Download Lecture 20—State Building and Society in Early Modern Europe

Lecture 20—State Building and Society in Early
Modern Europe
Why Did Europe come to dominate the world and shape history from 1600 to
WWII?
1. By 1750, five states dominated Europe: Great Britain, France, Prussia,
Russia, and Austria. The struggles between them heavily shaped the rest of
the world as well as they spilled out of Europe into the rest of the world.
2. During this time, Europeans innovated in economic matters, making huge
advances in agriculture and goods production.
European Political Consolidation
Two Models of Political Development: In the sixteenth century, warfare became
much more expensive as it moved from privatized warfare supported by nobles to
the central government raising professional soldier armies of musketeers and
pikemen. Monarchies that established their own independent revenue streams
could build strong armies and become absolute monarchs. Other governments
continued to have a legislature which held the purse strings of war; in England,
this leads to Parliamentary monarchy (called 'Constitutional' or 'Limited'
monarchy in other places. The Netherlands had a governing legislature, but no
real king).
Towards Parliamentary Government in England:
The Stuart Dynasty: The death of Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1603
led to the accession of her first cousin, twice removed, King James VI of
Scotland, who became King James I (1603-1625 as King of England,
1567-1625 as King James VI of Scotland). This made him ruler of Ireland
and England as well as Scotland, uniting Britain for the first time. The
Stuart dynasty would clash with its its subjects over religious reform,
taxation, war, and the role of Parliament. James I and his son Charles I
(1625-1649) tried to rule without Parliament, lacking the skills and
resources to bend it to their will; they clashed heavily with their Scottish,
Irish, and English subjects over the question of the religious future of
Ireland, Scotland, and England. Both kings fought against the Puritans,
who wanted a Calvinist reformation in England, to make the English
church more like the Calvinist-modelled Scottish Church. (And both
kings continued to suppress Catholicism in Ireland.) And they favored
peace with traditional foes France and Spain (in part because they could
not afford to fight wars with other countries due to Parliament's
unwillingness to vote taxes).
The British Civil Wars: The efforts of Charles I to support the High
Churchmen (enemies of the Puritans) in England and to force the Church
of Scotland to use the English Book of Common Prayer led to Civil War
when the Scots revolted and Charles proved unable to stop them without
Parliament, which demanded more control of royal affairs in return for
war money. A civil war now broke out between King and Parliament,
with those opposed to Puritanism backing the King. Two civil wars
ensued from 1642 to 1648, ending with the King's execution in 1649, but
also the purging of Parliament by its own army. England sank into
military dictatorship and religious moderation under Oliver Cromwell, a
moderate Puritan (hard, perhaps to imagine, but he was a man of unusual
religious tolerance who allowed any Protestant faith to operate unmolested
in England and even covertly allowed the Jews to return to England).
After his death, the English monarchy returned to power in 1660, under
Charles II (1660-85).
The Restoration: But the new monarchy still struggled with the problem
of religious settlement and finance. Charles II and his brother James II
(1685-8) solved this problem by going on the King of France's secret
payroll and trying to avoid foreign wars, while extending religious
tolerance but not political participation rights to English protestants
outside the Church of England. James II, however, himself became a
Catholic and his short reign foundered when he had a new son by an
Italian princess, Mary of Modena.
The Glorious Revolution: As a result, his own son-in-law, William of
Orange, married to his first child, Mary (a protestant) overthrew him in the
Glorious Revolution in 1688. A Bill of Rights was issued and religious
toleration for Protestants reinforced. Parliament would henceforth be
called on a triennial basis. The 1701 Act of Settlement arranged the future
unification of the English and Scottish Crowns.
William III (1689-1702) and Mary II (1689-1694) finally put the English
monarchy on an even keel by the introduction of Dutch finance methods,
but the system of a national bank, bonds issued in wartime and permanent
land taxes to pay for it all required close cooperation between King and
Parliament and ensured England would remain a limited, constitutional
monarchy. It also would lead to England becoming much more powerful
and free to act abroad after 1689 than it had been from 1453 to 1689.
Anne and The Hanoverians: Queen Anne (1702-1714) was the second
daughter of James II and the last of the Stuarts. On her death, her distant
cousins, the Hanoverian dynasty from Germany, now took the throne; this
dynasty still rules England, though it is now known as the 'House of
Windsor'. Under the early Hanoverians, Parliament and the Monarchy
settled into a balance with the rise of a key figure, the Prime Minister, an
unofficial title for whichever royal cabinet member could best mobilize a
majority in Parliament to carry out his will (and the King's will.) Under
the Hanoverians, England enjoyed the benefits of both substantial freedom
and liberty and the ability to field powerful military forces to protect
English interests abroad. Constitutional monarchy became a recipe for
success.
Rise of Absolute Monarchy in France / The World of Louis XIV (1643-1715)
Personal Rule: In his youth, Cardinal Mazarin ran France, trying to
consolidate personal power in the hands of the monarchy. (Louis was born
in 1638, so he was five when he became King and 23 when Mazarin died
in 1661.) This triggered a series of revolts in 1649-52 known as the
Fronde. This led Louis to tread lightly in some areas in the future,
avoiding changing and challenging local institutions when possible. On
Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis took direct control of the government.
Good Government: Louis ruled through a series of councils of minsters
(staffed from families long close to the crown or rising families with no
tradition of nobility) which handled major affairs such as the military or
justice, and he worked very hard to keep himself informed and involved in
decision making. Louis' palace at Versailles was built to hold his
government but also to help him control the nobility by cutting them off
from the rest of society and ritually subjecting them to himself.
The Divine Right of Kings: From his old tutor, Bishop Bossuet, he
derived the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, that God chose who was
to rule and gave them divinely backed absolute authority. Mere nobles
and parliaments had to bend to him. Frenchmen of the time believed
(we're not sure if it's true), that he had famously declared 'I am the State.'
He also tried to impose religious unity on France, revoking the Edict of
Nantes and driving off or forcing the conversion of French Huguenots.
Rise of Russia: Russia had been off in its own world for centuries, but now rose
to prominence in European affairs, having finally thrown off the threat of the
Mongol successor state, the Golden Horde, which had first ruled it, then
threatened it. Ivan IV (Grand Prince of Moscow 1533 to 1547 and Tsar of Russia
1547 to 1584), known to us as Ivan the Terrible, had crushed rebellious nobles ith
a secret police force (the Oprichina), conquered the Astrakhan and Siberian
Khanates, and tried unsuccessfully to seize land on the Baltic coast for trade with
the rest of Europe.
Birth of the Romanov Dynasty: In his last years, Ivan IV foundered in
madness and defeat in war, and his death led to the Time of Troubles
(1584-1613), a period of civil war, usurpation, and repeated imposters
claiming to be Ivan's dead son Dmitri. (One such usurper met his death by
being fired out of a cannon towards Poland.) This ends with the ascension
of Mikhail Romanov in 1613. But the early Romanovs still clashed with
the Boyars (the old Russian nobility).
Peter the Great (1682-1725): Peter set out to modernize Russia, from
forcing the boyars to cut their beards to importing foreign craftsmen to
modernizing the army. He had two big goals: to break the power of the
boyars and the strelsi (the military guards of the capital) and to modernize
the military. He replaced the strelsi with a modernized military force
based on conscription of peasants, a force loyal to himself. He forced the
boyars to modernize their customs. He built a modernized navy as well,
once he obtained some land for ports and built a new capital, Saint
Petersburg. (He gained the land by taking it from Sweden in the Great
Northern War, 1700-1721.) He created a new system of 'colleges' on the
Swedish model to administer his government. He also abolished the
Patriarch of Russian Orthodoxy and replaced him with a government
department.
The Habsburg Empire and the Pragmatic Sanction
The Habsburg Family: This Austrian family of nobles ruled many
territories over the centuries. One branch ruled Spain from the early
1500s to the late 1600s. The German branch were Holy Roman Emperors
and built up a large personal domain in Europe including Austria,
Bohemia, and Hungary. They fought the Turks from the early 1500s to
the early 1700s, finally driving the Turks back and claiming a large chunk
of modern Romania and the Balkans.
The Pragmatic Sanction: Charles VI (1711-1740) had no male heir and
feared civil war on his death. He assembled a document, the Pragmatic
Sanction, which he tried to get other nations, his nobles, the legislatures,
etc, to agree to, to arrange a smooth succession for his heir, Maria
Theresa (1740-80). Despite this, the young king of Prussia, Frederick
(II) the Great (1740–1786), now challenged Maria's rule of the area
known as Silesia almost immediately on his death, starting the War of
Austrian Succession (1740-8). Maria ultimately lost Silesia to Frederick,
but held on to her other territories.
The Rise of Prussia: Frederick's state of Prussia would eventually unify
all of Germany; it began, however, as a tiny state named Brandenburg in
1417 around the city of Berlin, ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty.
Through a series of marriages and tiny wars, they built up a patchwork of
states across Germany and inside modern Poland, which collectively were
one of the stronger states in the Holy Roman Empire. They built up a
system of taxation by their own authority, backed by a standing army; in
return, the Prussian nobles, the Junkers, had absolute power over the serfs
on their estates. Taxes fell mostly on peasants and merchants and Junkers
came to dominate the officer corps. The rising military power of Prussia
enabled its rulers to get the grant of the title of King in 1701, and to field
the third-fourth largest army in Europe in the 18th century. Military
priorities dominated the Prussian state as nowhere else. Frederick II the
Great inherited this army from his father Frederick William I (17131740), but where his father had avoided war, he courted it. His invasion
of Silesia set Austria and Prussia on a collision course for the next century
and a half.
European Warfare: From Continental to World Conflict: The rise of these powers
fueled a series of wars driven by commercial and personal rivalries. Each round of
warfare spilled across more of the world, until every continent was involved to some
degree. European military power grew as did European commercial might. These wars
developed military technology and methods which would be used across the world by
Europeans.
The Wars of Louis XIV (1667-1714): Starting in 1667, Louis XIV led Europe
into a series of wars in his quest to bring France's boundaries to its 'natural
boundaries': the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.
1. War of Devolution (1667-8): Louis invaded Flanders, trying to claim
the territory of Babrant, a region of modern Belgium ruled by Spain.
2. Franco-Dutch War (1672-8): Louis teamed up with England to
attack the Dutch and their allies in Flanders. Inconclusive.
3. War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697): The League of
Augsburg (England, the Netherlands, many Holy Roman Empire
states, Sweden, and Spain) tried to stop further aggression into
Germany by France. Warfare now spills into North America.
4. War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714): Louis XIV
successfully claims the Spanish throne for his grandson, Philip of
Anjou (Philip V of Spain), but takes a heavy beating from a large
alliance against him. France was now exhausted. Fighting also in
North America.
The Eighteenth Century Colonial Arena: By the eighteenth century, the
Americas had been largely divided between colonial empires: The British and
French in the Caribbean, the Spanish in South and Central America and Mexico,
Portugal in Brazil, Britain in the original 13 states of the USA and the French in
modern Canada. The dutch had a few American colonies, but mainly were strong
in Southeast Asia. Each empire tried to keep out outside traders, but the Treaty of
Utrecht (1713) had given the English limited trading rights in Spain's empire.
The War of Jenkin's Ear (1739 to 1748) / War of the Austrian
Succession (1740-8): The War of Jenkin's Ear broke out between Spain
and England over the harrassment of English captain Jenkins, whose ear
was cut off by a Spanish officer who thought him a smuggler and/or
pirate. It erupted into general war when Prussia invaded Austria to steal
the region of Silesia from it in 1740, when Marie Theresa became Queen
of Austria. The French stepped in to support Prussia and Spain, linking
the wars, which were also fought in the colonies. Prussia gained Silesia;
elsewhere, the war was inconclusive.
The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) / The French and Indian War (in
NA, 1754-1763): This war began in the colonies with George
Washington's attack on French outposts in Pennsylvania in 1754, followed
by Frederick II of Prussia invading Saxony in 1756. France allied with
Austria and Britain with Prussia, reversing traditional alliances. Sweden,
Russia, and many other states joined the alliance of France and Austria
against Prussia. The death of the Russian empress saved Prussia from
destruction and in North America, the British and their colonists overran
Canada. Further, the French were driven from British territories in India
as well. This European war thus affected more non-Europeans than any
previous one. Britain emerged as a rising power in the world.
The Old Regime (1650-1789): The bloody experiences of the wars of religion caused
Europeans to turn away from revolutionary attempts to remake society in God's name (or
any name), and for a time, the nobility and kings came together to protect traditional
society. The ambitions of rising merchants and master craftsmen in the cities was, for the
moment, contained and delayed, though this would ultimately have explosive results in
and after 1789, leading to the turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
This detente was known as the Old Regime, a time of Absolute Monarchy, wealthy and
privileged (but politically weaker) nobility, uppity but politically weak rising merchants
and master craftsmen, stagnant and quietist state religions, and an odd combination of
rising commercial empires with stagnant agriculture hurt by the Little Ice Age and
population pushing the limits of the food supply. Instead of solving the problems of the
system, Kings and nobles turned to fighting each other in wars for control of trade routes
and each other's land. This worked fine so long as the rest of the population acquiesed
quietly in the Game of Kings. But it would end in blood in the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars (1650-1789).
Maintenance of Tradition: The Wars of Religion made most Europeans just
want peace and quiet. The result was a failure to innovate in the face of social
changes (rising non-noble economic power) and agricultural problems. The
Enlightenment thinkers were an exception, but they were largely ignored until too
late.
Hierarchy and Privilege: Rights were based on group membership, such as
being a citizen of London or a member of the nobility, and all of society had a
clear hierarchy with fixed rights and privileges. In theory, movement between
levels was largely blocked; in practice, efforts to keep wealthy folk from the
'lower' classes out of power would become increasingly difficult.
Aristocracy: The nobility had less power than time past, but many privileges and
prestige and the monarchs had to carefully cultivate them to keep them rich but
impotent. The nobility increasingly fought to keep its privileges in the face of
rising urban merchants and craftsmen below and royal manipulation from above.
Farmers: Farmers were largely poor; most of the population was now tenant
farmers, struggling to get by. Farmers in Eastern Europe were often still serfs, for
landlords had much more power in the east. The Little Ice Age was in full force,
shrinking growing seasons and lowering crop yields, even as the population
pushed the limits of food. Peasant land owners paid the bulk of taxes assessed to
the government. The result was frequent famine. In Russia, conditions for serfs
were absolutely terrible.
The Family Economy: Most units of production, from craftshops to farms were
family based, a group of relatives living together and pooling their resources and
production under the lead of a head of the family. The goal was not big profits
but rather to sustain the members of the family. Virtually everyone was part of a
family by blood or apprenticeship. Everyone worked; some in the family
business, some possibly outside it for wages.
Women and the Family Economy: Women were an important part of the labor
pool; they worked for their birth family, then for the family they married into.
Ideas of women staying home and being domestic date from a later era when
families could survive without women working. That only applied to nobles in
this era and the wealthiest of merchants. Marriage was an economic and social
and security necessity for women. Farm families often ended up with too many
daughters and would send some into domestic service at 12 or 14. Married
couples used crude birth control—animal organ condoms, coitus interruptus,
herbal methods (mostly useless), breastfeeding beyond what is necessary, or
whatever, to keep from having too many kids, as economic security was key.
The Revolution in Agriculture: During the Old Regime period, food prices slowly,
steadily rose, putting increased pressure on everyone to be able to afford to eat. It rose
faster than urban wages but not enough to help small landowners. Landlords and largescale farmers made better profits. Also, this influx of money enabled landlords and largescale farmers to begin a series of innovations: The Agricultural Revolution.
New Crops and Methods: This begins with the Dutch in the 16th-17th century.
The Dutch drained lands to turn into farmland and used new crops such as clover
and turnips which would restore lands drained of needed nutrients. The English
then adopted this and also became very large scale pastoralists as the land lords
confiscated old common lands and turned them into sheep runs. This replaced the
old medieval methods of land use (the open field system), which had involved
many jumbled together small plots of private land which couldn't be farmed very
efficiently and common lands, usually for everyone to graze animals together (the
system had been designed to force community cooperation, not for efficiency).
The conversion of these into private plots with land lords seizing most of the land
caused riots and chaos in the countryside. But in the long term, it led to vastly
more efficient farmer which helped cities to grow and fought off famine. At the
cost of small farmers, many who began to be driven off their lands to the cities.
The Eighteenth Century Industrial Revolution: In 18th century Britain, the
groundwork was laid for one of the largest transformations in human history: the birth of
the Industrial age. Agriculture was limited in its ability to produce wealth by the finite
amount of land useful for agriculture. But new methods of industrial production allowed
for vastly huger increases in craft production, making a huge expansion of wealth
possible. Technology multiplied human productivity by 10, 20, 50, 100, or more,
allowing for huge expansion of goods production; this made some people hugely rich and
others sank into poverty (like the old artisan class). In the long term, a larger economic
pie could be divided to make everyone better off than before...the problem then became
how exactly the new wealth would be distributed. And this growing economic power
would help Europeans to dominate the world for centuries. Most nations were unable to
adapt to this at first, and until they finally adjusted to this new way of doing things, those
nations who remained mired in the past soon found themselves puppets of Europe, turned
into sources of raw materials. Until they learned enough to cut the strings, but that's
much later this semester.
Industrial Leadership of Great Britain: The British were the first to
industrialize (followed by the USA and France). Unlike other nations, the
nobility was small and the interests of the commercial classes who drove the
Industrial Revolution had more weight in British government. Britain was
dependent, in fact, on commerce, trade, and production for its wealth. Combined
with the growing British commercial empire, this positioned the British well to be
the Industrial leader.
New Methods of Textile Production: For centuries, the British had
raised sheep to make wool for cloth. In the 18th century, they had access
to growing amounts of cotton for textile production as well. British
textiles were in demand in Africa as part of the triangle trade as well. This
gave the British incentive to innovate new mechanical methods to improve
production. Under the putting out system, merchants gave families raw
wool, cotton, and other materials to spin into thread or weave into cloth,
which the merchants then paid them for and sold the results for a profit.
Rising demand for cotton clothing forced ways to improve production
compatible with this system, such as the spinning jenny (James
Hargreave, 1765), a home-operable device for more efficient thread
production. (The flying shuttle (John Kay, 1730) had increased the speed
of cloth weaving.) In 1769, Richard Arkwright's water frame took
weaving out of the home and into new, larger workshops. It used water
power to produce pure cotton clothing. Factories now began to spring up.
The Steam Engine: The Greeks and Romans had steam engines, but
hadn't used them for much. The English invented them to help pump
water in mines, then turned them to providing a source of power for
machines that didn't need a river handy. In 1776, James Watt (17361819), working with toy manufacturer Matthew Boulton and cannon
manufacturer John Wilkinson, began producing the standard steam
engines which would fuel the early Industrial Revolution (though earlier
inventer Thomas Newcomen had made cruder ones earlier). It also would
fuel new forms of transportation—steam ships and steam trains.
Iron Production: The increase in machines required new methods of
producing iron and steel. In 1700, the British produced under 25,000 tons
of iron annually. The rise of the steam engine allowed better blasting of
the iron as it was processed, the British shifted from the use of charcoal to
the use of coke (a derivative of coal) in the process, and demand for iron
was now rising due to spreading mechanization. In 1784, Henry Cort
(1740-1800) developed a new method for melting and stirring the molten
iron, and a rolling mill for pressing it into new shapes.
European Cities: European cities grew in size and number from 1500 to 1800. In 1500,
there were 156 cities with a population of over 10,000 but only 4 (Paris, Milan, Venice,
Naples) with more than 100,000. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (212,000) and
Beijing (670,000) were as large or larger than any European city. By 1800, 363 cities
had 10,000 or more people and 17 were 100,000+. (Some 9% of the population was
urban.)
The Upper Classes: At the top of the heap were the merchants, bankers, nobles,
government officials, and clergy. The leaders of each city were a self-constituted
oligarchy which ran the city to benefit themselves. Cities' rights were defined and
guaranteed by royal charters.
The Middle Class: The middle class was a combination of the most successful
craftmasters, lesser merchants, petty officials, scholars, scribes, and professionals,
sometimes called the 'bourgeoisie'. They had ambitions of upward mobility but
usually found themselves blocked by the nobility. Absolutist monarchs liked to
recruit them to offices as their loyalty could be counted on more than that of
nobles. As time passed, they grew more and more resentful of the nobility. They
also feared the poor.
Artisans and Petty Businessmen: This group made up the bulk of the
population of any city and suffered extraction of their wealth at the hands of
nobles and the town oligarchs. Many were organized into guilds, though guilds
had declined in power from times past. Still, guilds provided stability, training,
and protection.
The Ghetto and the Jews: When allowed into countries at all, most western
European Jews lived in cities, but were in this age forced into ghettos:
neighborhoods made up entirely of Jews. Most Jews lived in Eastern Europe,
where mass expulsions of Jews had not taken place in the middle ages. (And in
the Eastern countryside, they lived in seperate Jewish farming villages.) To
contrast, in 1700, 100,000 Jews lived in Britain; 3 million lived in Poland,
Lithuania and the Ukraine. Legally, Jews were resident aliens with minimal
rights. (In Britain in 1700, it wasn't even clear if it was actually LEGAL for Jews
to be in Britain.) The richest Jews were the financiers, who usually worked in
close alliance with court nobles, kings, or high officials. They essentially
gambled on making a good return on those loans which ACTUALLY got paid
back. Which was not all of them. Most Jews, however, lived in poverty as small
craftsmen, farmers, or peddlars. Jews were regarded as inferior in every way and
were often abused and treated badly.