CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Summary

Between the Peace of Paris 1763 and the outbreak, thirty years later, of the war of the first European coalition against revolutionary France, the outlines of a Western civilisation which was recognisably ‘modern’ in most of its characteristic attitudes and attributes rapidly emerged. A civil war between the English colonists in North America and the imperial government at Westminster, unparalleled industrial and commercial expansion in Britain, radical social and political reforms in France and a steady but uneven increase in population imposed on the western world a momentum of revolutionary change which has never since slackened. On a comparatively minor scale, but with results which helped to determine the trend towards greater social and political equality at this period, there occurred in western Europe another series of revolutions—such as the struggles in the small city republic of Geneva between 1768 and 1789 for the political and economic emancipation of the middle-class représentants and the socially inferior and unprivileged natifs, the Dutch ‘patriotic’ movement of 1784–7 and the schismatic revolt of the Belgian democrats in the Austrian Netherlands between 1789 and 1792. Even in conservative England the radicalism inherent in the ambivalent Whig creed received a fresh emphasis in the county ‘association’ movement of 1779–80 in favour of parliamentary reform and the agitation in 1787–90 for the relief of the Protestant Dissenters from their civic disabilities under the Test and Corporation Acts. The closer study of these radical movements and of their connections with the American and French revolutions has led some historians to see in this period a pattern of radical reform and revolutionary change common to many parts of the western world.