Which commercial powers of Europe were emerged in seventeenth -eighteenth century
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The 1640s were especially trying for the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty. Aside from the ongoing challenge of ending the long and costly war with his rebellious provinces in the northern Netherlands, Philip IV was faced in 1640 with two new revolutions: in May, the principality of Catalonia, which on the commercial strength of Barcelona was the most important part of his Aragonese possessions, rose up in revolt; in December, the kingdom of Portugal, which had been cobbled into the composite Habsburg state in Iberia and Italy some sixty years earlier, declared its independence, taking with it a vast array of colonial interests. After an unsuccessful military campaign to subdue Barcelona as well as a diplomatic failure to prevent a Catalonian alliance with France, the Habsburg regime in Madrid appeared to be incapable of mounting even a token resistance to the Portuguese secession. Meanwhile, although the effective loss of Portugal had simplified some of the sticking points in negotiating peace with the Dutch, it was not until 1647 that a preliminary treaty, formally recognizing the independence of the Dutch Republic, was completed in the Westphalian city of Münster. Thus even before the Peace of Münster could be ratified and officially promulgated (1648), a spectacular popular revolt in Naples in the summer of 1647, paired with several others in Sicily, threatened even more serious damage to Philip’s dynastic house of cards. Surely all of this opposition merely confirmed the English ambassador’s belief, expressed as early as 1641, that “the greatness of this monarchy is near to an end.” [1]
Yet the tribulations of Philip IV were hardly unique. At the same time that Philip was being confronted with the obvious limits of his autonomy as the sovereign of a composite existing regimes has spawned a sizable literature regarding what is usually called the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. R. B. questions relating to the characteristics of a more general social and economic crisis of which Merriman’s “revolutions” were said to be symptomatic (Ashton 1965; Parker and Smith 1978). Before long the crisis metaphor itself became the focus of attention as a new generation of scholars found ever more crises to explore, either in other dimensions of the mid-seventeenth-century European experience or in other decades, reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century. Eventually, T. K. Rabb (1975) suggested that the original crisis of the mid-seventeenth century might most usefully be seen as merely the climax of a much grander social, political, and cultural “struggle for stability” that began in the early sixteenth century and finally gave way to the relative stability of Europe’s ancien régime by the 1680s.[2]
For our purposes, it is essential to refocus on the political dimensions of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and to situate these multiple challenges to Europe’s dynastic princes within both the changing spaces of European politics and the larger history of popular political practice. Looking prospectively from the end of the sixteenth century, this chapter examines the constellation of political conflicts that finally yielded to a relatively durable pattern of religious and political settlement in the second half of the seventeenth century. I argue that the political action of ordinary people was instrumental in transforming the composite states created by aggressive princes nearly everywhere in Europe, not just in those areas where a broad-based Reformation coalition had succeeded in implanting Protestant churches in the sixteenth century. This is not to say, of course, that popular political actors were everywhere (or even anywhere unambiguously) triumphant; rather, surveying the revolutionary conflicts that constituted the midcentury crisis, I highlight the variable, transient, and often ambiguous outcomes of the religious and political struggles. My goal, in proceeding from one region to the next, is to describe and account for the complex interactions of rulers and subjects in a number of revolutionary situations and to suggest how the outcomes of these struggles structured, in turn, the political opportunities of ordinary people under Europe’s new regime.
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The End of the Religious Wars?
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was credible evidence to suggest that the dangerous and destructive cycle of “religious” wars that had attended the reformations of the sixteenth century might actually be coming to an end. The most promising signs of hope first appeared in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes in France and the death of Philip II in Spain. On the face of