This book covers the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The prologue is by Anthony Pagden.

Introduction by Euan Cameron. What are the features of EME that obtain today? What are the features that have disappeared? Early modern Europeans felt certain that they were destined to govern the world. They had a common language, Latin, and a common legal system derived from Rome. And, in fact, within a few centuries they did dominate the rest of the world.

Across the century, as the population rose, but the ability to grow grain stayed about the same, there developed a permanent class of poor people living just above starvation. In the 17th century the population tailed off and basic food prices stabilized. In the 18th century the population took off again and has never stopped rising since. In the middle of the 17th century people began to have a better way of life, being able to afford luxuries. Europe began to have a colonial system, although the primary wealth of Europe was developed within Europe. An important motif in the history of European thought during these centuries is disintegration. Old certainties jostled against new, rival and opposed bodies of ideas. Instruments of the breakup were the printing press, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, which includes the birth of modern science. There is a move away from motivations due to kinship to motivations due to individual aggrandizement.

The trends in politics, estates(?) and warfare also included revolutions. The adoption of the musket changed the way armies were built and raised, and states began to raise much larger armies than had ever been raised before. They developed more rational and efficient ways of taxing, and better ways to mobilize goods for the army. Kings took over the authority that had formerly belonged to the church, and assumed a kind of royal absolutism. Finally, to sum it up, an industrial society replaced its agrarian predecessor. In the early modern period was born bureaucracy. In this regard, we might think of the period of 1520-1660 as dominated by Hapsburg needs; and the period of 1660-1800s, as dominated by France. It is England that assumes dominance in the 1800s, and at the beginning of the 1900s, we turn our attention to Germany.

Prologue, Anthony Pagden

The mythical sources for Europe are Asia. The basis for Roman thought is Greek; the basis for Christianity is Judaism. Typical maps of the world are in a T-O map. Asia is at the top of the map, Europe is below to the left, Africa is to the right, and Jerusalem is at the center. Key understandings for Europe are the polis, the city, and the civitas, the state, or the commonwealth. How do Europeans come to see their own cities and states as part of one whole, Europe? Pagden argues that Rome has laid an initial stamp, or impression, of empire on Europe, loaning its literature and language. Of course, there is a political remnant, the Holy Roman Emperor, uniting French, Spanish and German parts of Europe. Europe defined itself in opposition to the Ottoman Turks, marginally including Russia, and excluding Africa.

As Christians, the Europeans believed that the natural world was designed to be useful, and in pursuit of control, science was superior to mere force. Europeans continued to believe in the power of science when they took their ships out to encounter new societies, discovering some inferior in science to their own. (Not the Turks!) And it turns out that science and force together were nearly unbeatable. Europeans saw themselves as exceptional: even with the idea that there was a common humanity, they retained a sense of separation. Thomas Munster's Cosmographia gives one this picture clearly. Copy, if possible, page 20.

Sixteenth Century

The Conditions of Life for the Masses
Alison Rowlands

Rowlands describes most countryside peasants living in a simple, nuclear household which was a place of production. An important factor was the assignment of land. Legal traditions of impartible vs. partible inheritance made a big difference in the way peasant households continue (everyone has smaller and smaller pieces of land; many are alienated from the land and must find other work). Work was gendered and lifestyle was subsistence. Death was the greatest disruptor of 16th c. peasant households. Average life expectancy was around 30 years, and most people died of disease, to which famine was a large contributor. The growth rate of 1520-1600 came at the cessation of the Black Plague and also the advent of better weather. A newly poor group came into existence: those who had to pay for their grain.

Village life consisted of folks who belonged to craft households. Guilds were established to limit competition and allow the most number of people to make a decent living at the trade in question. From the late 15th to the early 17th century is sometimes seen as an era of progress: increasing spheres of trade and early capitalism brought Europe closer to modernity. For the common people, however, this period was not progressive. "Re-ensurfment, declining living standards, and, in particular, an increase in structural poverty, and the emergence of a social and economic gulf between the few wealthy and the many poor were the lot of the vast mass of the population of sixteenth-century Europe." (p.62)

The Power of the Word: Renaissance and Reformation
Euan Cameron

The italic hand was re-developed at the turn of the century (1400s) and the printing press was established by 1450. Most early printed works were Bibles, naturally because these could be read by priests, the largest class of educated men. But by the beginning of the 16th century, huge numbers of classical works in Latin, Greek and Italian were printed by, for instance, Aldus Manutius of Venice. Although the Renaissance did not quite re-discover the classics, they rethought how the classical authors were to be understood. They rejected the commentary and thinking of the Middle Ages, wanting to see the original without surrounding verbiage. The concept of an original historical concept is attributed to the Renaissance (to Petrarch). Renaissance writers did indeed practice
paroemiography -- the art of collecting the sayings of sophists and rhetoricians, but they were more concerned to develop a forceful, elegant and original style. Erasmus's efforts to apply textual criticism to the Bible itself helped to created the Reformation. Paring away tradition also meant paring away church tradition.

The habit of observation together with the ability to print pictures created a whole new world for medicine. Based on direct anatomical observations, would-be healers had a far better understanding of what was, in fact, in the human body. Just as Andreas Vesalius of Brussels supplanted Galen of Pergamum (129-199 AD), Ptolemy was supplanted by Copernicus. (see pages 78-80 for a good short description). Cameron briefly summarizes traditional Christianity, which included the rights of authoritative church, a cycle of feasts and rituals, and the support of saints, most especially Mary. The Reformation emphasized, instead, the Word of God, eliminated of most feasts and rituals, and established a living community of (disciplined) saints. Although the Catholic church responded and changed - changed not only because of the Reformation, but because of the needs of the world around it, the polarization was sufficient for war, as religion and politics were tied together.

War, Religion and the State
Steven Gunn

Gunn tells us that the long-term trend was for larger states to consume the smaller one in a process of consolidation. However, some well-organized small powers held their own against the great powers: Switzerland, for example, and Holland. There were many small rebellions, but the only one that posed a real threat to the ruling powers was the German Peasant's Rebellion (Bundschuhe) from 1524-26. Speaking of the German territories, constant pressure came from the Turks to the East; the battle line wavered between Hungary and Vienna. Spain also defied the Ottomans and scored a huge victory at Lepanto in 1571. Important to any understanding of war and the state are the affairs of the Hapsburgs. Their domains spanned Austria, Spain and at one point, nearly England (when Elizabeth was thinking of Phillip II of Spain). Through various inheritances Charles V of Spain governed the Netherlands, Spain and Austria and was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The constant enemies of the Hapsburgs were the Valois of France, the Dutch, and most of the time, the English. Italy became one of the battlegrounds between the Valois and the Hapsburgs. Charles lived across the Protestant Reformation and abdicated after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which held until 1618. The increasing use of firearms, the rising price of food, and the new defensive fortifications called for a much larger army at a time when people were more willing to be recruited. War created several different kinds of stalemates: one , the siege stalemate, in which it was difficult to find or claim a victory; and two, the taxation stalemate, in which kings, requiring greater armies, borrowed against taxes. Debt grew so great that it was impossible to borrow or to repay. Bureaucracy and propaganda rose together, but to a limited audience, says Gunn. Gunn offers a good image on page 118.

Finally, Gunn offers a précis of the 30 Years' War. Essentially, internal opposition to the Hapsburgs spread out and wrapped all of Europe in war.

Seventeenth Century

Colonies, Enterprises and Wealth: The Economies of Europe and the Wider World
R. A. Houston

In 1600 the richest parts Spain were ruled by the Hapsburgs in Spain, Northern Italy, Southern German and the Low Countries. The first European empire arose from Spain. Houston carries forward the description offered by Rowlands: the nuclear household, the rise in population, the gendering of work, childbirth rates (5-6 per woman) and the presence/absence of serfdom. The beginning of overseas colonization saw the addition of tea, coffee and sugar as luxuries to be desired. Mortality rates were still very high, and it appears that at least one person in 12 was blind or crippled. Gregory King in 1688 estimated that about 40 percent of England's "GDP" came from agriculture, and 30 percent from overseas trade and re-export. Changes in agriculture created an increased grain yield. In 1600 a peasant could feed his own and half of another family; by 1700 a peasant could feed his own and all of another family. Energy was limited to rivers, wind, animal or human muscle. For energy, people burned wood, coal or peat.

Towns, although small, were motors of economic change in the 17th century. Towns gathered and focused capital. Bills of exchange were developed in towns that engaged in international trade. States diverted funds from industry and commerce into bureaucracy and armies. Double-entry bookkeeping was developed in about 1450, but spread via the book by Luca Pacioli 1494, and the Dutch had a tulip bulb craze around 1636. Among the luxury goods that were being acquired were clocks. About 1 in 10 households had a clock in 1675, compared with half in 1715. Towns not only marketed financial services, but they also served as centers of manufacturing. Weavers and guild organizations were in competition with putting-out industries. Leading bourgeoisie lenders played some part in government strategies.

Mercantilism was the dominant theory of government economics: prevent the outflow of precious metals; be self-sufficient in food and manufacture; protect trade and treat trade as a zero-sum game. Historians like Braudel argued that the accumulation of capital through international trade became the prime force of capitalist growth in the 19th century. Those who traded, however, tended to plough it back into arms, land and honors. About 1 million men left the Netherlands to work for the VOC between 1600-1800. About 600,000 died during their tour of duty. So migrators were a cross-section of society, including more than thieves, pickpockets, rogues and whores. When they encountered natives, be they Irish, Polynesians or South American Indians, there was there was plenty of prejudice.

By 1700 there was not such a thing as a truly European economy; rather there were trade zones that touched, united by general famines in the late 1690s. What were the elements in these zones? Towns are important in Northwestern Europe, but they didn't touch Spanish or Russian agriculture, trade and industry. The Dutch did success through commerce and shipping, but they were supplanted by the English. Groceries, semi-durable goods and human beings were the important trade goods. See p. 168 for World Trade Routes.

Embattled Faiths: Religion and Natural Philosopy
Robin Briggs

Although science would eventually define itself in opposition to older world views, in this century science was not in opposition to Christianity. It began to break free from Aristotelian and occultist themes. When both Catholics and Protestants set out to reform the church, they didn't realize that repudiation of ritual would lead to direct observation, and that internal religious would lead to intensified individualism. Two of the points under simultaneous reform were the traditions of the Catholic church and the education of the clergy. An educated clergy in turn led to an educated (reading) populace in Protestant eras. The habit of distinguishing between the old and the new allowed scientific inquiry to do the same. Briggs reminds us not to misunderstand the religious motivations of rulers; their piety carried over into their policy. Consider PhillipV, Louis XIII, Emperor Ferdinand II, (endless troubling edict of Restitution 1629) Gustavus Adolphus, Maximilian of Bavaria, etc. The Dutch (Calvinist) and the English (Anglicans) had both to learn to live in a civil society not dominated by religious zealots. What about the position of women in families? While the Protestants had greater emphasis on nuclear families, women were less tolerated in power. The Catholics had rituals which allowed women a place in power. Both camps had powerful feminine pietists who have left behind a body of writings. Witchcraft appears to be an overflow of envy, a fear of one's neighbors, a superstitious belief of the devil, children as accusers: it is an expression of a social as well as religious problem, but I don't think he's got a grip on it either. Distortion and determinism p. 190 are the sins of historian

Four scientists of importance in this century are Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler. Descartes's Theory of Matter was also a subject of much debate, and tested by the vacuum pump experiments of Boyle and the mercury experiments of Torricelli. Key breakthroughs are the telescope, the microscope and the vacuum pump. Key institutions are the Royal Society and the Paris Academy. During this century Anton Van Leeuwenhoeck speculated that diseases have their own life. The projectors - connected partly to the Royal Society - offered some crazy schemes - canals X and so on. While machine tools remained problematic, clocks were being built (one-off) with precision. Probability theory is advanced in this century, and John of Graunt was admitted to the Royal Society for his work on bills of mortality.

Although this is a time of continuity, some of the important changes are as follows: antiquity lost its authority; direct observation was more important for establishing claims about the world. Tradition was discarded in the church, and that justified the intellectual radicalism of the 17th century - a victim of its own corrosive thinking. Power was garnered through understanding of nature as a rule-based entity.

Warfare, Crisis and Absolutism
Jeremy Black

Black begins with a short précis of European Expansion. The Russians got to the Eastern Pacific, Spain got to the Philippines, the Portuguese, Dutch and French found bases in West Africa. The Spanish and Portuguese also found power bases in North America as did the English and French. The Dutch yielded New Amsterdam to the English in 1664. The Thirty Years' War is covered again. From 1618-1625 the revolution was won by the Imperial Catholic troops; after the Swedish and the French got involved, it was won by the Protestants. The Peace of Westphalia ended the Protestant-Catholic wars, but not the conflicts between France and Spain, which continued. And between 1640 and 1660 Britain had a Civil War, which Black argues was a "picture in little" of the Continent. Is there such a thing as absolutism. Yes, there were more powerful at the end of the century. But the current trend is to debunk the all-powerful mythology. Louis XIV embodies absolutism and his policies were to oppose the Spanish by any means and increase his own mythology. See p. 222-226 Most important is the War of Spanish Succession, which pitted the British and Dutch and Hapsburgs against the French, and ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. France sank as a power, Britain and Prussia rose, but the prestige of the Sun King was never quite eclipsed. The Ottomans were still fighting on the border, and in the saving of Vienna in 1683 Hungary was re-taken. Russia began to rise, Peter the Great, who modernized his country.

Eighteenth Century

A Widening Market in Consumer Goods
James C. Riley

First to note, is that Western Europe, led by France and England, had a higher population, and the result was a re-distribution of people and resources toward the West. By the end of the 18th century a rise in life expectancy brought the average age from about 35 to roughly 75 years. It began in a small way in the population of Northwestern Europe, France and the Nordic Lands. People tended to live longer in villages, and by the end of the century, it did make a difference which socio-economic class you belonged to. (In other words, disease had less of an effect, and diet had more).

If we compare the wages of a single earner in the 18th century to our own age, then the distinct feature of the 18th century as compared to our own is its poverty, but if we add in the uncounted work of women and children, then it is less certain that the 18th century was poor. Specialization happened more in the towns than the countryside, because it is something of a risk to specialize, especially if one lives outside an urban market. Land yields remained modest, about 1/3 of modern yields, but experiments with crop rotation and manuring slowly changed yields for the better. The potato is a huge addition to the calorie content of the average person's diet. It requires more work to sow, but it well repays the labor. Most people still ate grains (in bread and beer), soup and eggs, and looked with some suspicion on fruits and vegetables.

Manufacturing and industry consisted of textiles and metal work, some glass working and pottery, transportation and services. Most manufacturing was concentrated in France, England, areas around Leipzig and Budapest, Lisbon in Portugal, the bottom parts of Spain. At the end of the 18th century there were capital intensive factories, but at the beginning, goods were produced in households. Riley claims that ordinary people began to acquired more goods before the industrial revolution, and he wonders why it is people felt the need to own things, and how they got the money to do so.

Why did England mobilize people in factories and workshops sooner than other countries? It possessed a favorable and unique set of circumstance: water for supplying power, coal, good waterways, transport services, a dense and migratory population, a well-developed cottage industry and well-established trade routes to foreign markets. It had more of these features than any country except the Low Countries. When, for instance, farmers added off-season activities to their work year, they began to rationalize their time. When workers began to place a value on their time, then they might choose to forego some kind of leisure for work (and pay). Farmers who worked in their spare time in the putting out system rival and overlapped the town trade guilds. They thus circumvented the system that kept competition from being ruinous. Day laborers who sat a little bit below farmers on the pay scale were much more dependent on the putting out system.

How did people get money when they weren't at work? There were pawn banks where they could bring goods for cash. There were also guild loans or loans from a landlord. "In the old regime, as we are just learning, even ordinary people possessing only commonplace work skills often lived complex lives requiring seasonal migration and astute financial planning." (251). When one considers economic growth, Riley reminds us that the growth of the service sector was quite large, accounting for some 44% of the output. It was largely invisible, and is now largely untold, including transport, retailing and other service activities. The price of basic goods on different markets moved together, which is a sign of economic specialization.

The 18th century saw a move away from Amsterdam as the major entrepot to London. As most other authors have argued, trade in international goods was simply not enough to build national wealth, and fortunes were built on trade internally in Europe. (humm - I think this cannot be true in individual cases, although it is probably true for the middle class, if one existed!) In the 17th century governments had been dominated by the notion of mercantilism. In the 18th century the notion that there could be an enlargement of the "trade pie" emerged. Resources could be fostered by larger populations and economic activities. We can look to Frederick the Great of Prussia for this. War, of course, was one of the major economic activities, but also states took measure to protect social welfare. For example, to deal with the growing threat of famine, anticipated because population growth appeared to gain on output, the Spanish government created public surplus stores of grain, enough to cover two full months.

Riley returns to the question of consumerism. Yes, of course, goods are a way to store wealth if you cannot get access to a bank, and they can be pawned, but that's not the whole story. What did they buy: more furniture, more clothes, wardrobes and dressers, wallpaper, clocks, pocket watches, chamberpots and razors - it was the dawn of the age of the shopkeeper, in which small home shops proliferated. They began to drink tea and coffee. They bought candles and lamps, toys, books and newspapers, and they brought prepared foods at take-out counters. They also hired instructors to teach their children. They began to think about smells and higher ceilings. Travel time from Paris to Marseilles was cut from 7 days to 3 days. In each city and county, the consumer revolution pre-dated industrial modernization. The origins, Riley suggests, seems to lie in a secularization of attitudes and behavior. They turned away from asceticism and exalted materialism. Novel reading is even included - having read about them, people desire more experiences.

Although wages apparently declined, ownership of goods increased. It could be that the measures used do not account for the extra hours people worked, or for the labor of women and children, but it could also be that more people were being paid in cash and not in kind, and so that highly skilled workers didn't gain as much relative to the rest of the economy. He concludes that the leading factor of the economy wasn't making textiles, and a widening range of goods. Rather, the leading factor was the demand of urban consumers for larger quantities of goods and the sharply diversified variety of goods and services available. So….modern economic growth originated before steam engines in factors, before mass production; rather, by demand as sketched above, and satisfied largely by rising number of small craft shops and service providers. It's not innovations of scale, use of technology or investment. "Industrial modernization is often said to have promoted 'capitalism,' meaning not merely investment in productive assets but also a rapacious quest for profits. The consumer revolution calls attention, in contrast, to an enlargement of traditional means of production and therefore to the growth of working-class capitalism." (264)

The Enlightenment
Norman Hampson

The Enlightenment was a change from a vision of life as a pilgrimage of grace and trials
to life as a human-centered activity taking place in a law-governed universe with historical progress at its core. Some humans' lives can be compared to others not in terms of typography but simply in terms of event. Locke, for instance, argued that the human mind gathered thoughts and ideas through the product of sensation and reflection. It implied that people brought up in different circumstances were bound and right to come to different conclusions about life. Hampson argues that the Enlightenment was different things to different people. To some it argued for more practical efficiency, to others, it signaled a more secular attitude toward life, to yet others it meant a more purified religion. Ordinary people maybe thought of it as changed behavior in their social superiors: for instance, they might still believe in the existence of witches, but they were not allowed to burn them.

Ideas about God are very important. God is a benevolent law-giver; He is remote - and your senses are all you have to apprehend Him and everything else. Men and woman moved from faith in God to faith in an ethical code (Does he mean faith in the idea, "if I treat you properly, you will treat me properly?" Because people certainly say "I hope the Big Guy is looking out for me," and not, "I hope the second commandment is looking out for me." ) Here is key change in beliefs: people are (probably) basically good, and each person is entitled to some stint of happiness. Of course, the big question becomes, "then why are some people so bad?" There are a variety of answers: first, society corrupts humans; second, they have a flaw in their physiological and psychological make-up; third, it is a combination of nature and nurture both. Here, Hampson says "the road of enlightenment seemed to lead toward the determinist abyss." (274) The debate takes on new dimensions when we think about the age of the universe and the species as a whole having enough time to work out our biological quirks. Other answers take us from the question of reason to the question of feeling. The 18th century sees the rise of the Man of Sentiment. (this is a big deal in novel-writing!) The Man of Sentiment lets his emotional conscience be his guide. It is kind of return to the religious attitudes of the 17th century, except now the source of authority is individual inspiration, rather than the corporate doctrine of the Church, of a direct experience of God. At any rate, these concepts didn't make a whole lot of dent on the common person, or made the biggest dent in the French revolution.

Self interest and economic rationalization is paired with self-interest and religious rationalization. We think about allowing the market to work freely; no one quite did that, but everybody experimented with it a little bit. Most governments have to balance against "in the long run it will be good for us," with traditional care-taking issues. As "As Keynes was to remind a later generation, in the long run we are all dead." (278). So it was necessary to balance ideas of free markets against traditional ideas of protection, tariffs, and so on. He quotes a nobleman who says, after the French Revolution - all of the bonds are broken between us" and then gains courage to say "increase our charitable donations, because as long as Marsay is mine, I will not allow anyone to go short of food or clothing." (279) The most important issue for stability is the price and availability of bread.

Another issue is the question of society. Who or what is natural society and who would want it? How do you balance between liberty and justice? The whole notion that one would not want an artificial and structured society is very new. That one would want an utopia of some sort… Hampson said that the demolition of the past led men further than they had originally intended to go.

Turning from society to politics, Hampson says that there are two main lines of thinking about what enlightenment thought created: first is the administrative approach, commending itself to rulers impatient to maximize their power and resources. What matters here is the implementation of the correct policies, leading to the development of more resources. The second is approach is simply to put freedom or liberty first, and to let society find the way to best organize its goods and services to preserve those liberties. Wise legislators modify or manipulate rewards, but in this idea power must needs be fragmented in order to ensure individual liberty. In the other, power must be solidified and expressed in order to ensure good government. In the totalitarian ideal, personal liberty and total self-subordination could be combined - a kind of secular religion (in fact, what many Christians conceive heaven to be). People who felt this way pointed towards the classical treatises on good government (Plato). But the concept was new: everyone was to be a citizen, and in addition, emotion (sentiment) should take precedence over reason. Oh my, what a mix!

The Enlightenment has different effects in different places. Prussia to Spain to England has many forms. The church is still a powerful segment of society and did oppose the Enlightenment in some places, although not all. In Spain the Inquisition was strong enough to repel heresies, but in Florence, although Galileo's works were banned, they erected a statue in his honor. In Russia, French was the language of the court and foreign books were translated and published. Scottish contributions to the Enlightenment helped to form a national identity. In France, the ideas of the philosophes were regarded with suspicion. (Under Louis XVI, Turgot was a disaster). In general, Western Europe had more printing presses, more newspapers, a more educated populace, more access to the ideas of the Enlightenment and more willingness to entertain those ideas. Russia was influenced most by German born Catherine the Great, likewise those ideas that penetrated Prussia and Austria and Spain. In theory and practice, the terror was a negation of the Enlightenment, and of course, put a big black eye on the whole thing. Russeau's ideas were applied to terrifying effect: the Revolution was seen as threat to the social order, and many repudiated the philosophes. France went to war with almost the rest of Europe after the revolution.

Hampson, living at the end of the 20th century, characterizes the optimism of the Enlightenment as a false dawn. "Evil is not so easily dismissed as a remediable consequence of superstition; knowledge is no guarantee of harmony or progress…. "[S]cience has been made the instrument of barbarism." (296) However, there are some practical victories to enjoy: people stopped burning witches and heretics, serfdom was on its way out, and the abolition of the slave trade had been launched. Judicial torture was being abolished and the death penalty was under attack. One cannot overlook the advent of industrialism, which, whatever else it has done, has brought basic necessities to most in industrialized nations.

Europe Turns East
H. M. Scott

What happens in the last half of the 18th century? Shifts in the international order, were, in the long term, decisive. The Pentarchy, the five Great Powers, was composed of Russia, Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, Spain and France, and were developed and positioned in this period. Germany and Italy, by the by, did not exist as nation-states. Their power was made possible by the innovations made by governing bodies of each nation. The two greatest political success stories of the age are the Prussian monarchy and the Russian Empire. He starts in the 1628-1741 and notes three important conflicts: first, the conflict between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs. This effectually ends in 1682 when the Ottomans are repelled at Vienna. Vienna was improved and developed into the Hapsburg court, figuring in the Hapsburg self-confidence and display. The Spanish branch was extinguished in 1700 with the death of Carlos (Charles) II. The Hapsburgs were never really well-organized, but they did beat the Turks! The second set of conflicts were against Louis the XVI: the Glorious Revolution brings to power William III, a stead opponent of France; the War of Spanish Succession settled at the Peace of Utrecht, put Louis XVI's great-grandson Philip V on the throne of Spain. The third locus of conflict is the war between Russia and Sweden, which is won by Russia and permits the dividing of Poland. Sweden was demoted to a second rank power. Russia contained an important Baltic port and controlled Poland and Lithuania.

Governments assumed direct responsibility for raising and equipping armies (no more contractors) and so built barracks and garrisons for their soldiers, keeping up ports for shipping food, and having enough on hand to pay the soldiers. How to create an internal administration? Spain, France, Northern Italy, Berlin and others created the provincial intendant. That person was not a noble, but an administrator directly responsible to the government. The role varied, and was semi-judicial, but always involved with taxes. The Swedish-Russian model was conscription (every so-many households must produce a soldier) and allotment (soldiers get land). Although it was efficient, it was burdensome: service was for life, and unluckily, most of the conscripts died. The overhaul of the Russian administrative system under Peter the Great (a dynamic man if ever there was one was influential in Prussia. Russia then had trade, a good organized army, a Baltic Navy, and military and administrative institutions, an army to collect the taxes, but he didn't have a son who could carry forward.

Frederick William I ,and his son, Frederick the Great of Prussia, are also outstanding Enlightenment rulers. Society was militarized and an efficient system of recruiting was advised. The military-noble Junkers were developed. He conquered provinces and triggered the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War, both because of his acquisitive tendencies.

Were these modern states? They were composite monarchies. Although they began to do statistics and surveys, and to rationalize their policies, they nevertheless had groups of officials who were only partially trained, many of them derived from the nobility. There were still a chain of favors, clerics involved in politics, and a central king. However, there were schools that trained administrators, but they were thinly scattered. The Habsburgs, drowning in provincial law, were also drowning in paperwork which increased enormously in this era.

Enlightened rulers did, in fact, change things: they encouraged manufacturing enterprises; developed protectionist tariffs; tried to take care of farming; improved transportation; reformed the Catholic church (particularly the onerous number of feast and saint's days and its ownership of large tracts of land); encouraged toleration everywhere; and limited judicial torture. The king was the first servant of his people, and rulers studied the craft of ruling.

Russia gained quite a bit during the last half of the century. It fought for the first time in the Seven Years' War. It also held Poland. Russia's rise was at the expense of France, which was then experiencing huge financial problems. In 1789 the next century begins.

Epilogue: The Old Order Transformed 1789-1815

Key points:

1) France was bankrupt. When the angry Estates General finally met, they eliminated most of the old structure. They negotiated with the King for two years, but were unable to work out a deal. Monarchy was suspended in 1792 and the king and queen were executed in 1793. The Reign of Terror lasted through 1794, a time when most of the major powers were at war with France. General Napoleon in 1796 began to win some battles, and took power, but the whole thing stayed unstable till the brief peace of Amiens in 1802 when Napoleon became "Consul for Life." Then the ruling map of central Europe was redrawn. Napoleon and his family members held the West and South. Prussia and Austria remained at the center. Russia held the East, and Britain held the seas. The empire was brief, suffering a disastrous defeat in the winter of 1812 in Russia, and finished finally in June at Waterloo in 1815. Our author says this defeat lingered; in terms of production, France fell permanently behind Germany, England, and the USA.