During the middle of the seventeenth century, there were violent revolts against existing regimes in England, France, Catalonia (northern Spain), Portugal, and Naples. These nearly simultaneous challenges to existing regimes led historians in the middle of the twentieth century to propose that there was a "crisis of the seventeenth century" involving much of Europe. The conceptualization of a "crisis" was expanded to include more political upheavals, along with certain striking economic, intellectual, and social developments. Some scholars, including the British historians Eric Hobsbawm and H. R. Trevor-Roper, suggested that there was a "general crisis" that involved continentwide patterns of change in all aspects of life, which may have started in the early sixteenth century. Other historians wondered whether it made much sense to call something that went on so long a "crisis," which generally suggests a short period of extreme distress followed by some sort of resolution. (The word "crisis"
Was originally used in medicine, and meant the point in a disease at which the patient suddenly begins to get significantly worse or better.) In the 1980s the American historian Theodore K. Rabb suggested that "struggle for stability" was a better term, though others pointed out that this phrase could be used to describe certain historical eras in many places, not simply the seventeenth century in Europe. Despite criticisms, however, both the notion of a "crisis of the seventeenth century" and of a "struggle for stability" still shape some scholars' understanding of this period. The economic historian Jan de Vries, for example, finds that contractions of the seventeenth century led to a transformation in basic patterns of economic life in Europe. Demographic historians have noted that the famines and epidemic diseases of the midseventeenth century were the last major check on European population growth, which would begin its steep ascent upward from that point on. (See graph on p. 464.)
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Every state in Europe. In many of those states, orders that came from centralizing rulers also provoked vehement reactions, leading to mob violence, localized urban and rural revolts, regional upheavals, and in some cases nationwide civil wars.
The aims of European rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries far exceeded what they could actually do, and could also work at cross-purposes to one another. Opening schools or taking them over from the church allowed greater control of the education of one’s subjects, but cost money, as did the bureaucracy needed to oversee other royal projects. Building fabulous palaces or better roads enhanced royal prestige, but could be enormously expensive. Defending or expanding one’s territories offered the greatest possibilities for personal and national aggrandizement, but could also bring bitter disappointment and financial ruin. The possibilities war offered were too great to ignore, however, so that all political developments in these centuries played themselves out against a backdrop of nearly constant warfare.
World History
