Peter H. Wilson – A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe

Автор: Peter H. Wilson
Название книги: A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Европы
Страницы: 609
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This Companion contains 31 essays by leading international scholars to provide an overview of the key debates on eighteenth-century Europe.

Examines the social, intellectual, economic, cultural, and political changes that took place throughout eighteenth-century Europe
Focuses on Europe while placing it within its international context
Considers not just major western European states, but also the often neglected countries of eastern and northern Europe

For most modern geographers, Europe is no longer a continent, but the western tip
of Afroeurasia, the world’s largest land mass. There is some doubt whether historians
should also still treat Europe as a distinct fi eld. The current interest in world history
questions older national and regional subdivisions as artifi cial constructs deriving
largely from the nineteenth century, while so-called “micro-historians” encourage us
to examine each community in detail and to explore individual experience. Yet eighteenth-
century Europeans saw themselves as living in a distinct continent. Though
infl uenced by physical geography, their concept of Europe was primarily cultural: a
means to distinguish between themselves and other peoples. Like all such cultural
constructs, defi nition depended on identifying boundaries often associated with the
perceived character of communities rather than the physical locations they occupied.
This was most problematic to the east where there was no agreed physical frontier,
but even to the west, bordered by the oceans, many questioned whether the inhabitants
of the British Isles or Iceland were fully fl edged Europeans (Wolff, 1994).
Europeans were not unifi ed by a single religion, despite the lingering legacy of
the medieval ideal of Christendom. The eleventh-century schism between Western
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy left an indelible mark on the European consciousness,
with many of the inhabitants in the Catholic west, north, and south no
longer regarding the followers of the Orthodox faith to the east as part of a common
civilization. Politics reinforced this division, as Russia, the primary Orthodox state,
expanded eastwards into Siberia and central Asia from the sixteenth century, and only
resumed a more western political orientation around 1700. The majority of the
remaining Orthodox believers lived in the Balkans where they fell under the rule of
the Islamic Ottoman empire between the late fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
With possessions across North Africa and the Middle East, the Ottoman empire was
a true world power that, until 1699, refused to entertain the possibility of permanent
peace with any other civilization and was only gradually integrated into a common
diplomatic order with European states during the eighteenth century. Yet Greece,
that came to be regarded by the late eighteenth century as the cradle of European
civilization, lay fi rmly under Ottoman rule from 1460 to 1829, apart from a brief period of Venetian control from 1699 to 1715. Meanwhile, the sixteenth-century
Reformation shattered Catholic unity and produce a variety of competing strands of
Protestantism. After a century and a half of strife, Protestants and Catholics largely
abandoned attempts to align religious conformity with political authority by the later
seventeenth century. As a result, most states contained either a Catholic or Protestant
offi cial majority, with dissenting minorities of varying size, faith, and legal status.
Throughout, Jewish communities persisted, particularly in central and east-central
Europe.
While they rarely matched religious boundaries precisely, political frontiers nonetheless
became more distinct across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These
divisions were articulated in the language of sovereign states that gained acceptance
during the seventeenth century, though it remained disputed whether such states
should interact as equals, regardless of size, wealth, and form of government, or
whether they should remain in some kind of hierarchical order. Seventeenth-century
wars had largely resolved disputes over which states were fully sovereign, and how
their governments were to be organized internally and what authority they should
exercise over their own peoples. However, the eighteenth century still saw struggles
over the size of individual states, with competing claims to certain provinces and even
entire states leading to numerous “wars of succession,” since rulers’ legitimacy generally
rested on dynastic inheritance. Such confl icts were also related to the continuing
struggle over international status, with the century opening with the defeat, in the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), of French pretensions to occupy pole
position in a hierarchical order. Subsequent confl icts saw the gradual integration of
struggles for regional pre-eminence, for example over the control of the Baltic, into
an overarching conception of a single system containing several major and more
numerous minor powers. Prior to the re-emergence of French power after 1789,
confl icts no longer centered on the pretension of one state to occupy a commanding
position, but rather disputes over the relative “balance of power” between the components
of this single system.
To these religious and political divisions can be added further differences in language,
custom, social organization, and economic activity, separating not only sovereign
states and communities of believers, but individual provinces, communities,
and groups within these. The practicalities of distance in an age still reliant on horse
and wind power for propulsion simply reinforced these distinctions. Nonetheless, it
is clear that there existed a common sense of belonging, even if Europe’s extent and
the character of its inhabitants remained matters of dispute. The French philosopher
Voltaire spoke of Europe as “a kind of republic divided into several states.” Some
conceived of this as a formal political order, such as the Abbé de St Pierre, who
urged European sovereigns to agree a common court to arbitrate their differences as
a means of guaranteeing perpetual peace. For most, however, Europe was a complex
set of broadly common aspirations and beliefs, shared at least by intellectuals, those
with formal education, and many of those wielding political, economic, and social
power. These ideas instilled confi dence, born of the conviction that Europeans possessed
a unique capacity to overcome intractable problems, as well as a superior
culture, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome that together were regarded as the
well of human civilization. Such ideas did not go unchallenged during the eighteenth
century as Europeans discovered more about the world beyond their shores. Nonetheless, it is possible to detect a shift from faith that the Christian God would
assist all who believed in him, to a conviction that Europeans already possessed innate
qualities for success. This shift was related to the move away from the pessimism
characterizing the previous hundred years, the “iron century” of hardship and confl
ict, and towards a more optimistic “age of reason.” Structural changes clearly
assisted this. There was a modest improvement in long-term weather conditions after
a particularly unfavorable decade around 1690. European demography progressed
from simple recovery from earlier seventeenth-century losses to steadily accelerating
growth around 1730. Whereas Europe’s population had grown by a modest 20
percent in the sixteenth century, and again in the seventeenth, it doubled between
1750 and 1850 and continued to increase rapidly thereafter. Crop yields that had
remained largely static since the later Middle Ages, also experienced dramatic improvement,
while other activities witnessed rising productivity. Many remained desperately
poor, but the overall capacity to produce a surplus beyond immediate needs increased.
Luxuries were no longer the preserve of a narrow governing elite, but became available
to the growing and increasingly self-conscious and assertive “middle classes.”
Confi dence grew with awareness of gradually improving conditions, while the
sense of achievement simply reinforced feelings of superiority over non-European
peoples. Alongside this, however, was a growing sense, among some Europeans at
least, that they were members of a common humanity to which they bore some
responsibility for their actions. Self-confi dence and a sense of destiny were paradoxically
reinforced by the Britain’s reluctant acceptance of the independence of its North
American colonies in 1783: the fi rst signifi cant defeat of European imperialism in
world history. While the Americans broke with Britain, they nonetheless established
a state and society closely modeled on an idealized version of European civilization
that appeared to confi rm that European values and institutions would eventually
encompass the entire globe.
If there are good reasons for us to treat Europe as a distinct fi eld for historical
research, how confi dent can we be in using the eighteenth century to demarcate our
time frame? The division of history into discrete centuries fl ows naturally from our
familiarity with chronological time and makes sense pedagogically by allowing us to
subdivide the long human story into more manageable segments. We like our stories
to have a beginning, middle, and end, as well as a plot and sense of direction. Do
the dates 1700 and 1800 make sense in these terms? Historians writing before the
present, self-consciously “postmodern” age were already well aware of these questions.
Their studies offer the alternatives of a “short” eighteenth century, running
from 1713 to the 1780s (Anderson, 1987; Black, 1999; Woloch, 1982), or a “long”
one that, for British historians generally begins with the Glorious Revolution of 1688
and ends in the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815. Those with a more “continental”
perspective tend to stretch to dates back to 1648 and forward to 1789 or even
1815 (Treasure, 1985; Winks and Kaiser, 2004). This longer period is variously
labeled the “age of absolutism” or the “old regime,” as defi ned primarily according
to the prevailing political philosophy and practice of strong monarchy, justifying its
authority on claims to guarantee order and social stability after a period of upheaval
and religious confl ict over the previous century and a half.
The disagreement over dates not only refl ects the differing signifi cance attached
to particular events, but also divergence over historical approach. Both the “long” and “short” eighteenth centuries were initially defi ned according to criteria developed
by historians writing in the nineteenth century; in many ways the formative period
of modern historical scholarship. Such writers gave preference to high politics, especially
the wars and diplomacy that marked the “rise” or “decline” of Europe’s great
nation-states. They also emphasized intellectual trends, especially those associated
with the language of liberal constitutionalism, personal liberty, and capitalist economics.
While these factors no longer feature so prominently today, other historiographical
developments question the appropriateness of using the eighteenth century as a
distinct phase in Europe’s past. The division of modern history into “early” and later
stages tends either to subsume the eighteenth century within a longer early modern
period beginning around 1450 (Cameron, 2001; Dewald, 2003; Wiesener-Hanks,
2006), or split it between these two modern epochs. The former option generally
retains the French Revolution of 1789 as its end marker, but the latter pushes the
start of later modernity back to around 1750. For example, the Consortium on the
Revolutionary Era (until recently “Revolutionary Europe”), an infl uential US-based
academic network, works within the rough parameters of 1750 to 1850 and interprets
this as a period of fundamental transition. The same period has been identifi ed by
the German historian Reinhart Koselleck as the “saddle” (Sattelzeit) between modernity
and pre-modernity (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, 1972–97: vol. 1, pp. xiv–
xv). Such ideas have been hugely infl uential, not least because they chime with the
interpretations advanced by social and cultural theorists working in the 1970s to
1990s. Many of these theorists are inherently hostile to the claims advanced by earlier
writers for the “modernity” of the eighteenth century. This dispute over the meaning
of modernity and the validity of the values ascribed to it has largely replaced the
division marked by political ideology that colored much of twentieth-century historiography.
These twenty-fi rst-century differences, like those of the past, exist beyond
the self-serving agendas of some participants because there are genuine problems of
interpretation.
There are many good reasons for taking the 1750s as a more signifi cant dividing
point than either the 1700s or 1800s. Older scholarship already identifi ed the mideighteenth
century as marking a shift from a state primarily concerned with restoring
order and promoting stability after earlier upheavals, to one that had greater
confi dence in its ability to reshape society along more effi cient and productive lines.
Traditionally, this has been labeled a move from the “classical absolutism” epitomized
by Louis XIV in France (r. 1643–1715), to the “enlightened absolutism”
exemplifi ed by monarchs like Catherine II of Russia (r. 1762–96). Internationally,
the mid-eighteenth century saw the emergence of Prussia as a fi fth “great power”
alongside Austria, France, Russia, and Britain, establishing a pattern that remained
basically unchanged until the end of World War I. The 1750s witnessed a lasting
shift in the global balance of European power as Britain triumphed over France in
North America and India. Though Britain’s position in the former was diminished
by American independence in 1783, its gains in India continued throughout the
later eighteenth century and sustained imperial predominance into the twentieth
century. Rising agricultural productivity, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands,
assisted the changes customarily labeled the Industrial Revolution that started to
become more apparent in some areas around 1750. Social change likewise showed
signs of accelerating, fuelled by demographic growth. The rapidity as well as the scale of these changes became manifest in more marked social differentiation,
clearer divisions of labor, and the emergence of new occupations. Culturally, the
mid-eighteenth century is perhaps less important for truly new ideas than for the
wider dissemination of more secular ways of thinking, as well as the engagement
of broader sections of the population in more freely ranging debates on human
society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the publication of the Encyclopédie,
a 28-volume compendium of new knowledge edited by Denis Diderot and Jean
d’Alembert between 1751 and 1772, to which over 150 people contributed. A
further seven volumes were later added to what became a major best-selling publishing
venture.
These debates over the signifi cance of particular trends, and how best to study
them, inform the contributions to this volume that is nonetheless based on a
chronological division roughly from 1700 to 1800. While not suggesting that either
year marks a dramatic turning point, there are valid reasons to frame the eighteenth
century as a distinct period in Europe’s history. Many developments certainly began
much earlier, while others continued far beyond 1800, as the subsequent chapters
make clear. However, when the perspective is widened beyond Europe to examine
Europeans’ impact on the world, the eighteenth century emerges more distinctly.
Again, individual chapters will explore this in greater depth, but some important
aspects can be noted here. Britain and Russia emerged around 1700 as countries
with political, social, and economic systems of global importance. Both had been
rather peripheral powers till that point, but were confi rmed as major world powers
by 1800. Perhaps more fundamentally, the eighteenth century saw the culmination
of long-term trends that were to shape world history for the next 200 years and
beyond. Europe now achieved a unique global position as a concentration of
technological (especially maritime), economic, and military power, supported by
sophisticated state infrastructures with the ability to project their infl uence well
beyond their own frontiers. Individual elements of this unique mix were not
unknown elsewhere, nor had Europeans achieved this combination unaided or
without borrowing ideas and practices from other peoples. The different strands
had their roots far in the past, while their development accelerated from the fi fteenth
century, but it was only in the eighteenth that they fully came together
and made a more signifi cant impact outside Europe. In doing so, they also transformed
Europe, providing the basis for European global predominance (at least
economic and military).
This fusion produced a set of institutions, best defi ned broadly as cultural practices
and assumptions, both formal and informal. In short, they were a way of doing things,
coordinating activities, setting priorities, and allocating resources. Individual elements
were not unique, but their combination was distinctly European. Seen in a broader
time frame, these institutions provide perhaps a better defi nition of modernity than
either the French or Industrial revolutions that have traditionally served as markers.
More importantly, these institutions, such as state structures and forms of education,
were present across Europe and not merely in those countries engaged in overseas
trade or conquest.