Introduction

A conspicuous feature of many naturally limited populations of long-lived vertebrates is their relative stability. Both in populations that are regulated by predation or culling and in food-limited populations, population size can persist at approximately the same level for decades or even centuries (Runyoro et al. 1995; Waser et al. 1995; Clutton-Brock et al. 1997a; Newton 1998). The persistent fluctuations shown by Soay sheep and by some other island populations of ungulates (Boyd 1981; Leader-Williams 1988; Boussès 1991) raise general questions about the causes and consequences of variation in the stability of populations (see section 1.2). How regular are they? How are they related to population density? What are their immediate causes? To what extent do fluctuations in food availability, parasite number or predator density contribute to them? And what are their effects on development and on the phenotypic quality of animals born at contrasting population densities? And how much do changes in phenotype contribute to changes in dynamics?

As yet, there are very few cases where we understand either the ecological causes or the demographic consequences of persistent fluctuations in the size of naturally regulated populations of mammals (Hanski 1987; Saether 1997). Since we are able to monitor the growth, movements, breeding success and survival of large samples of individuals as population density changes, the Soay sheep offer an opportunity to investigate the causes and consequences of changes in population size with unusual precision (see Chapter 1).

NOTE ON THE FRENCH REPUBLICAN CALENDAR

This calendar was proposed on 20 September 1793 and adopted on 5 October, (with amendments 24 November), retrospectively as from 22 September 1792, the date of the foundation of the Republic; but for this reason it was never used for the year I. Each month had 30 days. In each month there were three décades of 10 days each; the days were Primedi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Novidi and Decadi, the last being the official day of rest. At the end of each year five days were added, called jours complémentaires or sansculottides; and a sixth, called jour de la Révolution, was added at the end of each year preceding a leap year (including the year VII, preceding 1800, which was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar). Consequently, the republican years began on varying dates in September according to the Gregorian calendar, and the succeeding months also. For this reason it is impossible to give concisely a complete concordance, but that will be found in P. Caron, Manuel pratique pour l'étude de la Révolution française (1912), pp. 221-69; or (for the years II-VIII only) in the 1947 edition, pp. 281-6. The following tables show the dates covered by each year, and the order of the months, which began on dates varying between the 18th and the 24th.

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.

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.

An attempt has been made in Chapter I (pp. 7–11) to see how the general pattern of the European state system in 1830 differed from that of 1790. The shifting scenes of the war period are described in Chapter IX, and the negotiations leading to the settlement of 1815 in Chapter XXIV. Here it is intended to present in outline the main issues that were implicit in the situation created by that settlement or that came to a head in the years of relative tranquillity that followed it. Most of these issues are touched upon in other chapters concerning particular regions, but they need to be reviewed as elements in a developing total situation as it presented itself to sovereigns, chanceries and foreign ministers. Alexander I could not fix his gaze on Constantinople without remembering Spain and Germany; neither Metternich nor Canning could make a move about Latin America without keeping an eye on the Aegean. Moreover, certain general problems arise concerning the nature and conduct of international relations after 1815. At first, these are closely connected with the experiences, even with the personalities, of the statesmen who made the settlement; all of them, except for Talleyrand, survived in power for some years— Castlereagh and Alexander I until their deaths in 1822 and 1825, and Metternich for almost as many years after 1830 as before it.

In this chapter it is not the intention to recapitulate the political history of the various Mediterranean countries—the unification of Italy, the French conquest and settlement of Algiers, the consolidation of the small Greek state, the reawakening of Egypt and the effort to conserve and reform the remains of the Turkish empire; or, again, to relate the diplomatic and military history of the international crises which these and other developments produced. Nor would it be easy, within this compass, to trace the influence of new ideas and habits which these countries shared in unequal degrees with the rest of Europe. Instead, an attempt will be made to define the common characteristics of the Mediterranean region in this period and to fasten upon some changes in the outward conditions of the region as a whole. The main key to these changes is the gradual advent of the steamship and, to a lesser extent, that of the railway, as carriers of the new industrial age into a still traditional pattern of life; if that is true, no apology is needed for focusing attention upon the Mediterranean considered internally as a network of communications and internationally as a through-route between Asia and the West. The political and strategical implications of these changes must be noticed, but not merely as part of the history of the several Mediterranean countries or of the two extra-Mediterranean powers, England and Russia, whose rivalry so much influenced the course of events within the region.