After the Treaty of Utrecht the British and French colonies in North America, though separated by a vast wilderness, became increasingly apprehensive of one another.

In the short term, the French colonies were in the stronger position. Their power was based on the riches of the wilderness itself, economically on furs, militarily on water communications and diplomatically on manipulating the Indian tribes. The conditions of the fur trade made it possible for the Governor-General, the Company and the Church, all operating from the St Lawrence valley, to control a vast and very sparsely populated hinterland. The weakness of the French colonies came, however, from this adaptation to the conditions of the wilderness and in the end was to outweigh the sources of strength. The French fur trade only required a very few men: the French did not settle in numbers large enough to develop agriculture or industry or even to provide enough soldiers. The exploitation of the forests soon reached a point of diminishing returns. Traders went even further into the hinterland and relations had to be established with even more distant Indian tribes. Concentration on the fur trade meant reliance on France for provisions, manufactures and weapons. The existence of New France depended on command of the sea and particularly the control of the approaches to the St Lawrence which was threatened by British occupation of Newfoundland and of Acadia. In the circumstances, the best hope for the French colonies was to pursue a boldly offensive policy, and by using the initiative which their centralised planning gave them they managed, between 1713 and 1754, to extend their power from the Mississippi and the Great Lakes to the Appalachians.

In matters of taste the period 1715-63 is only part of a longer period beginning in the late seventeenth century and ending with the triumph of the romantic spirit during the eighteenth century. During the whole age men prided themselves on their appreciation of the classical art of Augustan Rome, yet they had so much self-confidence in their own intellectual powers and had, specially in England and France, evolved such a characteristic form of society that while paying sincere lip service to the classic ideals they evolved examples of town architecture, of essay and of novel, which were entirely original and of great beauty.

In architecture the predominant influence throughout Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century was that of classical Rome as reinterpreted by the Italian architects of the Renaissance. But in France and England, and indeed in northern Europe generally, that influence was transmitted in a rather different form from the one it assumed in Italy and southern or Roman Catholic Europe. In Italy the style which persisted during the first half of the eighteenth century was the baroque which developed in Rome early in the seventeenth century. It had found expression in the work of such architects as Maderno (d. 1629), Bernini (d. 1680), Borromini (d. 1667) and Cortona (d. 1669), and the finest examples are perhaps the Palazzo Barberini designed by Carlo Maderno and built by Borromini and Bernini, the church of St Carlo alle Quattro Fontane designed by Borromini who built the front at the very end of his life, the Scala Regia in the Vatican designed by Bernini in 1665 and the chapel of St Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria designed by Bernini in 1646.

The Seven Years War in Europe, which began with the invasion of Saxony by Frederick the Great on 29 August 1756, was but one part of the world-wide struggle between Great Britain and France, which had commenced in the New World in 1754, though war between them was not officially declared until May 1756. Whilst the struggle of Prussia for existence was the main theme of the war in Europe, the operations on the Continent contributed to the larger struggle by influencing the energy and resources of the two contesting imperial Powers.

Prussia in 1756 was a new, half-finished country, composed of scattered fragments joined under one Crown, as a result of various marriages, by the chance of various deaths, and by conquest—a State without real frontiers, without geographical unity, inhabited by subjects who looked on the people of the next province as foreigners, and who owned a common allegiance to one thing alone, the person and the power of the sovereign. It lay scattered from the Niemen to the Rhine, divided into three principal groups: in the east was Prussia; in the centre the compact group of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Silesia; in the west the small territories of Minden and Ravensburg on the River Weser, Mark on the Ruhr, the Cleve duchies on the Rhine. On the borders of these possessions extended a fringe of contested lands, doubtful sovereignties, and potential legacies. Prussia had an artificial and precarious unity; its frontiers were one long law-suit; it had to win or lose, advance or retreat, extend or disintegrate—never satisfied since never secure.

Historians have chosen the discovery of America as a convenient date for dividing modern times from the Middle Ages, a conventional point for changing editors and attitudes. Yet the history of science, the history of ideas, and perhaps especially the history of the expansion of Europe all serve to remind us that the division is an arbitrary one. The world of Ptolemy did not suddenly become the world of Mercator. On the contrary, a traditional cosmography was gradually adjusted in the light of widening experience, and even Columbus's remarkable discovery forms part of a long process that has its origins deeply hidden in the Middle Ages. Behind his venture across the Atlantic lies the whole range of the Portuguese discoveries of the fifteenth century leading up to the finding of the sea-route to India. At their head stands the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, when the Portuguese established their first overseas possession and thus launched the movement of European expansion. This expansion in turn is the inversion of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula. The main phases of peninsular medieval history thus provide the background of the discoveries—the collapse of the ‘Ummaiyad caliphate after 1002, which opened the centre of the peninsula immediately and the south ultimately to the Christian advance; the conquest of Lisbon in 1147, the first Atlantic seaport where the Gothic north met the Mozarabic south; the capture of Seville and the opening of the straits of Gibraltar to the trade of northern and southern Europe; the intervention of the peninsular states in the affairs of Muslim North Africa; the expansion of Italian commerce from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, and the confluence of Italian and northern European enterprise and capital in Portugal.

At the end of the fifteenth century the normal state among Christians was assumed to be peace, tempered by a readiness to repel the infidel. In practice nothing was more likely than war among Christians and, in order to leave them free to pursue it, overtures of peace to the Turk.

Chivalric writers still taught that war could be glorious, the scientific approach of Italian theorists lost sight of its horrors in deep interest, and both points of view admired the successful captain—one for his bravery, his prouesse, the other for the mark on events of his genius and energy, his virtù. The first thought war legitimate because it was noble, the other because force was an obvious and legitimate branch of negotiation.

The Church also, by supporting the institutions of chivalry and the knightly orders, had blessed weapons that were not always to be used against the oppressor or the infidel, and by admitting that it was permissible to wage a just war, she had in effect sanctioned all wars. The criteria of a just war, it was generally agreed, were that it should only be waged on the authority of a superior, for a just cause and with righteous intent, and the satisfaction of these conditions was not hard save to the most recalcitrant conscience. The Church, too, needed war to support her authority and punish those who defied it. And she was partly responsible for the view that in great causes war was a divine judgment, an extension of the judicial duel, where two armies instead of two rival champions fought to decide who was in the right.

In 1714 the British settlements still adhered to a tiny coastal fringe stretching from Albemarle Sound to the river mouths of Maine, with isolated communities to the south on the Ashley and Cooper rivers and to the north in Nova Scotia; and there were still unsettled patches along the coast. The American communities were still centred on tide-water.

It had taken a century for settlement to reach the fall line of the rivers: but between the end of Queen Anne's War, in 1713, and the outbreak of the French and Indian War, in 1755, the occupied area more than doubled. Behind the fur traders, pursuing beaver and deer beyond the mountains, and the lumberjacks, attacking stands of white pine and oak in Maine, pioneers pushed inland, up the Susquehanna, the Mohawk and the Connecticut, along the high Appalachian valleys, and along the littoral into Maine and the Carolinas, intent on settling the land. This outward pressure of population was the basic determinant of the colonies' growth.

Between 1715 and 1750 the population grew from 400,000 to one and a quarter millions; by 1763 it was about two millions. Part of this was the result of natural increase in a rural society where land was abundant, food supplies assured and children an economic asset. But large families (Franklin speaks of eight children as normal), offset by a high death rate from disease, accidents and Indian war, only accounted for part of the phenomenal growth. More important were the immigrants who settled frontier and back country.

The period between 1490 and 1520 was one of great efflorescence in the arts of the north, when men like Dürer, Grünewald and Holbein were active in Germany and the workshops in the Netherlands were still prolific. It was at this time that artists in these countries became aware of the Italian Renaissance and also felt the first tremors of the Reformation.

In the spring of 1494 the young Albrecht Dürer was recalled by his father from the ‘bachelor journey’ which had taken him west to some of the big towns on the Rhine. Obediently, he came home to Nürnberg to marry and set up his own workshop, but a few months later he left again, this time, however, going south to Italy. These two journeys are symptomatic of the crisis which the artists of the north had to face at the turn of the century. Dürer, born in 1471 as the son of a goldsmith in whose workshop he received his first training, had been apprenticed to the leading Nürnberg painter Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519). This master, like most German painters of his generation, had been strongly influenced by Roger van der Weyden (d. 1464) in whose work traditional Gothic design and the new delight in depicting the outward appearance of the world are perfectly merged. During his ‘Wanderjahre’ Dürer tried to meet the painter and engraver Martin Schongauer (1445?–91) who was looked upon almost as a pupil of Roger. But the sudden journey to Italy speaks of very different interests.

During the period extending from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century monarchy in most of the States of western and central Europe represented a compromise between medieval and modern conceptions of government; medieval ideas of the divine sanction of kingship were combined with an increasingly absolute form of rule. This phase in the history of European polity reached the completest development possible within its own limits in France. In his capacity as a Divine-Right monarch, Louis XIV embodied a tradition that went back to the rois thaumaturges; but the rays that darted from the roi soleil were not the effulgence of a setting sun. The new absolutism, allied to the old Divine Right, had given the French monarchy a renewed and more vigorous life. It must be remembered that the effete and decadent system of 1789, the ancien régime of the historians, only a century before was the new deal of Louis XIV and Colbert. At the close of the seventeenth century, by the efficiency of its administrative and governmental structure, France was in advance of every other country in Europe. True, Louis XIV did not leave his country at the height of her greatness. He outlived his own glory both at home and abroad and bequeathed more problems than solutions to his successors. In France distress and discontent were widespread before he died; and in Europe, during his long reign, Louis had first used and then abused the power with which the cardinals had endowed France, until the Treaty of Utrecht registered his defeat and opened what has been called, though hardly with justice, the age of ‘the English preponderance’.

As the eighteenth century began, the white man's efforts at formal colonisation in Africa had come to a standstill. Indeed, some of these projects, the missionary kingdom in the Congo, the Portuguese holdings along the East Coast, the Jesuit beginnings in Ethiopia, had broken completely against the hard facts of Africa; the only surviving white settlers were the traders of Angola, and the farmers of the Cape, whose impact was as small as their prosperity. But if European flags or bibles made small headway, commercially a great connection was being built. The work of white traders, the play of the market, the needs of countries far away, were dragging West Africa into the world economy. This was not for the sake of its raw materials, for the gold and ivory of the West Coast would not by themselves have attracted much attention, had there not been a more fundamental commodity for sale.

The trade in African labour is very old, but the development of the New World in the seventeenth century had switched it from a northerly into a westward, transatlantic direction, and made slaving a more spectacular, as well as a more massive type of Raubwirtschaft. For the plantation economies of America a regular labour supply was vital, and only immigration could provide it, while the profitable geometry of the Triangular Trade benefited both African slave brokers and European traders. Herein lay the reason for the gigantic population transfers made by the slave trade.

On 19 August 1493 the old emperor Frederick III died. His long reign, ever since 1440, had been marked by a rising consciousness of German nationality. This had been nourished by the controversies of the conciliar period, stimulated by the invention of printing amongst an increasingly wealthy and German-reading public in the courts and towns, and expressed in the newly current phrase ‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. But the reign had witnessed territorial losses on all sides. The estates of Holstein had accepted the rule of the Danish king (1460). The Teutonic Order had come under the control of Poland (1466). The Austrian duchies were overrun at intervals by the Turks. The Swiss had ceased to regard themselves as having duties to the Reich. On the collapse of the Burgundian power (1477) the French monarchy resumed its efforts at eastward expansion; and French diplomacy stimulated centrifugal movements from the Netherlands to the Alps. Frederick's son, Maximilian, took over a Reich diminished and threatened.

Indignation was felt at the helplessness of the Reich. But what could be done? Machiavelli wrote truly ‘Of the power of Germany none can doubt, for it abounds in men, riches and arms….But it is such as cannot be used’. The supreme authority was the king acting with the advice and consent of the Reichstag, the assembly of his estates or direct tenants. At full strength it could consist of the six electors, some 120 prelates, about thirty lay princes and 140 counts and lords, and eighty-five towns.

With the end of the Great Northern War the Scandinavian countries entered upon a period of much-needed peace after more than a century and a half of bitter though spasmodic inter-Scandinavian warfare. This struggle had fundamentally been one between the two more powerful nations, Denmark and Sweden, for political and economic control of the Sound and the Baltic, but the other Scandinavian countries had also been vitally affected by it: Norway because of its dynastic union with Denmark, Finland because that duchy formed part of the kingdom of Sweden. In its last phase, during the Great Northern War (1700–21), this inter-Scandinavian rivalry had become inextricably intermingled with the wider struggle of many Powers against the Baltic empire conquered by Sweden; Denmark-Norway's allies in the war had at one time or other included Saxony, Russia, Poland, Prussia and Hanover.

As far as the long inter-Scandinavian conflict was concerned, the Great Northern War imposed a settlement which lasted in its entirety for nearly a century, while the specific Dano-Swedish-Norwegian borders established have survived to the present day. Denmark gave up all hopes of reconquering the provinces Scania, Halland and Blekinge, lost to Sweden in the seventeenth century, while Norway similarly reconciled herself to the loss of Härjedalen, Jämtland and Bohuslän. The Swedish attempt to conquer Norway was abandoned immediately after the death of Charles XII in 1718, and the project of a Swedish acquisition of Norway was not revived till the very end of the century (and then along lines which excluded plans for direct conquest).

In 1714 some six million people lived in England and Wales and though this fact was unknown to contemporaries their number was increasing more rapidly than in any previous period. More than half the people and considerably more than half their wealth were found south of a line from Worcester to the Wash and almost one-quarter probably lived in London and the adjacent counties. According to the predilections of the observer England might be viewed as a rural paradise disfigured by a rank growth at the centre or as a small world of wit and wisdom surrounded by rural barbarism. Bristol and Norwich might boast commercial institutions which rivalled those of London, but financial control was passing to the metropolis, and one had to go north of the border to find at Edinburgh a culture comparable to that of London. Moreover, London was not only the national capital but also the metropolis of an imperial domain of islands, trading posts and coastal settlements scattered over the face of the world. The interests of her merchants ranged from the fur of the North American wilderness to the tea of Canton, from slaves, sugar and spices to textiles, hardware and nails. London merchants, together with those of Bristol and the lesser trading ports, were concerned with the export of British manufactures, with the import of many luxuries and some necessities, and with a world-wide carrying trade; but the greatest single source of wealth was the re-export of colonial and Indian goods to Europe.

‘If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we… must never forget that the country of which we read was a very different country from that in which we live.’ Lord Macaulay's dictum is certainly true of Europe on the eve of the Great Discoveries. Could the landscapes of that time be set before our eyes, we should find them very different from those of today. The countryside, although tamed by the pioneering activity of the Middle Ages, would still look wild to our eyes—or much of it would. If the great forests had been reduced, much of the marsh and heath still remained untouched. The medieval city had risen to prominence, yet most of the towns and cities would appear small to us, and their industrial and commercial activities limited.

But although much has changed, the bold facts of physical geography have remained much the same. Europe is a peninsula of peninsulas; and on either side of the great peninsula itself lie, and lay, the two maritime worlds of the Mediterranean and of northern and western Europe, with their contrasting histories and climates and commodities. Towards the broad base of the peninsula, where it is attached to Asia, Europe loses its identity. Vast plains replace the variety of mountain and lowland, and the temperatures on these plains fall below freezing point for most of the winter.

But the human geography of Europe in the fifteenth century must be considered not only against the variety of its physical setting, but also in the framework of its time. One of the most notable achievements of the Middle Ages was the clearing and reclamation and draining by which the countryside was tamed and transformed. But this great expansive movement did not continue uninterruptedly right up to the dawn of modern times. In places it slowed down; in some places it ceased; in yet other places the frontiers of cultivation even retreated.

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.