Generations passed into centuries--the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth
and seventeenth. From small local beginnings the nations of western
Europe emerged: Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain,
Italy, Austria and eventually Russia. Each was a consolidation of local
principalities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms. Each was passing through
the rural-urban transformation. Each was outgrowing feudalism and
producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals,
tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle class and a proletariat.
After the fifteenth century each state was spilling over its own
frontiers, annexing or losing neighboring territory, spreading beyond
the boundaries of Europe into the teeming markets of Asia and the newly
discovered treasure-house of the Americas.
A score of European peoples were engaged in the give-and-take of this
struggle for wealth and power--for land and its resources in Europe,
North Africa and the Near East; for booty, trade and overseas colonies.
As the struggle grew more intense smaller and weaker nations dropped out
of the contest or were partitioned and gobbled up piecemeal.
Such was the condition of Europe's free-for-all in the closing years of
the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth
century, while three developing forces pushed into the forefront of
European life: the enlightenment and science, representative government,
and the industrial revolution.
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