Mercantilism and War
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) served as Louis XIV's finance minister from 1664 until his death. He worked assiduously to promote commerce, build up French industry, and increase exports. However much Colbert may have seen his economic policies as ends in themselves, to Louis they were always means to the end of waging war. Ultimately, Louis's wars undermined the prosperity that Colbert tried so hard to create. This memorandum, written to Louis in 1670, illustrates clearly the mercantilist presumptions of self-sufficiency on which Colbert operated: every item needed to build up the French navy must ultimately be produced in France, even if it could be acquired at less cost from elsewhere.
Nd since Your Majesty has wanted to work diligently at reestablishing his naval forces, and since afore that it has been necessary to make very great expenditures, since all merchandise, munitions and manufactured items formerly came from Holland and the countries of the North, it has been absolutely necessary to be especially concerned with finding within the realm, or with establishing in it, everything which might be necessary for this great plan.
To this end, the manufacture of tar was established in Medoc, Auvergne, Dauphine, and Provence; iron cannons, in Burgundy, Nivernois, Saintonge and Perigord; large anchors in Dauphine, Nivernois, Brittany, and Rochefort; sailcloth for the Levant, in Dauphine; coarse muslin, in Auvergne; all the implements for pilots and others, at Dieppe and La
Rochelle; the cutting of wood suitable for vessels, in Burgundy, Dauphine, Brittany, Normandy, Poitou, Saintonge, Provence, Guyenne, and the Pyrenees; masts, of a sort once unknown in this realm, have been found in Provence, Languedoc, Auvergne, Dauphine, and in the Pyrenees. Iron, which was obtained from Sweden and Biscay, is currently manufactured in the realm. Fine hemp for ropes, which came from Prussia and from Piedmont, is currently obtained in Burgundy, Maconnais, Bresse, Dauphine; and markets for it have since been established in Berry and in Auvergne, which always provides money in these provinces and keeps it within the realm.
In a word, everything serving for the construction of vessels is currently established in the realm, so that Your Majesty can get along without foreigners for the navy and will even, in a short time, be able to supply them and gain their money in this fashion. And it is with this same objective of having everything necessary to provide abundantly for his navy and that of his subjects that he is working at the general reform of all the forests in his realm, which, being as carefully preserved as they are at present, will abundantly produce all the wood necessary for this.
Source: Charles W. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York:
1939), p. 320.
Questions for Analysis
1. Why would Colbert want to manufacture materials for supplying the navy within France rather than buying them from abroad?
2. From this example, does Colbert see the economy as serving any other interest other than that of the state?
3. Was there a necessary connection between mercantilism and war?
Traders brought furs to the American Indians and missionaries preached Christianity in a vast territory that stretched from Quebec to Louisiana. The financial returns from North America were never large, however. Furs, fish, and tobacco were exported to European markets but never matched the profits from the Caribbean sugar colonies or from the trading posts that the French maintained in India.
Like the earlier Spanish colonies (see Chapter 14), the French colonies were established and administered as direct crown enterprises. French colonial settlements in North America were conceived mainly as military outposts and trading centers, and they were overwhelmingly populated by men. The elite of French colonial society were military officers and administrators sent from Paris. Below their ranks were fishermen, fur traders, small farmers, and common soldiers who constituted the bulk of French settlers in North America. Because the fishing and the fur trades relied on cooperative relationships with native peoples, a mutual economic interdependence grew up between the French colonies and the peoples of the surrounding region. Intermarriage, especially between French traders and native women, was common. These North American colonies remained dependent on the wages and supplies sent to them from the mother country. Only rarely did they become truly self-sustaining economic enterprises.
The phenomenally successful sugar plantations of the Caribbean had their own social structure, with slaves at the bottom, people of mixed African and European descent forming a middle layer, and wealthy European plantation owners at the top, controlling the lucrative trade with the outside world. Well over half of the sugar and coffee sent to France was resold and sent elsewhere to markets throughout Europe. Because the monarchy controlled the prices that colonial plantation owners could charge French merchants for their goods, traders in Europe who bought the goods for resale abroad could also make vast fortunes. Historians estimate that as many as 1 million of the 25 million inhabitants of France in the eighteenth century lived off the money flowing through this colonial trade, making the slave colonies of the Caribbean a powerful force for economic change in France. The wealth generated from these colonies added to the prestige of France’s absolutist system of government.
Although absolutism was the dominant model for seventeenth - and eighteenth-century European monarchs, it was by no means the only system by which Europeans governed themselves. A republican oligarchy continued to rule in Venice. In the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the monarch was elected by the nobility and governed alongside a parliament that met every two years. In the Netherlands, the territories that had won their independence from Spain during the early seventeenth century combined to form the United Provinces, the only truly new country to take shape in Europe during the early modern era. England, which had suffered through a violent civil war between 1642 and 1651, followed by the tumultuous years of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the Protectorate (see Chapter 14), also took a different path during these years, eventually arriving at a constitutional settlement that gave a larger role to Parliament and admitted a degree of participation by nonnobles in the affairs of state. Arriving at this settlement was not easy, however. The end of the civil wars and the collapse of Cromwell’s Protectorate had made it clear that England would be a monarchy and not a republic, but the sort of monarchy England would be remained an open question. Two issues were paramount: the religious question and the relationship between Parliament and the king.
CHARLES II OF ENGLAND (r. 1660-85) IN HIS CORONATION ROBES. This full frontal portrait of the monarch, holding the symbols of his rule, seems to confront the viewer personally with the overwhelming authority of the sovereign's gaze. Compare this classic image of the absolutist monarch with the very different portraits of William and Mary, who ruled after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (page 503). ¦ What had changed between 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, and 1688, when the more popular William and Mary became the rulers of England?
The Restoration Monarchy in England
The king who took the throne following the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, Charles II (r. 1660-85), was initially welcomed by most English, despite being the son of the beheaded and much-despised Charles I (see Chapter 14). He restored bishops to the Church of England, but he did not initially return to the provocative religious policies of his father. He declared limited religious toleration for Protestant “dissenters” who were not members of the Church of England. He promised to observe the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, which comforted members of Parliament. He also accepted the legislation passed by Parliament immediately before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, including the requirement that Parliament be summoned at least once every three years. England thus emerged from its civil war
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As a limited monarchy, in which power was exercised by the “king in Parliament.” Meanwhile, the unbuttoned moral atmosphere of Charles II’s court, with its risque plays, dancing, and sexual licentiousness, may have reflected a public desire to forget the restraints of the Puritan past.
During the 1670s, however, Charles began openly to model his kingship on the absolutism of Louis XIV. As a result, the great men of England soon came to be publicly divided between Charles’s supporters (known as “Tories,” a popular nickname for Irish Catholic bandits) and his opponents (called “Whigs,” a nickname for Scottish Presbyterian rebels). In fact, both sides feared absolutism, just as both sides feared a return to the bad old days of the 1640s, when resistance to the crown had led to civil war and ultimately to republicanism. What they could not agree on was which possibility frightened them more.
Charles’s known sympathy for Roman Catholicism (he converted on his deathbed in 1685) also generated fodder for the opposition Whigs. During the 1670s, he briefly suspended civil penalties against Catholics and Protestant dissenters by asserting his right as king to ignore parliamentary legislation, and he retreated only in the face of public protest. The Whigs, meanwhile, rallied support by targeting Charles’s Catholic brother James, the heir to the throne. The result was a series of Whig electoral victories between 1679 and 1681. A group of radical Whigs tried and failed to exclude James from succeeding his brother by law, and thereafter Charles found that his rising revenues from customs duties, combined with a secret subsidy from Louis XIV, enabled him to govern without relying on Parliament for money. Charles further alarmed Whig politicians by executing several of them on charges of treason and by remodeling local government to make it more amenable to royal control. Charles died in 1685 with his power enhanced, but he left behind a political and religious legacy that was to be the undoing of his less able and adroit successor.
James II was the very opposite of his worldly brother. A zealous Catholic convert, James admired the French monarchy’s Gallican Catholicism that sought to further the work of the Church by harnessing it to the power of an absolutist bureaucratic state. His commitment to absolutism also led him to build up the English army and navy, which in turn led him to search for innovative solutions to the problems of taxation and the quartering of troops. To make the tax system more efficient he created new revenue agencies in many English towns. His quest for more accurate intelligence about political opponents led him to take control over the country’s new post office, which made domestic surveillance routine, and his government also stepped up its efforts to prosecute seditious speech and writings. For the Whigs, James’s policies were all that they had feared.
Meanwhile, James’s Catholicism also alienated his Tory supporters, who were close to the established Church of England. Religion was not the only cause of his unpopularity, but resistance to his policies was often mixed with resentment against a perception that he favored Catholics. His decision to appoint Catholics as officers in the army was unpopular, but his decision to maintain a standing army in peacetime was even more so. Towns that were asked to quarter troops resented the expense and the disruptive presence of soldiers in their midst. When, in June 1688, he ordered all Church of England clergymen to read his decree of religious toleration from their pulpits, seven bishops refused and were promptly imprisoned. At their trial, however, they were declared not guilty of sedition, to the enormous satisfaction of the Protestant English populace.
The trial of the bishops was one event that galvanized the growing opposition to James. The other was the unexpected birth of a son in 1688 to James and his second wife, Mary of Modena. This child, who was to be raised a Catholic, replaced James’s much older Protestant daughter Mary Stuart as heir to the thrones of Scotland and England. So unexpected was this birth that there were widespread rumors that the child was not in fact James’s son at all but had been smuggled into the royal bedchamber in a warming pan.
With the birth of the “warming-pan baby,” events moved swiftly toward a climax. A delegation of Whigs and Tories crossed the channel to Holland to invite Mary Stuart and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, to cross to England with an invading army to preserve English Protestantism and English liberties by summoning a new Parliament. As the leader of a continental coalition then at war with France, William also welcomed the opportunity to make England an ally against Louis XIV’s expansionist foreign policy.
Following William and Mary’s invasion, James fled the country for exile in France. Parliament declared the throne vacant, clearing the way for William and Mary to succeed him as joint sovereigns. The Bill of Rights, passed by Parliament and accepted by the new king and queen in 1689, reaffirmed English civil liberties, such as trial by jury, habeas corpus (a guarantee that no one could be imprisoned unless charged with a crime), and the right to petition the monarch through Parliament. The Bill of Rights also declared that the monarchy was subject to the law of the land. The Act of Toleration, also passed in 1689, granted Protestant dissenters the right to worship freely, though not to hold political office. And in 1701, the Act of Succession ordained
WILLIAM AND MARY. In 1688, William of Orange and his wife, Mary Stuart, became Protestant joint rulers of England, in a bloodless coup that took power from her father, the Catholic James II. Compare this contemporary print with the portraits of Louis XIV (page 494) and Charles II (page 501). ¦ What relationship does it seem to depict between the royal couple and their subjects? ¦ What is the significance of the gathered crowd in the public square in the background? ¦ How is this different from the spectacle of divine authority projected by Louis XIV or the image of Charles II looking straight at the viewer?
That every future English monarch must be a member of the Church of England. Queen Mary died childless, and the throne passed from William to Mary’s Protestant sister Anne (r. 1702-14) and then to George, elector of the German principality of Hanover and the Protestant great-grandson of James I. In 1707, the formal Act of Union between Scotland and England ensured that the Catholic heirs of King James II would in future have no more right to the throne of Scotland than they did to the throne of England.
The English soon referred to the events of 1688 and 1689 as the “Glorious Revolution,” because it firmly established England as a mixed monarchy governed by the “king in Parliament” according to the rule of law. Although William and Mary and their successors continued to exercise a large measure of executive power, after 1688 no English monarch attempted to govern without Parliament, which has met annually from that time on. Parliament, and especially the House of Commons, also strengthened its control over taxation and expenditure. Although Parliament never codified the legal provisions of this form of monarchy into one constitutional document, historians consider the settlement of 1688 as a founding moment in the development of a constitutional monarchy in Britain.
Yet 1688 was not all glory. Contrary to many historical accounts, the revolution of 1688 was not “bloodless.” The accession of William and Mary was accompanied by violence in many parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. There were attacks on royal troops by angry Whigs in York, Hull, Carlisle, Chester, and Portsmouth. James’s revenue agencies were also attacked, as were his newly founded Catholic schools. Historians now see this violence as motivated as much by antiabsolutism as by religious bigotry—popular anger against James II focused not so much on his defense of tradition but his innovations, specifically his attempts to strengthen the power of the bureaucratic state. Furthermore, the revolution of 1688 consolidated the position of large property holders, whose control over local government had been threatened by the absolutist policies of Charles II and James II. It thus reinforced the power of a wealthy class of English elites in Parliament who would soon become even wealthier from government patronage and the profits of war. It also brought misery to the Catholic minority in Scotland and to the Catholic majority in Ireland. After 1690, when King William won a decisive victory over James II’s forces at the Battle of the Boyne, power in Ireland would lie firmly in the hands of a “Protestant Ascendancy,” whose dominance over Irish society would last until modern times.
At the same time, however, England’s Glorious Revolution also established a climate that favored the growth and political power of the English commercial classes, especially the growing number of people concentrated in English cities whose livelihood depended on international commerce in the Atlantic world and beyond. In the decades to come, trade became a political issue, and merchant’s associations began to lobby parliament for favorable legislation. Whigs in Parliament became the voice of this newly influential pressure group of commercial entrepreneurs, who sought to challenge the monopoly enjoyed by the East India Company (founded with a royal charter in 1600) and open up colonial trade to competitors. They also argued that royal charter companies discouraged English manufacture by importing cheaper goods from abroad. The Whigs also argued for revisions to the tax code that would benefit those engaged in manufacturing and trade, rather than the landed elites who benefited from the tax regime under the Stuarts. In 1694, the Whigs succeeded in establishing the Bank of England, with the explicit goal of facilitating the promotion of English power through the generation of wealth, inaugurating a financial revolution that would make London the center of a vast network of international banking and investment in the eighteenth century.
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JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704). Locke was an important foundational thinker in the liberal political tradition, who had a profound influence on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, as well as on the makers of the American Revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson, and French political theorists during the Enlightenment. His debate with Robert Filmer, a defender of absolutism, led him to elaborate a theory of government as a contract between the ruler and the ruled.
John Locke and the Contract Theory of Government
The Glorious Revolution was the product of unique circumstances, but it also reflected antiabsolutist theories of politics that were taking shape in the late seventeenth century in response to the ideas of writers such as Bodin, Hobbes, Robert Filmer, and Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet. Chief among these opponents of absolutism was the Englishman John Locke (1632-1704), whose Two Treatises of Government were written before the Glorious Revolution but published for the first time in 1690.
Locke maintained that humans had originally lived in a state of nature characterized by absolute freedom and equality, with no government of any kind. The only law was the law of nature (which Locke equated with the law of reason), by which individuals enforced for themselves their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Soon, however, humans perceived that the inconveniences of the state of nature outweighed its advantages. Accordingly, they agreed first to establish a civil society based on absolute equality and then to set up a government to arbitrate the disputes that might arise within this civil society. But they did not make government’s powers absolute. All powers not expressly surrendered to the government were reserved to the people themselves; as a result, governmental authority was both contractual and conditional. If a government exceeded or abused the authority granted to it, society had the right to dissolve it and create another.
Locke condemned absolutism in every form. He denounced absolute monarchy, but he was also critical of claims for the sovereignty of parliaments. Government, he argued, had been instituted to protect life, liberty, and property; no political authority could infringe these natural rights. The law of nature was therefore an automatic and absolute limitation on every branch of government.
In the late eighteenth century, Locke’s ideas would resurface as part of the intellectual background of both the American and French Revolutions. Between 1690 and 1720, however, they served a far less radical purpose. The landed gentry who replaced James II with William and Mary read Locke as a defense of their conservative revolution. Rather than protecting their liberty and property, James II had threatened both; hence, the magnates were entitled to overthrow the tyranny he had established and replace it with a government that would defend their interests by preserving these natural rights. English government after 1689 would be dominated by Parliament; Parliament in turn was controlled by a landed aristocracy who were firm in the defense of their common interests, and who perpetuated their control by determining that only men possessed of substantial property could vote or run for office. During the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, both France and Britain had solved the problem of political dissent and social disorder in their own way. The emergence of a limited monarchy in England after 1688 contrasted vividly with the absolutist system developed by Louis XIV, but in fact both systems worked well enough to contain the threats to royal authority posed by powerful landed nobles and religious dissent.
Another exception to absolutist rule in Europe was the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces, which had gained its independence from Spanish rule in 1648, after a long period of struggle (see Chapter 14). The seven provinces of the Dutch Republic (also known as the Netherlands) carefully preserved their autonomy with a federal legislature known as the States General, made up of delegations from each province. Through this flexible structure, the inhabitants of the republic worked
Hard to prevent the reestablishment of hereditary monarchy in the Dutch Republic. They were all the more jealous of their independence because several Catholic provinces of the southern Low Countries, including present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, remained under Spanish control.
The princes of the House of Orange served the Dutch Republic with a special title, stadtholder, or steward. The stadtholder did not technically rule and had no power to make laws, though he did exercise some influence over the appointments of officials and military officers. Instead, powerful merchant families in the United Provinces exercised real authority, through their dominance of the legislature. It was from the Dutch Republic that the stadtholder William of Orange launched his successful bid to become the king of England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The Dutch United Provinces were not, perhaps, the first place that one would choose as a base for a commercial trading empire. Much of the territory of the Dutch Republic was below sea level, and the water was only kept out by an elaborate system of dikes that protected the land from floods. But the Dutch made good use of their proximity to the sea. By 1670, the prosperity of the Dutch Republic was strongly linked to trade: grains and fish from eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea; spices, silks, porcelains and tea from the Indian Ocean and Japan; slaves, silver, coffee, sugar, and tobacco from the Atlantic world. With a population of nearly 2 million and a capital, Amsterdam, that served as an international hub for goods and finance, the Dutch Republic’s commercial network was global (see Chapter 14). Trade brought with it an extraordinary diversity of peoples and religions, as Spanish and Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, English Quakers, and Protestant dissidents from central Europe all sought to take advantage of the relative spirit of toleration that existed in the Netherlands. This toleration did have limits. Jews were not required to live in segregated neighborhoods, as in many other European capitals, but they were prohibited from joining guilds or trade associations. Tensions between Calvinists and Catholics were a perennial issue, with Calvinists living in the western provinces and Catholics concentrated to the east and south.
The last quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed a decline in Dutch power, however, as the Low Countries were increasingly squeezed between the military strength and territorial ambitions of absolutist France to the south and competition from the maritime empire of the British in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The turning point came in 1672, when the French king, Louis XIV, put together a coalition that surrounded the United Provinces, threatening an invasion. The English took advantage of this moment of vulnerability to attack a major Dutch convoy returning from the eastern Mediterranean. Louis XIV invaded and quickly overran all but two of the Dutch provinces. Popular anger at the failures of Dutch leadership turned violent, and in response the panicked assemblies named William of Orange the new stadtholder of Holland, giving him the power to organize the defense of the republic and to quell internal dissent. William opened the dikes that held back the sea, and the French armies were forced to retreat in the face of rising waters. Soon after, the Spanish entered the war on the side of the Dutch, which caused Louis XIV to abandon his plans to conquer the United Provinces. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, which brought William of Orange to the English throne, the Dutch joined an alliance with the English against the French. This alliance protected the republic against further aggression from France, but it also forced the Dutch into heavy expenditures on fortifications and defense and involved them in a series of costly wars (see below). As a result, the dynamic and flexible political institutions that had been part of the strength of the Dutch Republic became more rigid and inflexible over time. Meanwhile, both the French and the British continued to pressure the Dutch commercial fleet at sea. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch no longer exercised the same influence abroad.
WAR AND THE BALANCE OF POWER, 1661-1715
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, Europe was being reshaped by wars whose effects were also felt far beyond Europe’s borders. The initial causes of these wars lay in the French monarchy’s efforts to challenge his main European rivals, the Habsburg powers in Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. Through his continued campaigns in the Low Countries, Louis XIV expanded his territory, eventually taking Strasbourg (1681), Luxembourg (1684), and Cologne (1688). In response, William of Orange organized the League of Augsburg, which over time included Holland, England, Spain, Sweden, Bavaria, Saxony, the Rhine Palatinate, and the Austrian Habsburgs. The resulting Nine Years’ War between France and the League extended from Ireland to India to North America (where it was known as King William’s War), demonstrating the broadening imperial reach of European dynastic regimes and the increasing significance of French and English competition in the Atlantic world.
These wars were a sign both of the heightening power of Europe’s absolutist regimes and of a growing vulnerability. Financing the increasingly costly wars of the eighteenth century would prove to be one of the central challenges
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Faced by all of Europe’s absolutist regimes, and the pressure to raise revenues from royal subjects through taxation would eventually strain European society to a breaking point. By the end of the eighteenth century, popular unrest and political challenges to absolutist and imperial states were widespread, both on the European continent and in the colonies of the Atlantic world.
From the League of Augsburg to the War of the Spanish Succession
The League of Augsburg reflected the emergence of a new diplomatic goal in western and central Europe: the preservation of a balance of power. This goal would animate European diplomacy for the next 200 years, until the balance of power system collapsed with the outbreak of the First World War. The main proponents of balance of power diplomacy were England, the United Provinces (Holland), Prussia, and Austria. By 1697, the League forced Louis XIV to make peace, because France was exhausted by war and famine. Louis gave back much of his recent gains but kept Strasbourg and the surrounding territory of Alsace. In North America, the borders between French and English colonial territory remained the same for the time being (see below). Louis was nevertheless looking at the real prize: a French claim to succeed to the throne of Spain and so control the Spanish Empire in the Americas, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Philippines.
In the 1690s, it became clear that King Charles II of Spain (r. 1665-1700) would soon die without a clear heir, and both Louis XIV of France and Leopold I of Austria (r. 1658-1705) were interested in promoting their own relatives to succeed him. Either solution would have upset the balance of power in Europe, and several schemes to divide the Spanish realm between French and Austrian candidates were discussed. Meanwhile, King Charles II’s advisers sought to avoid partition by passing the entire Spanish Empire to a single heir: Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. Philip was to renounce any claim to the French throne in becoming king of Spain, but the terms of this were kept secret. When Charles II died, Philip V (r. 1700-46) was proclaimed king of Spain and Louis XIV rushed troops into the Spanish Netherlands while also sending French merchants into the Spanish Americas to break their monopoly on trade from the region. Immediately a war broke out, known as the War of the Spanish Succession, pitting England, the United Provinces, Austria, and Prussia against France, Bavaria, and Spain. Although the English king, William of Orange, died in 1702, just as the war was beginning, his generals led an extraordinary march deep into the European continent, inflicting a devastating defeat on the French and their Bavarian allies at Blenheim (1704). Soon after, the English captured Gibraltar, establishing a commercial foothold in the Mediterranean. The costs of the campaign nevertheless created a chorus of complaints from English and Dutch merchants, who feared the damage that was being done to trade and commerce. Queen Anne of England (Mary’s sister and William’s successor) gradually grew disillusioned with the war, and her government sent out peace feelers to France.
In 1713, the war finally came to an end with the Treaty of Utrecht. Its terms were reasonably fair to all sides. Philip V, Louis XIV’s grandson, remained on the throne of Spain and retained Spain’s colonial empire intact. In return, Louis agreed that France and Spain would never be united under the same ruler. Austria gained territories in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy, including Milan and Naples. The Dutch were guaranteed protection of their borders against future invasions by France, but the French retained both Lille and Strasbourg. The most significant consequences of the settlement, however, were played out in the Atlantic world, as the balance of powers among Europe’s colonial empires underwent a profound shift.
Imperial Rivalries after the Treaty of Utrecht
The fortunes of Europe’s colonial empires changed dramatically owing to the wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Habsburg Spain proved unable to defend its early monopoly over colonial trade, and by 1700, although Spain still possessed a substantial empire, it lay at the mercy of its more dynamic rivals. Portugal, too, found it impossible to prevent foreign penetration of its colonial empire. In 1703, the English signed a treaty with Portugal allowing English merchants to export woolens duty free into Portugal and allowing Portugal to ship its wines duty free into England. Access to Portugal also led British merchants to trade with the Portuguese colony of Brazil, an important sugar producer and the largest of all the American markets for African slaves.
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht opened a new era of colonial rivalries. The French retained Quebec and other territories in North America, as well as their small foothold in India. The biggest winner by far was Great Britain, as the combined kingdoms of England and Scotland were known after 1707. The British kept Gibraltar and Minorca in the
THE TREATY OF UTRECHT, 1713. This illustration from a French royal almanac depicts the treaty that ended the War of Spanish Succession and reshaped the balance of power in western Europe in favor of Britain and France.
Mediterranean and also acquired large chunks of French territory in the New World, including Newfoundland, mainland Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay, and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Even more valuable, however, Britain also extracted from Spain the right to transport and sell African slaves in Spanish America. As a result, the British were now poised to become the principal slave merchants and the dominant colonial and commercial power of the eighteenth-century world.
The Treaty of Utrecht thus reshaped the balance of power in the Atlantic world in fundamental ways. Spain’s collapse was already precipitous; by 1713, it was complete. Spain would remain the “sick man of Europe” for the next two centuries. The Dutch decline was more gradual, but by 1713 Dutch merchants’ inability to compete with the British in the slave trade diminished their economic clout. In the Atlantic, Britain and France were now the dominant powers. Although they would duel for another half century for control of North America, the balance of colonial power tilted decisively in Britain’s favor after Utrecht. Within Europe, the myth of French military supremacy had been shattered. Britain’s navy, not France’s army, would rule the new imperial and commercial world of the eighteenth century.
THE REMAKING OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
The decades between 1680 and 1720 were also decisive in reshaping the balance of power in central and eastern Europe. As Ottoman power waned, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs emerged as the dominant power in central and southeastern Europe. To the north, Brandenburg-Prussia was also a rising power. The most dramatic changes, however, occurred in Russia, which emerged from a long war with Sweden as the dominant power in the Baltic Sea and would soon threaten the combined kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. Within these regimes, the main tension came from ambitious monarchs who sought to increase the power of the centralized state at the expense of other elites, especially aristocrats and the Church. In Brandenburg-Prussia and in Tsarist Russia, these efforts were largely successful, whereas in Habsburg Austria, regional nobilities retained much of their influence.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, as Louis XIV of France demonstrated the power of absolutism in western Europe, the Austrian Habsburg Empire, with its capital in Vienna, must have seemed increasingly like a holdover from a previous age. Habsburg Austria was the largest state within what remained of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, a complex federal association of nearly 300 nominally autonomous dynastic kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and archbishoprics that had been created to protect and defend the papacy. Some, such as the kingdom of Bavaria, were large and had their own standing armies. Each Holy Roman emperor was chosen by seven “electors” who were either of noble rank or archbishops—in practice, the emperor was always from the Habsburg family. Through strategic marriages with other royal lines, earlier generations of Habsburg rulers had consolidated their control over a substantial part of Europe, including Austria, Bohemia,
EUROPE AFTER THE TREATY OF UTRECHT (1713). ¦ What were the major Habsburg dominions? ¦ What geographical disadvantage faced the kingdom of Poland as Brandenburg-Prussia grew in influence and ambition? ¦ How did the balance of power change in Europe as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht?
Moravia, and Hungary in central Europe; the Netherlands and Burgundy in the west; and, if one included the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family, Spain and its vast colonial empire as well. After 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia granted individual member states within the Holy Roman Empire the right to conduct their own foreign policy, the influence of the Austrian Habsburgs waned, at precisely the moment that they faced challenges from France to the west and the Ottoman Empire to the east.
The complicated structure of the Holy Roman Empire limited the extent to which a ruler such as Leopold I of Austria could emulate the absolutist rule of Louis XIV in France. Every constituent state within the empire had its own local political institutions, its own entrenched nobilities, each with a strong interest in resisting any attempt to centralize crucial functions of government, such as taxation, or the raising of armies. Even if direct assertion of absolutist control was impossible, Habsburg rulers found ways of increasing their authority. In Bohemia and Moravia, the Habsburgs encouraged landlords to produce crops for export by forcing peasants to provide three days of unpaid work per week to their lords. In return, the landed elites of these territories permitted the emperors to reduce the political independence of their traditional legislative estates. In Hungary, however, the powerful and independent nobility resisted such compromises. When the Habsburgs began a campaign against Hungarian Protestants, in 1679 an insurrection broke out that forced Leopold to grant concessions to Hungarian nobles in exchange for their assistance in
PRUSSIANS SWEARING ALLEGIANCE TO THE GREAT ELECTOR AT KONIGSBERG, 1663.
The occasion on which the Prussian estates first acknowledged the overlordship of their ruler. This ceremony marked the beginning of the centralization of the Prussian state.
Restoring order. When the Ottoman Empire sought to take advantage of this disorder to press an attack against Austria from the east, the Habsburgs survived only by enlisting the help of a Catholic coalition led by the Polish king John Sobieski (r. 1674-96).
In 1683, the Ottomans launched their last assault on Vienna but after their failure to capture the Habsburg capital, Ottoman power in southeastern Europe declined rapidly. By 1699, Austria had reconquered most of Hungary from the Ottomans; by 1718, it controlled all of Hungary and also Transylvania and Serbia. In 1722, Austria acquired the territory of Silesia from Poland. With Hungary now a buffer state between Austria and the Ottomans, Austria became one of the arbiters of the European balance of power. The same obstacles to the development of centralized absolutist rule persisted, however, and Austria was increasingly overshadowed in central Europe by the rise of another Germanspeaking state: Prussia.
The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia
After the Ottoman collapse, the main threat to Austria came from the rising power of Brandenburg-Prussia. Like Austria, Prussia was a composite state made up of several geographically divided territories acquired through inheritance by a single royal family, the Hohenzollerns. Their two main holdings were Brandenburg, centered on its capital city,
Berlin, and the duchy of East Prussia. Between these two territories lay Pomerania (claimed by Sweden) and an important part of the kingdom of Poland, including the port of Gdansk (Danzig). The Hohenzollerns’ aim was to unite their state by acquiring these intervening territories. Over the course of more than a century of steady state building, they finally succeeded in doing so. In the process,
Brandenburg-Prussia became a dominant military power and a key player in the balance-of-power diplomacy of the mid-eighteenth century.
The foundations for Prussian expansion were laid by Frederick William, the “Great Elector” (r. 1640-88).
He obtained East Prussia from Poland in exchange for help in a war against Sweden. Behind the Elector’s diplomatic triumphs lay his success in building an army and mobilizing the resources to pay for it. He gave the powerful nobles of his territories (known as “Junkers” (YUN-kurs)) the right to enserf their peasants and guaranteed them immunity from taxation. In exchange, they staffed the officer corps of his army and supported his highly autocratic taxation system. Secure in their estates and made increasingly wealthy in the grain trade, the Junkers surrendered management of the Prussian state to the Elector’s newly reformed bureaucracy, which set about its main task: increasing the size and strength of the Prussian army.
By supporting Austria in the War of the Spanish Succession, the Great Elector’s son, Frederick I (r. 1688-1713) earned the right to call himself king of Prussia from the Austrian emperor. He too was a crafty diplomat, but his main attention was devoted to developing the cultural life of his new royal capital, Berlin. His son, Frederick William I (r. 1713-40) focused, like his grandfather, on building the army. During his reign, the Prussian army grew from 30,000 to 83,000 men, becoming the fourth largest army in Europe, after France, Austria, and Russia. To support his army, Frederick William I increased taxes and shunned the luxuries of court life. For him, the theater of absolutism was not the palace but the office, where he personally supervised his army and the growing bureaucracy that sustained it. Frederick William’s son, known as Frederick the Great, would take this Prussian army and the bureaucracy that sustained it and transform the
THE CITY OF STETTIN UNDER SIEGE BY THE GREAT ELECTOR FREDERICK WILLIAM IN THE WINTER OF 1677-78 (c. 1680). This painting depicts the growing sophistication and organization of military operations under the Prussian monarchy. Improvements in artillery and siege tactics forced cities to adopt new defensive strategies, especially the zone of battlements and protective walls that became ubiquitous in central Europe during this period. ¦ How might these developments have shaped the layout of Europe's growing towns and cities? ¦How might this emphasis on the military and its attendant bureaucracy have affected the relationship between the monarchy and the nobility or between the king and his subjects?
Kingdom into a major power in central Europe after 1740 (see Chapter 17).
Thus, in both Prussia and Habsburg Austria, the divided nature of the respective realms and the entrenched strength of local nobilities forced the rulers in each case to grant significant concessions to noble landowners in exchange for incremental increases in the power of the centralized state. Whereas the nobility in France increasingly sought to maximize their power by participating in the system of absolutist rule at the court of Louis XIV, and wealthy landowners in England sought to exercise their influence through Parliament, the nobilities of Prussia and Habsburg Austria had more leverage to demand something in return for their cooperation. Often, what they demanded was the right to enserf or coerce labor from the peasantry in their domains. In both eastern and western Europe, therefore, the state became stronger. In eastern
Europe, however, this increase in state power often came at the expense of an intensification of feudal obligations that the peasantry owed to their local lords.
An even more dramatic transformation took place in Russia under Tsar Peter I (r. 1672-1725), Peter’s official title was “autocrat of all the Russias” but he was soon known as Peter the Great. His imposing height—he was six feet eight inches tall—and his mercurial personality—jesting one moment, raging the next—added to the outsize impression he made on his contemporaries. Peter was not the first tsar to bring his country into contact with western Europe, but his policies were decisive in making Russia a great European power.
The Early Years of Peter's Reign
Since 1613, Russia had been ruled by members of the Romanov dynasty, who had attempted to restore political stability after the chaotic “time of troubles” that followed the death of the bloodthirsty, half-mad tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1584. The Romanovs faced a severe threat to their rule between 1667 and 1671, when a Cossack leader (the Russian Cossacks were semiautonomous bands of peasant cavalrymen) named Stenka Razin led a rebellion in southeastern Russia. This uprising found widespread support, not only from oppressed serfs but also from non-Russian tribes in the lower Volga region who longed to cast off the domination of Moscow. Ultimately Tsar Alexis I (r. 1654-76) and the Russian nobility were able to defeat Razin’s zealous but disorganized bands of rebels, slaughtering more than 100,000 of them in the process.
Like Louis XIV of France, Peter came to the throne as a young boy, and his minority was marked by political dissension and court intrigue. In 1689, however, at the age of seventeen, he overthrew the regency of his half sister Sophia and assumed personal control of the state. Determined to make Russia into a great military power, the young tsar traveled to Holland and England during the 1690s to study shipbuilding and to recruit skilled foreign workers to help him build a navy. While he was abroad, however, his elite palace guard (the streltsy) rebelled, attempting to restore Sophia to the throne. Peter quickly returned home from Vienna and crushed the rebellion with striking savagery. About 1,200 suspected conspirators were summarily executed, many of them gibbeted outside the walls of the Kremlin, where their bodies rotted for months as a graphic reminder of the fate awaiting those who dared challenge the tsar’s authority.
The Transformation of the Tsarist State
Peter is most famous as the tsar who attempted to westernize Russia by imposing a series of social and cultural reforms on the traditional Russian nobility: ordering noblemen to cut off their long beards and flowing sleeves; publishing a book of manners that forbade spitting on the floor and eating with one’s fingers; encouraging polite conversation between the sexes; and requiring noblewomen to appear, together with men, in Western garb at weddings, banquets, and other public occasions. The children of Russian nobles
EXECUTION OF THE STRELTSY (1698). A contemporary woodcut showing how Peter the Great ordered the public hanging of guard regiments who had rebelled against his authority. How does this display of autocratic power compare with the spectacle of power so carefully orchestrated by Peter's contemporary, Louis XIV of France?
World History
