A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.
Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE VOLUME I 1500-1815
This book represents an attempt on the part of the author to satisfy a very real need of a textbook which will reach far enough back to afford secure foundations for a college course in modern European history.
The book is a long one, and purposely so. Not only does it undertake to deal with a period at once the most complicated and the most inherently interesting of any in the whole recorded history of mankind, but it aims to impart sufficiently detailed information about the various topics discussed to make the college student feel that he is advanced a grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading in large standard treatises. All too frequently, however, such assignments, excellent in themselves, leave woeful gaps which a slender elementary manual is inadequate to fill. And the student becomes too painfully aware, for his own educational good, of a chasmal separation between his textbook and his collateral reading. The present manual is designed to supply a narrative of such proportions that the need of additional reading will be somewhat lessened, and at the same time it is provided with critical bibliographies and so arranged as to enable the judicious instructor more easily to make substitutions here and there from other works or to pass over this or that section entirely. Perhaps these considerations will commend to others the judgment of the author in writing a long book.
Nowadays prefaces to textbooks of modern history almost invariably proclaim their writers' intention to stress recent happenings or at least those events of the past which have had a direct bearing upon the present. An examination of the following pages will show that in the case of this book there is no discrepancy between such an intention on the part of the present writer and its achievement. Beginning with the sixteenth century, the story of the civilization of modern Europe is carried down the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with constant crescendo . Of the total space devoted to the four hundred years under review, the last century fills half. And the greatest care has been taken to bring the story down to date and to indicate as clearly and calmly as possible the underlying causes of the vast contemporaneous European war, which has already put a new complexion on our old historical knowledge and made everything that went before seem part and parcel of an old régime.
Carlton J. H. Hayes
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PREFACE
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
CONTENTS
PART I
PART II
PART III
INTRODUCTION
ADDITIONAL READING
PART I
CHAPTER I
1. THE NEW NATIONAL MONARCHIES
ENGLAND
FRANCE
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
2. THE OLD HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
3. THE CITY-STATES
4. NORTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE YEAR 1500
ADDITIONAL READINGS
CHAPTER II
AGRICULTURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
TOWNS ON THE EVE OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
TRADE PRIOR TO THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
ESTABLISHMENT OF COLONIAL EMPIRES
EFFECTS OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER III
THE EMPEROR CHARLES V
PHILIP II AND THE PREDOMINANCE OF SPAIN
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER IV
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AT THE OPENING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
THE PROTESTANT REVOLT
LUTHERANISM
CALVINISM
ANGLICANISM
THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION
SUMMARY OF THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER V
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING
HUMANISM
ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
NATIONAL LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL SCIENCE
ADDITIONAL READING
PART II
CHAPTER VI
GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE: HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN
STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER VII
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
EXTENSION OF FRENCH FRONTIERS
THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER VIII
THE PURITAN REVOLUTION
THE RESTORATION: THE REIGN OF CHARLES II
THE "GLORIOUS REVOLUTION" AND THE FINAL ESTABLISHMENT OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN GREAT BRITAIN
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER IX
FRENCH AND ENGLISH COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
PRELIMINARY ENCOUNTERS, 1689-1748
THE TRIUMPH OF GREAT BRITAIN: THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR, 1756-1763
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER X
THE BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THE WAR OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 1775-1783
THE REFORMATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER XI
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IN DECLINE
THE HABSBURG DOMINIONS
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. THE HOHENZOLLERNS
THE MINOR GERMAN STATES
THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN HOHENZOLLERNS AND HABSBURGS
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER XII
RUSSIA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
PETER THE GREAT
SWEDEN AND THE CAREER OF CHARLES XII
CATHERINE THE GREAT: THE DEFEAT OF TURKEY AND THE DISMEMBERMENT OF POLAND
ADDITIONAL READING
PART III
CHAPTER XIII
AGRICULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES
RELIGIOUS AND ECCLESIASTICAL CONDITIONS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER XIV
THE BRITISH MONARCHY
THE ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS
THE FRENCH MONARCHY
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER XV
THE END OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE, 1789
THE END OF THE OLD RÉGIME: THE NATIONAL CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, 1789-1791
THE LIMITED MONARCHY IN OPERATION: THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY (1791-1792) AND THE OUTBREAK OF FOREIGN WAR
THE DIRECTORY (1795-1799) AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE REPUBLIC INTO A MILITARY DICTATORSHIP
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789-1799)
ADDITIONAL READING
CHAPTER XVI
THE FRENCH REPUBLIC UNDER THE CONSULATE, 1799-1804
THE FRENCH EMPIRE AND ITS TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
DESTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ERA OF NAPOLEON
ADDITIONAL READING