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Unit 3
10–15% of examAfter 1648, European states took different paths to power. You'll compare Louis XIV's France, the model of absolute monarchy, with England and the Dutch Republic, where parliaments and wealthy elites limited what rulers could do. A booming Atlantic economy, wars fought to keep any one country from dominating, and the rise of Russia under Peter the Great also reshaped Europe.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
In the 1600s, monarchs trying to centralize power ran into nobles, regions and religious minorities who wanted to keep their traditional rights, as in the Catalan revolt in Spain (1640) and the Fronde revolts in France (1648–1653). War, hunger and the cold Little Ice Age made this a period of crisis that pushed rulers to find new ways to hold power.
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Stuart kings James I and Charles I clashed with Parliament over taxes, religion and royal power, leading to civil war in the 1640s, Charles I's execution in 1649 and rule by Oliver Cromwell. After the monarchy returned in 1660, Parliament replaced the Catholic James II with William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the English Bill of Rights (1689) made the monarch rule with Parliament, not over it.
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Europe's market economy kept growing: in the putting-out system (cottage industry), merchants paid rural families to spin and weave at home, and new institutions like insurance and the Bank of England (1694) made money easier to raise. Better crop rotation, enclosure and American crops like the potato boosted food supplies in an Agricultural Revolution, but most people still farmed for a living.
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Mercantilism held that a country grows rich by exporting more than it imports, with colonies supplying raw materials and buying finished goods. Europe's demand for sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea expanded the transatlantic slave trade and created a new consumer culture at home.
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After revolting against Spanish Habsburg rule (beginning in the 1560s, with independence recognized in 1648), the Protestant Dutch Republic became Europe's leading trading and banking center in the 1600s. Wealthy merchants and landowners ran it instead of a king, it tolerated religious minorities more than most states, and it produced painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
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After 1648, states fought mainly over territory, trade and royal succession rather than religion, and they formed alliances to stop any one power from dominating, such as the coalitions against Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The Ottomans' failed siege of Vienna in 1683 ended their push into central Europe, and a weak Polish monarchy let Russia, Prussia and Austria carve up Poland until it ceased to exist in 1795.
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Absolute monarchs kept nobles out of real decision-making but left them their titles, tax breaks and social rank. Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) ruled from Versailles, sent royal officials called intendants into the provinces, built up the army and finances with his minister Colbert, and revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Peter the Great westernized Russia with a modern army, a new capital at St. Petersburg and Western dress for nobles, a project Catherine the Great continued.
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This wrap-up topic asks you to compare how power worked in different states from 1648 to 1815, such as absolute monarchy in France and Russia versus limited government in England and the Dutch Republic. Look at who held power, how rulers dealt with nobles and money, and why the outcomes differed.
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