Chapter I - Introduction

Summary

The phase of European experience studied in the present volume, and to some extent in its predecessor, has elastic chronological boundaries and no such recognizable identity as may be claimed for ages of reformation or revolution, though it contained features of both. Nor does a single figure bestride it. The conventional description which fixes on the decline of France is at best a half-truth, and then only for the West. Even in characterizing ‘The Age of Louis XIV’ from 1661, the editors of the ‘old’ C.M.H. were aware of ‘the long, and seemingly remote, history of the Ottoman Power in Europe’ as a main determinant of a period which lacked ‘the organic unity which belongs to our Napoleon volume’ and as soon as this ‘question of life and death’ had been settled at Carlowitz in 1699, ‘a large division of the canvas is filled by the great Swedish or “Northern” War’, formally closed at Nystad in 1721, six years after the Roi Soleil had gone to his grave but more than three before Peter, the great tsar, was to follow him.

If we consider the political geography of these years (ch. v), it is the changing map of eastern Europe which impresses us first. By 1716 Sweden was stripped of her trans-Baltic provinces, the basis of her great-power position (ch. XX(I)), with a commerce and revenues that had long been her answer to Danish control of the Sound and Dutch domination of the trade which passed through it.