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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.