In the mid-nineteenth century the pursuit of scientific knowledge at last attained true autonomy and independence. Emerging as a consistent discipline with experiment and observation as its sanctions and mathematics as its logic, science extended its province far into space, and brought millions of years within the scope of its pronouncements. Emancipated from the limitations imposed by formal reasoning and dogmatic theology, an unquestionable force of certainty was claimed for scientific truths such as had never before been granted to any products of the intellect; and though only a small part of the swift advance in material civilisation that was made in this period can be directly attributed to contemporary progress in science, vast accretions of potential power were being built up. The formative period of modern science in which its character, its methods and its problems were established may be said to have ended about 1830; the modern age, with the technical ascendancy of science, to have begun about 1870. The interval is both classical, in that it contains the fulfilment of much that had been originated earlier, and transitional, because the beginning of recent science lies within it. Without abrupt discontinuity there was a remodelling of activity, a displacement of some guiding concepts of scientific thought by others. A single individual, like James Clerk Maxwell, might in one investigation add a coping-stone to the fabric of Newtonian celestial mechanics, while in another he helped to lay the foundations of the new theoretical physics. The doctrine of universal gravitation received its fullest vindication in 1845–6 from the discovery of the planet Neptune in accordance with theoretical predictions, when Newton's optical theories had already been shaken by the newer theory of wave-motion.

It is characteristic of this period of literature that, with exceptional vigour, it both provokes and defeats large historical generalisations. For its writers show an exceedingly high degree of historical self-consciousness and debate their problems in terms of ‘the needs of the age’, believing that theirs is an age which calls for radically new insights, approaches and departures of the mind. On the other hand, this feeling is but a symptom of the dissolution of all naively held common beliefs, a negative fact which makes it hard to find for the epoch any positive common denominator. Is it a scientifically minded, materialistic, positivistic age? Yes, it is the age of Comte, Feuerbach, Darwin, Marx and Herbert Spencer. Yet it is also romantic, idealistic and anxiously waiting upon the spirit of man and his cultural possessions. Its intellectual history would certainly be badly out of focus if no mention were made of Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Is it an age estranged from religion? Certainly. Yet religious feelings run high, and not only feelings. There are such profound and dramatic religious thinkers as Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman, and there is, in literature, the deeply religious genius of Dostoevsky. Is it a prosaic age? Very likely; yet it is also the age which invented and passionately practised the doctrine of ‘pure poetry’, and which revelled in the emotional abandon of Richard Wagner's music. Is it an age which believes in the innate power of man to embark on a voyage of infinite progress? It would no doubt be easy to answer in the affirmative were it not for the eager reception given—and by no mean hosts—to the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer.

In the arts of building, painting and sculpture, the nineteenth century starts about 1760. Before that date in most countries art had been a need of the church or the pleasure of court and nobility. From that date the artist, like the writer, began to emancipate himself from patronage. Art became the pursuit of self-reliant, socially emphatically independent men. ‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’, is what Shelley called the artists, and Schiller ranks the bard with the king; ‘for both walk on the summits of mankind’. The social break is best remembered in this country by Dr Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, written in 1755:

It is characteristic that this remarkably early declaration of liberty should have been written in England. For socially, politically, philosophically, England was the leading country of Europe in the eighteenth century. That this was so in art and architecture too, is less known. It might be denied on the strength of the supreme aesthetic qualities of Watteau's or Tiepolo's paintings or the South German and Austrian churches and palaces of the Rococo. But if the later eighteenth century is looked at as a preface to the nineteenth, then it will be recognised beyond any doubt that from road making and canal making, from factory construction (of iron as early as 1792) and bridge construction to the arts of architecture and painting England was ahead at least until the closing years of the century.

The result of the revolutions of 1830 was to divide Europe into two opposing diplomatic combinations and, in most European questions in the years immediately following the risings of 1830, the eastern powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—were to be found ranged against Great Britain and France. This separation, as Palmerston noted in 1836, was ‘not one of words but of things, not the effect of caprice or of will, but produced by the force of circumstances. The three and the two think differently and therefore they act differently.’

The differences were largely matters of political principle and method. The eastern courts were bound together by a common belief in autocratic government and a common fear of a resurgence of the revolutionary principles of 1789 and 1793. They took a completely static view of the organisation of Europe and believed that changes in the political and social structure of the Continent, or of its member states, must be resisted lest the whole edifice fall in ruins. In addition, since they regarded all movements for constitutional reform, or—in the case of subject nationalities—for national self-determination, as ‘revolutionary’, they claimed for themselves the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the smaller states of Europe in order to extirpate these heresies before they spread. The western powers, on the other hand, stood for liberal and constitutional government, rejected the theory of intervention advanced by the reactionary governments of eastern Europe and, whenever it was within their power to do so, encouraged and protected other constitutional regimes.

The contribution to the twentieth-century Russian revolution made by the condition of Russia in the mid-nineteenth century is all the more clearly revealed as the character of the society which the revolution has established becomes increasingly certain and perceptible. Even a generation ago the institutions of tsarist Russia, like the efforts of the autocracy to conserve them, could appear no more than obstacles or incentives to its overthrow in favour of the liberal democracy which was often still regarded as the world-wide objective of political reform. Similarly the tendencies towards spiritual collectivism, indeed social absolutism, shared so generally by Russian reformers of distinct and even opposed schools long before the advent of Marxism in Russia, could still be counted as aberrations from the course of liberal development. But by now we can perceive that the tsarist autocracy and the movements of opposition to it provided many of the moulds of post-revolutionary government and political thought. A historical revision is therefore gaining ground in the West in which the evidence of survival and recurrence in Russian institutions and thought is a directing factor.

Such evidence is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the tradition of absolute centralised government at one extreme, co-existent with a village collectivism reputedly, if not in fact, traditional at the other. But the western interpreter will also observe, as did his more acute predecessors at the time, the association of political authority with bureaucratic or military rank rather than private, local, or hereditary status, a common indifference to western conceptions of liberty for either moral or economic ends, an obsession with Russia's historical status, the sense of national exclusivism linked with a sense of supra-national, indeed universal mission, the confidence in a manifest destiny in Asia owed to a new dispensation distinct from that of the older maritime trading empires, the reluctant debt to Germany for the principle of national economics, and for models of militarism and technology—besides the education of German philosophy which the Russian intelligentsia digested and transformed.

The wars of Spanish American independence virtually ended in 1824. Between the Great Lakes and Cape Horn European dominion in the New World had been reduced to a chain of islands in the West Indies, to the British settlement of Belize in Central America, and to the three colonies of British, French and Dutch Guiana in South America. In the Caribbean sea the old French colony of Saint Domingue had established its rule, as the new republic of Haiti, over the old Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. Brazil had separated from Portugal. And from the viceroyalties, captaincies-general, and presidencies of Spain on the mainlands of North and South America seven new republics had been formed—Mexico, the United Provinces of Central America, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and those Provinces of the Rio de la Plata which were to become at last Argentina. To these new states four others were added by 1830. The provinces of Upper Peru, the former Presidency of Charcas, became in 1825 the Republic of Bolivia. Uruguay, in 1828, was born of war between the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata and Brazil; and Ecuador and Venezuela, in 1830, both seceded from Colombia. Territorial changes were yet to come. Other republics would be brought to birth. But already in 1830 the political map of South America had more or less assumed its modern form.

For many years the legend flourished that Bismarck, by a masterly coup, tricked France into declaring war on Prussia in July 1870. No one was more assiduous in fostering this story than Bismarck himself, in moods of mischief or vainglory; many historians found evidence to support him, and carried the tale of his deceit of the French back several years before 1870. The truth is far more complicated. Bismarck certainly bears his share of responsibility for the outbreak of war, but cannot claim the whole of it; the question even of when he began to desire war remains obscure, as does the question of exactly what results he hoped would follow from it.

Among its other results one, the shift in Europe's diplomatic centre of gravity from Paris to Berlin, had been among his few long-term objectives from the start of his career in office in 1862. He had always meant, if he could, to turn Berlin into the directing centre of a Europe controlled by a Prussianised Germany. The events of the rest of the 'sixties were dominated by his determination to remake Germany on terms of his own choosing. This determination soon became evident, and the four powers strong enough to stand up to Prussia had to decide what to do about it. Great Britain and Russia were, for divers reasons, indifferent. The British deliberately pursued a policy of isolation. The Russians, emerging from the retirement in which they had been plunged by the Crimean War (ch, x, pp. 268-9), found themselves rivals with Austria in south-east Europe, and therefore looked more with favour than otherwise on any distraction to be provided for the Habsburgs in Germany.

The forty years from 1830 to 1870 saw a greater change in the means of warfare, both on land and sea, than during the whole previous span of modern history—or of all previous history. Most of the change was concentrated, at least in the sense of being demonstrated, within the last decade of the period. The technical, tactical, and strategical developments during the wars of this decade foreshadowed the operational trend, and social form, of warfare in the next century. Some of the new trends also exemplified the remarkable influence of two great military thinkers of the nineteenth century, Jomini and Clausewitz, whose main works appeared in the ’thirties.

For many centuries the strength of armies was reckoned in number of men, with merely a distinction between cavalrymen and infantrymen— ‘horse’ and ‘foot’, as the two branches, or arms, were customarily described. Subject to that distinction, of respective mobility, it was the most suitable way of computing their material strength before the advent of firearms, and it remained a reasonable form of reckoning so long as firearms were effective only at very short range, while still so inaccurate and slow-loading that the opponent had a good chance, especially if mounted, of coming to close quarters without being shot down. Even so, the volley-fire of infantry armed with the flint-lock musket became sufficiently effective with good training to put a strong curb on cavalry charges, and in the Napoleonic wars the cavalry arm was palpably a diminishing force. At the same time, field artillery played an increasingly important part in Napoleon's later battles, through improved tactical employment in concentrated numbers, so that it became more necessary in a reckoning of strength to count ‘guns’ as well as ‘horse and foot’.

The years between 1830 and 1870 were marked, in the western world, by the triumph of nationalism in three important areas—Italy (chs. IX and XXI), Germany (chs. IX and XIX) and the United States. In Italy, nationalism could not achieve its fulfilment until it overcame the obstacles of universalism—the universalism of both church and empire. In Germany, Bismarckian nationalism reached its goal by breaking down the forces of German particularism and by sacrificing the democratic values of 1848. In America, the alignment of forces was different: the ideals of nationalism and democracy were fused and the force which resisted nationalism was sectionalism within the United States. The sequence of development was also different, for nationalism seemed to gain a quick and easy triumph in America during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and then belatedly encountered the disruptive force of sectionalism which grew in strength until the tension between the two forces culminated in the Civil War of 1861-5.

At the time when Andrew Jackson came to the American Presidency in 1829, Italy was still split into minor principalities, largely under the domination of the Habsburgs, and Germany as yet remained a loose confederation of thirty-eight autonomous states. By contrast, the triumph of nationalism in the United States already appeared, at least outwardly, to be complete. During the forty years of the republic's existence, no other country had grown so rapidly and no other people were so proud of their national growth. The population, which stood at 12,800,000 in 1830, was more than three times as great as in 1790.

Few people in 1830 believed that there might exist an Italian nation. There were eight several states in the peninsula, each with distinct laws and traditions. No one had had the desire or the resources to revive Napoleon's partial experiment in unification. The settlement of 1814–15 had merely restored regional divisions, with the added disadvantage that the decisive victory of Austria over France temporarily hindered Italians in playing off their former oppressors against each other. Austria now owned Venetia as well as Lombardy, and indirectly controlled the central duchies, Tuscany, Lucca, Modena and Parma; and Austrian forces were at hand to quell the insurrections of Naples and Piedmont in 1821. Italians who, like Foscolo and Rossetti, harboured patriotic sentiments, were driven into exile. The largest Italian state, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with its eight million inhabitants, seemed aloof and indifferent: Sicily and Naples had once formed part of Spain, and had always been foreign to the rest of Italy. The common people in each region, and even the intellectual élite, spoke their mutually unintelligible dialects and lacked the least vestiges of national consciousness. They wanted good government, not self-government, and had welcomed Napoleon and the French as more equitable and efficient than their native dynasties.

In the forty years after 1830 the peninsula was to be unified under a single government. This risorgimento of Italy did not follow any pre-conceived plan, and many various ideological, political and economic forces aided it, directly or indirectly. A strong movement for economic and governmental reform already existed among the ruling classes of the ancien régime, particularly among the military and civilian officials who had served under the French.

At the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century the central area of the Far East, comprising China, Korea and Japan, with approximately half the population of Asia and a quarter of the population of the world, was still almost inaccessible to the travel and commerce of Western nations and virtually impervious to Western cultural influences. In particular, the vast empire of China, under the Ch'ing dynasty set up in Peking by the Manchus in 1644, remained untouched by the internal disintegrations and external encroachments which had overtaken the more westerly of the major Asian powers since the end of the seventeenth century. The Mogul empire had disappeared and over most of India had been replaced by the direct or indirect rule of the British East India Company; the Ottoman empire had lost territory to Russia and had been weakened by the secession of Egypt and the national revolt of the Greeks; Persia also had lost territory to Russia and had been curtailed in the east by the new realm of Afghanistan. But China had not merely suffered no loss of territory since 1700, but had extended her borders by the incorporation of the central Asian empire of the Kalmuk Mongols including Tibet. This massive political organism, reaching from the Pacific to the Pamirs, was loosely, but effectively, controlled by a central government in Peking; it inherited a tradition of imperial unity closely associated with the teaching of the Confucian scholar class and going back to an age contemporary with the Roman empire of Augustus.

During the 250 years immediately preceding 1830, the navies of the world did not greatly change in their material composition and in the technical requirements of their personnel. If Drake's men had found themselves in Nelson's Victory, they would, without prolonged training, have sailed and fought her with considerable efficiency. During these centuries, therefore, the development of matériel and personnel need not constantly engage the historian's attention. On the other hand, the use of navies as instruments of national policy, and the consequent campaigns waged at sea, loom too large to be disregarded.

After 1830, however, the emphasis is exactly reversed. Now the great seafaring nations are no longer in endemic conflict, and the nations most usually at war are not the seafaring nations. So ‘operations’ fall naturally into the background, and, though fleets are still used as instruments of policy, that use is more indirect, less primarily warlike. There now occurs, however, a series of unparalleled revolutions in matériel which, extending inevitably to personnel, profoundly alters the whole nature of navies. Though Nelson's men could have gone back two-and-a-half centuries without trouble, they would have been utterly bemused if called upon to go forward only a quarter of that period.

It is, therefore, the great evolutions in the ships themselves, their propulsion, weapons and equipment, and in their men which must be the main concern here. It is in the period from 1830 to 1870, indeed, that those changes were at their quickest and most bewildering, and in their results most decisive. The navies of 1830 were still, in essence, the navies of Nelson and Villeneuve: those of 1870 were already, in most respects, those of Fisher and von Tirpitz.

The prodigious forces discovered and exploited through many decades by the inventive genius and tireless energy of the European peoples seemed in the middle of the nineteenth century to carry them upwards to the very zenith of their power. The states of Europe might subsequently rule over dominions still more extensive, command armies still larger, and possess weapons more terrible by far in their destructive range; yet, as time went on, their supremacy would be increasingly open to challenge from the peoples of other continents. In the years 1830–70, however, it was scarcely questioned. This was a period when the European states were free from serious threat of political dominance by any one among them, and when, prone though they as ever were to shifting antagonisms, they were not more permanently divided into hostile and highly armed camps. Their wars were relatively brief and the loss of life relatively small. Conflict had not yet attained the suicidal proportions of 1914–18, and, although men of vision like Tocqueville and Gioberti could foretell the immense future power of the United States or Russia, it was not until after that first ‘world war’ that a European statesman would write of the decadence of Europe and a European thinker dilate upon the decline of the West.

This supremacy the European peoples owed above all to their near monopoly of the new skills and machines born of the Industrial Revolution and to the extraordinary and simultaneous increase in their own numbers. These phenomena had become manifest well back in the eighteenth century and had led intelligent men to ponder deeply upon their significance.

Spain 1714 appeared to retain its American empire through the forbearance of the rest of Europe. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession many outside observers thought that the Indies, or part of them, could easily be detached from Spain. Whether this opinion was right or wrong, however, the attempt was not made. Spain was supported politically by France, and the enemies of Spain wanted an extension of their trade rather than an extension of their colonial possessions. Spanish America remained Spanish; but the reputation of Spain, political, military and economic, had sunk very low, and throughout the first half of the eighteenth century a stream of books and pamphlets appeared, both in Spain and abroad, condemning Spanish policy and the feebleness and incompetence of Spanish administration in the Indies.

Most foreign writers on the subject were divided between their envy of the wealth, actual or potential, of the American kingdoms, and their contempt for Spanish mismanagement. This distinction appears very clearly, for example, in the Spanish Empire in America, by ‘an English Merchant’, [John Campbell], published in London in 1747. The author writes ‘The weakness of the Spaniards is, properly speaking, the weakness of their Government. There wants not people, there wants not a capacity of defence, if the Governors and other Royal Officers were not so wanting in their duty, and did not thereby set so ill an example as corrupts and effeminates all who are subject to them.’ The ‘English merchant’ proceeds to give a list of foreign attacks on Spanish colonial possessions, of which some succeeded, but more were beaten off by a spirited local defence; and he concludes: ‘So it seems to be a thing out of dispute, that it is not so much the weakness of the Spaniards, as the weakness of their Councils, which have occasioned their losses in these parts.’

After the Treaty of Utrecht the British and French colonies in North America, though separated by a vast wilderness, became increasingly apprehensive of one another.

In the short term, the French colonies were in the stronger position. Their power was based on the riches of the wilderness itself, economically on furs, militarily on water communications and diplomatically on manipulating the Indian tribes. The conditions of the fur trade made it possible for the Governor-General, the Company and the Church, all operating from the St Lawrence valley, to control a vast and very sparsely populated hinterland. The weakness of the French colonies came, however, from this adaptation to the conditions of the wilderness and in the end was to outweigh the sources of strength. The French fur trade only required a very few men: the French did not settle in numbers large enough to develop agriculture or industry or even to provide enough soldiers. The exploitation of the forests soon reached a point of diminishing returns. Traders went even further into the hinterland and relations had to be established with even more distant Indian tribes. Concentration on the fur trade meant reliance on France for provisions, manufactures and weapons. The existence of New France depended on command of the sea and particularly the control of the approaches to the St Lawrence which was threatened by British occupation of Newfoundland and of Acadia. In the circumstances, the best hope for the French colonies was to pursue a boldly offensive policy, and by using the initiative which their centralised planning gave them they managed, between 1713 and 1754, to extend their power from the Mississippi and the Great Lakes to the Appalachians.

In matters of taste the period 1715-63 is only part of a longer period beginning in the late seventeenth century and ending with the triumph of the romantic spirit during the eighteenth century. During the whole age men prided themselves on their appreciation of the classical art of Augustan Rome, yet they had so much self-confidence in their own intellectual powers and had, specially in England and France, evolved such a characteristic form of society that while paying sincere lip service to the classic ideals they evolved examples of town architecture, of essay and of novel, which were entirely original and of great beauty.

In architecture the predominant influence throughout Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century was that of classical Rome as reinterpreted by the Italian architects of the Renaissance. But in France and England, and indeed in northern Europe generally, that influence was transmitted in a rather different form from the one it assumed in Italy and southern or Roman Catholic Europe. In Italy the style which persisted during the first half of the eighteenth century was the baroque which developed in Rome early in the seventeenth century. It had found expression in the work of such architects as Maderno (d. 1629), Bernini (d. 1680), Borromini (d. 1667) and Cortona (d. 1669), and the finest examples are perhaps the Palazzo Barberini designed by Carlo Maderno and built by Borromini and Bernini, the church of St Carlo alle Quattro Fontane designed by Borromini who built the front at the very end of his life, the Scala Regia in the Vatican designed by Bernini in 1665 and the chapel of St Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria designed by Bernini in 1646.

The Seven Years War in Europe, which began with the invasion of Saxony by Frederick the Great on 29 August 1756, was but one part of the world-wide struggle between Great Britain and France, which had commenced in the New World in 1754, though war between them was not officially declared until May 1756. Whilst the struggle of Prussia for existence was the main theme of the war in Europe, the operations on the Continent contributed to the larger struggle by influencing the energy and resources of the two contesting imperial Powers.

Prussia in 1756 was a new, half-finished country, composed of scattered fragments joined under one Crown, as a result of various marriages, by the chance of various deaths, and by conquest—a State without real frontiers, without geographical unity, inhabited by subjects who looked on the people of the next province as foreigners, and who owned a common allegiance to one thing alone, the person and the power of the sovereign. It lay scattered from the Niemen to the Rhine, divided into three principal groups: in the east was Prussia; in the centre the compact group of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Silesia; in the west the small territories of Minden and Ravensburg on the River Weser, Mark on the Ruhr, the Cleve duchies on the Rhine. On the borders of these possessions extended a fringe of contested lands, doubtful sovereignties, and potential legacies. Prussia had an artificial and precarious unity; its frontiers were one long law-suit; it had to win or lose, advance or retreat, extend or disintegrate—never satisfied since never secure.