Europe in the Eighteenth Century

Book excerpt: Europe in the Eighteenth Century is a social history of Europe in all its aspects: economic, political, diplomatic military, colonial-expansionist. Crisply and succinctly written, it describes Europe not through a history of individual countries, but in a common context during the three quarters of a century between the death of Louis XIV and the industrial revolution in England and the social and political revolution in France. It presents the development of government, institutions, cities, economies, wars, and the circulation of ideas in terms of social pressures and needs, and stresses growth, interrelationships, and conflict of social classes as agents of historical change, paying particular attention to the role of popular, as well as upper- and middle-class, protest as a factor in that change.