciences in the Paris of the mid-sixteenth century and postponed to the reign of Louis XIII the development of anti-Aristotelian philosophy, the pursuit of the great Copernican debate, and the introduction of experimental inquiry. From this time, however, as in politics, manners and the arts of civilisation Paris became the arbiter of Europe, so in science France rose to a commanding position, to retire in turn before the challenge of English empiricism.

Rome was the centre where Baroque art originated and from where it spread. The great non-Italian artists of the first half of the seventeenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin, could not have developed as they did without direct or indirect contact with the artistic events in Rome. Even though conditions radically changed after 1650, Rome must be given a large share in any consideration of European art during the second half of the century.

All the great artists of the first generation of the Baroque—Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Caravaggio (1573–1610), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and the architect Carlo Maderao (1556–1629)—died long before 1650. The Fleming Rubens (b. 1577) died in Antwerp in 1640. Most of the great masters of the next generation, those mainly born in the last decade of the sixteenth century, were still alive, among them Alessandro Algardi (1595– 1654), Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661), Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), the Neapolitan sculptor and architect Cosimo Fanzago (1591–1678), the Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682), and the greatest of all, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Of the non-Italians of this almost unbelievably strong generation Velasquez (b. 1599) died in 1660, Poussin (b. 1593) in 1665, Frans Hals (b. 1580), the oldest of this group, in 1666, Rembrandt (b. 1606) in 1669, and Claude Lorrain (b. 1600) in 1682. All these artists reached their full maturity in the fourth and fifth decades and only few lived through the third and into the fourth quarter of the century.

In the sixteenth century the Portuguese changed the course of the Asian trade with Europe, but did not significantly alter its content; they broke in upon the profitable port-to-port trade in the East, but did not fundamentally alter its pattern. From the end of that century their Dutch and English competitors more radically rearranged the Asian carrying trade, promoting the sale of Bengal silk in Japan and of Javanese sugar in Persia. They also put more Asian wares upon the European market, supplementing Malabar with Sumatran pepper, introducing indigo and sugar, opening a trade in that useful ballast commodity, saltpetre. The Portuguese had found coarse Indian cottons saleable in Africa and their Brazilian colonies; the newcomers found such cottons suitable for Europe—plain for sheets, towels and napkins, coloured for hangings, quilts and furnishing fabrics.

A still more dramatic expansion in the flow of Asian goods to Europe took place after 1650. Pepper and spices shared in that expansion, though they no longer dominated the sales in Amsterdam and London. Saltpetre continued to be important because in Bihar were found new sources of supply, capable of meeting the demand caused by the growing scale and intensity of war in Europe. A similar discovery, that of cheap raw silk in Bengal, also came to be exploited, as a succession of able Mughal governors progressively cleared the province of Arakanese and Portuguese pirates. The supply of Persian raw silk to north Italy and France had been partially diverted by the Dutch and English in the 1630's; the arrival of cheaper silk from Bengal further upset the old pattern. The cheaper and more plentiful supply, together with the influx of skilled refugees and the temporary protection caused by war in Italy, fostered the growth of a considerable English silk industry.