StudySpace: Western Civilizations, 16 e.

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1. Introduction
1. Absolutism defined
1. A political theory that encouraged rulers to claim complete sovereignty within their territories
2. Sometimes defined by "divine right"
2. Age of absolutism as an age of empire
1. Colonial rivalries
3. The rise of limited monarchies and republics
4. Russian autocracy
2. The Appeal and Justification of Absolutism
1. Absolutism promised stability, prosperity, and order
2. Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715)
1. Squabbles among the nobility meant he must rule assertively
3. Absolutist "control"
1. Command of the state's army
2. Control over the legal system
3. Right to collect and spend the state's financial resources
4. The need to create an efficient centralized bureaucracy
5. Weakening privileged "special interests"
4. Obstacles
1. Legally-privileged estates of the nobility and clergy
2. The political authority of semi-autonomous regions
3. Interference of parliaments, diets, and estates general
5. Religion
1. France, Spain, and Austria: attempts to "nationalize" the Church and clergy
2. Consolidating authority over the Church into the hands of the monarchy
6. The nobility
1. Important opponents of royal absolutism
2. Louis XIV: deprived the nobility of power but increased their social prestige (Versailles)
3. Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725): forced his nobles into lifelong government service
4. Catherine II (r. 1762-1796): nobility surrendered administrative and political power into the empress's hands
5. Prussia: the army was staffed by nobles
6. Joseph II (r. 1765-1790): denied the nobility tax exemption and blurred the distinction between noble and commoner
3. Alternatives to Absolutism
1. Limited monarchy: the case of England
1. Parliament as longest-surviving representative institution
2. The reign of Charles II (r. 1660-1685)
1. General observations
1. Initially welcomed by most English men and women
2. Declared limited toleration for Protestant Dissenters
3. Promised to observe Magna Carta and the Petition of Right
4. Admired all things French
2. 1670s: open admiration of the kingship of Louis XIV
1. New party labels
1. Tories -- Charles's supporters
2. Whigs -- Charles's opponents
3. Both parties feared a return to the Civil War of 1640 as well as royal absolutism
3. Religion
1. Charles was sympathetic to Roman Catholicism
2. Suspended civil penalties against Catholics and Dissenters
1. Ignored Parliament
2. Led to a series of Whig electoral victories (1679-1681)
3. The Exclusion Crisis: Whigs attempted to keep Charles's brother, James, from obtaining the throne
4. Charles governs without relying on Parliament for money
5. Executes several Whigs
3. King James II (r. 1685-1688)
1. A zealous Catholic convert
2. Alienated his Tory supporters
3. June 1688: ordered the clergy to read his decree of religious toleration
1. The trial of the bishops
4. Crisis of succession and the birth of the "warming pan baby"
5. Whigs and Tories invite Mary Stuart and her husband, William of Orange, to invade England and preserve Protestantism
4. The Glorious Revolution of 1688
1. A bloodless coup
2. James fled the country, William and Mary claim the throne
3. The Bill of Rights (1689)
1. Passed by Parliament
2. Reaffirmed trial by jury, habeas corpus, and the right to petition Parliament
4. Act of Toleration (1689)
1. Granted Dissenters the right to worship freely but they could not hold political office
5. The Act of Succession (1701)
1. Ordained that every future English monarch must be a member of the Church of England
6. Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland
7. Why "glorious"?
1. No bloodshed
2. Established England as a mixed monarchy governed by "the King in Parliament"
3. Protestants saw 1688 as another sign of God's special favor to England
8. The reality
1. 1688 consolidated the position of large property-holders
2. A restoration of the status quo on behalf of wealth
5. John Locke (1632-1704) and the contract theory of government
1. Two Treatises of Government (1690)
1. The state of nature
1. Absolute freedom and equality
2. No government
3. The only law is the law of nature
4. The individual enforces his own natural right to life, liberty, and property
2. Civil society
1. The inconveniences of nature outweigh its advantages
2. Humans establish a civil society based on absolute equality
3. Set up a government to arbitrate all disputes
4. All powers not surrendered to the government were reserved for the people themselves
5. Governmental authority is contractual and conditional
3. Absolutism
1. Condemned by Locke
2. Government is instituted to protect life, liberty, and property
2. Influence
1. American and French Revolutions
2. Supporters of William and Mary saw Locke as defender of their "conservative" revolution
4. The Absolutism of Louis XIV
1. The façade that was Louis
2. Performing royalty at Versailles
1. A stage upon which Louis mesmerized the nobility into obedience
2. Daily rituals and demonstrations of royalty
3. Royal "choreography"
4. Nobles were required to live at Versailles for part of the years
1. Raised their prestige
2. Louis could keep an eye on them
5. Louis as hard working and conscientious
6. Personal responsibility for the well-being of all his subjects
3. Administration and centralization
1. For Louis, royal power meant domestic tranquility
2. Conciliated the upper bourgeoisie by making them royal administrators
1. Intendants: administered the 36 generalités into which France was divided
1. Unconnected with local elites
2. Held office at the king's pleasure ("his" men)
3. Taxation
1. Collection of taxes necessary to maintain a large standing army (very expensive)
2. The taille (land tax), capitation (head tax), and the gabelle (salt tax)
3. Other indirect taxes on wine, tobacco, and other goods
4. Regional opposition
1. Reduced but not curtailed
2. Members of any parlement (law court) that did not enforce his laws was exiled
3. Never called the Estates-General (last convoked in 1614)
4. Louis XIV's religious policies
1. Louis was determined to impose religious unity on France (God would favor him)
2. Outside Roman Catholicism
1. Quietists -- Catholics who preached personal mysticism
1. Dispensed with the Church as intermediary
2. Suspect in the eyes of Louis
2. Jansenists -- held to the Augustinian notion of predestination
1. Persecuted by Louis
3. Jesuits -- earned the support of Louis
4. Huguenots -- French Calvinists
1. Hated by Louis
2. Protestant churches were destroyed
3. Protestants banned from many professions (medicine and printing)
3. 1685: Louis revokes the Edict of Nantes
1. Protestant clerics were exiled
2. Laymen were sent to the galleys as slaves
3. Children were forcibly baptized as Catholics
4. 200,000 Protestants flee to England, Holland, Germany, and America
5. Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) and royal finance
1. Colbert as finance minister, 1664-1683
2. Tightened the process of tax collection
1. Eliminated tax farming
2. 1664 -- 25% of taxes collected ended up in the treasury, by 1683, 80%
3. Sold public offices
4. Allowed guilds to purchase the right to enforce trade regulations
5. Controlled and regulated foreign trade
1. Imposed tariffs on foreign goods imported to France
2. Used state money to promote domestic manufactures
6. Improved France's roads, bridges, and waterways
7. His policies foundered because of the wars of Louis XIV
6. The wars of Louis XIV to 1697
1. For Louis, glory at home was to be achieved by military victories abroad
2. Objectives
1. Lessen any threat to France by the Hapsburg powers (Spain, Spanish Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire)
2. Promote the dynastic interests of his own family
3. 1667/68: attacks the Spanish Netherlands
4. 1672: attacks Holland and William of Orange
1. Treaty of Nijmegen (1678/79)
5. Captures Strasbourg (1681), Luxembourg (16984), and Cologne (1688)
1. Pushes across the Rhine and burns the middle Rhineland
6. William of Orange organizes the League of Augsburg
1. Holland, England, Spain, Sweden, Bavaria, Saxony, the Rhine Palatinate, and Austrian Hapsburgs
2. The Nine Years' War (1689-1697)
1. Fought mostly in the Low Countries
2. 1697: Peace of Ryswick
3. Louis returns most territory except Strasbourg and parts of Alsace
4. Treaty recognized William of Orange as king of England
7. The War of the Spanish Succession
1. Preserving a "balance of power"
1. Designed to prevent any one country for assuming too much power
2. An operative principle of foreign policy until 1914
3. England, United Provinces, Prussia, and Austria as the main proponents
4. Louis sought a French claim to the throne of Spain
1. Controlling the Spanish empire in the New World, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Philippines
2. Who will succeed to the Spanish throne?
1. Louis marries eldest daughter of Philip IV of Spain
2. Philip's youngest daughter marries Leopold I of Austria
3. Charles II leaves his possessions to Louis XIV's grandson, Philip of Anjou (the will was secret)
1. Philip was to renounce his claim to the French throne
2. Keeping the Spanish empire intact
4. Charles II dies, Philip V (r. 1700-1746) proclaimed the king of Spain
5. Louis XIV rushes his troops into the Spanish Netherlands
3. War
1. England, the United Provinces, Austria, and Prussia against France, Bavaria, and Spain
2. French defeat at Blenheim (1704)
3. English navy captures Gibraltar and Minorca
4. 1709: France on the verge of defeat
8. The Treaty of Utrecht
1. Terms were reasonably fair to all sides
1. Philip V remained on the throne of Spain and retained its colonial empire
2. Louis agrees that France and Spain would never unite under the same ruler
3. Austria gains territories in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy
4. The Dutch were guaranteed protection of their borders from French invasion
5. Great Britain as greatest winner
1. Kept Gibraltar and Minorca
2. Obtained large chunks of French territory in the New World
3. Extracted from Spain the right to transport and sell African slaves in Spanish America
2. Reshaping the balance of power
1. By 1713, Spain's collapse was complete
2. Gradual decline of Dutch power
3. Balance gradually shifted to Britain's favor
4. The British navy would rule the imperial and commercial world of the 18th century
5. The Remaking of Central and Eastern Europe
1. The Hapsburg empire
1. 1683: Ottoman Turks assault Vienna, then their power in southeastern Europe declines
2. Austria reconquers most of Hungary from the Ottomans (1699)
1. Controls all of Hungary, Transylvania, and Serbia (1718)
2. Acquires Silesia from Poland (1722)
3. Hungary as buffer state
4. Vienna emerges as cultural capital of Europe
3. Austrian Hapsburgs retain title as Holy Roman emperors
1. Real power lay in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Hungary
1. Geographically contiguous but divided by ethnicity, religion, and language
2. Bohemia and Moravia
1. Hapsburgs force peasants to provide labor service for their lords
2. Reduced political independence of traditional legislative Estates
3. Administered Hungary through the army and imposed Catholic religious uniformity
4. Maria Theresa (r. 1740-1780) and Joseph II (r.1765-1790)
1. Pioneered "enlightened absolutism"
2. Centralized administration in Vienna
3. Increased taxation creating a large standing army
4. Tightened control over the church
5. Statewide system of education, relaxed censorship, abolished serfdom, liberal criminal code
2. The rise of Brandenburg-Prussia
1. Prussia a composite state
1. Two main holdings: Brandenburg and duchy of East Prussia
2. Dominant military power in central Europe
2. Foundations
1. Frederick William the "Great Elector" (r.1640-1688)
1. Diplomatic triumphs
2. Built a huge standing army
3. Granted Junkers (powerful nobles) the right to enserf peasants
4. Junkers staffed the army, immune from taxation
5. Junkers surrendered management of the state to a centralized bureaucracy
3. Frederick I (r.1688-1713)
1. Developed the cultural life of Berlin
4. Frederick William I (r.1713-1740)
1. Returned to policies of the "Great Elector"
2. Built a first-rate army (the "sergeant king")
3. The "Potsdam Giants"
4. Increased taxes and shunned expensive luxuries of the court
5. Frederick the Great (r.1740-1786)
1. Prussia as a major power
2. Mobilized the army and occupied Silesia
3. Gained the support of the Junkers for his policies
4. An "enlightened absolutist"
1. Social reforms
2. Prohibited torture and bribing of judges
3. System of elementary education
4. Encouraged toleration toward Christians
5. Fostered scientific forestry and cultivation of new crops
6. Autocracy in Russia
1. Peter the Great (1672-1725)
1. Mercurial personality
2. Policies were decisive in making Russia a Great European power
2. The early years of Peter's reign
1. The Romanov dynasty
2. The "time of troubles"
3. Stenka Razin rebellion (1667-1671)
1. Supported by oppressed serfs and non-Russian tribes in the lower Volga
4. Tsar Alexis I (r.1654-1676)
5. Peter comes to the throne as a young boy
1. Political dissension and court intrigue
2. Overthrows regency of Sophia (1689)
3. Travels to Holland and England to study shipbuilding and recruit skilled workers
6. The Streltsy rebellion
1. Peter crushes the rebellion with savagery
3. The transformation of the tsarist state
1. Western influences
1. Peter published a book of manners
2. Encouraged polite conversation between the sexes
3. Russian nobility sent their children to European schools
2. Peter's goal
1. Make Russia a real military power
2. New taxation system (1724)
3. Table of Ranks (1722)
1. Insisted that all nobles work themselves up from lower landlord class to highest military class
2. Reversed the traditional hierarchy of Russian nobility
4. Peter as absolute master of his empire
1. Russian peasants legally the property of their masters (1649)
2. By 1750, half were serfs, the other half lived on lands owned by Peter
3. State peasants could be conscripted, work in factories, or forced to work on public projects
4. The Duma is replaced by nine administrators
5. Religion
1. Peter takes direct control over the Russian Orthodox church
6. Noble status depe4nded upon service to the government
4. Peter's foreign policy
1. Goal was to secure warm-water ports on the Black and Baltic Seas
2. Begins a war with Sweden (1700-1721)
1. Secures the Gulf of Finland
2. Begins building St. Petersburg
3. Peace of Nystad (1721)
1. Realignment of power in eastern Europe
2. Gulf of Finland, Livonia, and Estonia pass to Russia
3. The cost of war
1. Direct taxation increased 500%
2. Aroused resentment among the Russian nobility
4. Peter dies (1725) with no heir to the throne
5. Catherine the Great (r.1762-1796) and the partition of Poland
1. Came to the throne after Tsar Peter III was deposed and executed in a palace coup
2. The image of the enlightened Catherine
3. Determined not to lose the support of the nobility
4. Summoned a commission to codify Russian law (1767)
5. The Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1775)
1. Forced Catherine to centralize her government
2. Tightened aristocratic control over the peasantry
6. War and diplomacy
1. War with the Ottoman Turks
1. Russia won the northern Black Sea and secured the independence of Crimea
2. Russian gains alarmed Austria
3. The Partition of Poland (1772)
4. The Partition of Poland (1795)
7. Commerce and Consumption
1. Economic growth in Eighteenth-Century Europe
1. Balance of power was shifting to the west (Britain and France)
2. New intensive agriculture in Britain and Holland
1. Produced more food per acre
2. New crops (maize and potatoes)
3. Urbanization
1. By 1800, 200 cities with a population over 10,000
2. Most of these cities were concentrated in northern and western Europe
3. Extraordinary growth of the very largest cities
4. Developments in trade and industry
1. Entrepreneurs and the "putting-out" system (protoindustrialization)
1. Employment during slack agricultural season
2. Avoided expensive guild restrictions
3. Reduced levels of capital investment
2. Cities as manufacturing centers
1. The growth of workshops
2. New inventions and the role of technological innovation
3. Machines and labor-saving devices
3. Obstacles to innovation
1. Machines threw people out of work
2. Governments blocked widespread use of machines
3. Mercantilist protection of commercial and financial backers
4. Europe's insatiable appetite for goods
2. A world of goods
1. A mass market for consumer goods (especially northwestern Europe)
2. Houses of ordinary people filled with luxuries (sugar, teas, books, toys, china, razors)
3. Demand outstripped supply
4. Encouraged the provision of services
5. Golden age of the small shopkeeper
8. Colonization and Trade in the Seventeenth Century
1. The age of empires
2. Spanish colonialism
1. Established colonial governments in Peru and Mexico
2. Government allowed only Spanish merchants to trade with American colonies
3. All colonial exports had to pass through Seville (later Cadiz)
4. Dominated by mining (silver)
5. Promoted farming in Central and South America
6. Spanish success prompted other countries to grab a share of the treasure
3. English colonialism
1. American colonies offered no significant mineral wealth
2. Profits obtained through agricultural settlements
1. Jamestown, Virginia (1607)
3. Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620)
1. Escaping religious persecution
2. No attempts made to Christianize Native Americans
4. English settlements were privately organized
5. Navigation Acts (1651 and 1660)
1. All exports from English colonies to England must be carried by English ships
6. Sugar and tobacco
7. Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
4. French colonialism
1. Colbert regarded overseas expansion as part of state economic policy
2. Encouraged sugar trade in the West Indies
3. French fur traders occupied the interior of North America
1. Preached Christianity to Native Americans
5. Dutch colonialism
1. By the 1670s, the Dutch maintained the most prosperous commercial empire
2. Followed the "fort and factory" model of the Portuguese
3. Dutch east India Company (founded 1602)
1. Controlled spice trade in Sumatra, Borneo, and the Moluccas
4. Secured an exclusive right to trade with Japan
5. maintained military and trading outposts in China and India
6. The Dutch as the primary financiers of 17th century Europe
1. The joint-stock company
1. Raised cash by selling shares in their enterprise to investors
6. Contrasting patterns of colonial settlement
1. Important differences in settlement patterns
2. Spain and Central and South America
1. Small number of Spaniards conquered complex, large populations
2. Did not attempt to replace their culture
3. Focus was on controlling native labor for maximum profit
4. Collecting tribute and Catholic conversions
5. High degree of intermarriage
6. Complex system of racial and social castes
3. France
1. Colonies established as direct crown enterprises
2. Military outposts and trading centers
3. Fur trade and fishing -- relied on cooperative relationships
4. Intermarriage was common
4. England
1. Colonies established as joint-stock companies or proprietary colonies
2. Planned settlements and plantations
1. Replicating English life
3. Primarily agricultural communities
4. No need to control large native labor force
5. Their goal was exclusive control of native lands
6. Expulsion and massacre of native populations
7. Rare incidence of intermarriage
8. Rigid racial divisions
7. Colonial rivalries
1. Spain and Portugal decline in importance
2. 18th century British merchants dominate world trade routes
9. Colonialism and Empire
1. The triangular trade in sugar and slaves
1. Sugar and slaves dominated 18th century colonial trade
2. British naval superiority
1. British ship sails from New England to Africa to exchange rum for slaves
2. African slaves sent to sugar colonies and are traded for molasses
3. Molasses brought to New England where it was mad into rum
3. 75-90,000 African slaves brought to the New World yearly
4. 18th century slave trade was open to private entrepreneurs
5. The "middle passage"
2. The commercial rivalry between Britain and France
1. Value of colonial commerce increased in the 18th century
2. Tied together the interests of governments and merchants
3. British dominance in commerce and finance
3. War and empire in the Eighteenth-Century world
1. War of the Austrian Succession spread beyond the frontiers of Europe
2. Continued colonial conflicts
3. The Seven Years' War (1756-1763)
1. Ended in stalemate
2. Indian mercenaries employed by the East India Company eliminated French competitors
3. The British capture Louisbourg and Quebec
4. The Treaty of Paris (1763)
1. France surrenders Canada and India to the British
4. The American Revolution
1. To pay for the cost of war, Britain increased taxes in the American colonies
2. Colonists complained they had no representatives in Parliament -- taxation without consent
3. George III -- vacillation and force
4. The Boston Tea Party (1773)
5. The Continental Congress at Philadelphia (1774)
6. Lexington and Concord (April 1775)
7. Independence (July 4, 1776)
8. France sides with the colonists (1778)
9. British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia (1781)
10. Conclusion
1. American War of Independence as final military conflict between Britain and France
2. Britain remains most important trading partner with American colonies
3. European population increase
4. European prosperity unevenly distributed
5. Gradual political changes

 

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