AP European History

Lesson 1.1 · Unit 1 · CED topic 1.2

The Italian Renaissance: humanism and the city-states

The Renaissance began where Europe's money was. Northern Italy had no single ruler but a cluster of wealthy, competitive city-states (Florence, Venice, Milan, the Papal States, Naples) grown rich on banking and Mediterranean trade. Their merchant elites wanted the prestige that classical Rome carried, and they could pay for it.

What they bought was humanism: a program of study built on recovered Greek and Roman texts, teaching rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy rather than the scholastic logic taught in medieval universities. Petrarch, who hunted Cicero's lost letters in monastic libraries, is usually called its father. In Florence the movement took a political turn: Leonardo Bruni argued that the active life of the citizen, not monastic withdrawal, was the highest calling. Historians call this civic humanism. It did not make Italians less Christian; it gave them a second vocabulary, drawn from antiquity, for talking about virtue, glory, and the state.

Lesson 1.2 · Unit 1 · CED topic 1.3

The Northern Renaissance and Christian humanism

Humanism crossed the Alps late in the fifteenth century, carried by students who had studied in Italy, by merchants, and above all by print. It arrived in a different religious climate and changed shape. Northern humanists applied the same tools (mastery of ancient languages, return to the earliest texts, contempt for scholastic hair-splitting), but they applied them to scripture and the early church rather than to Cicero and Livy.

Their slogan was ad fontes, back to the sources. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous scholar in Europe, produced a Greek New Testament in 1516 that exposed places where the Latin Vulgate had drifted from the original. He called his program the philosophia Christi: a simple, ethical Christianity of inward devotion, against a church he thought had buried the gospel under ceremony, relics, and fee-taking. Thomas More used the same satirical method on English society in Utopia (1516), describing an imagined island whose common property and religious tolerance indict the England the reader actually lives in. None of these men left the church. But a later saying, that Erasmus laid the egg Luther hatched, captures why their work mattered in the decade after 1517.

Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · CED topic 1.4

Printing and the spread of ideas

Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg combined movable metal type, oil-based ink, and a modified press in Mainz. None of the components was new; the system was. A scribe copying a manuscript produced one book in months. A press produced hundreds of identical copies, and the cost of a book fell far enough that a prosperous artisan could own one.

The consequences compounded. Presses spread down the Rhine and across the Alps, and by 1500 more than two hundred European towns had one. Standardized texts meant a scholar in Kraków and a scholar in Seville could argue about the same page number: a precondition for both humanist scholarship and, later, scientific work. Cheap pamphlets in the vernacular reached readers who had no Latin, and could be produced in days, which is what made the Reformation a mass event rather than a university dispute. Authorities noticed. Licensing requirements, censors, and eventually the papal Index of Prohibited Books (1559) were all responses to a technology that had made ideas difficult to contain.

Lesson 1.4 · Unit 1 · CED topic 1.5

The New Monarchies

The long crises of the later Middle Ages (plague, the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of the Roses) left several European monarchies with an opening. Nobles had been killed or impoverished; subjects wanted order. Between roughly 1460 and 1520 rulers in France, England, and Spain used that opening to build what historians call the new monarchies: states with more reliable taxation, standing or semi-permanent armies, professional bureaucracies staffed by men who owed their position to the crown, and a church brought under royal influence.

The pattern varied. Louis XI of France worked through the taille, a direct tax the crown could levy without calling the Estates-General. Henry VII of England, who took the throne by battle in 1485, avoided expensive war, used the Court of Star Chamber against overmighty nobles, and left a solvent treasury. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile ruled a dynastic union rather than a single kingdom, and built unity around religion: the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478, answered to the crown rather than to Rome. The conquest of Granada in January 1492 ended the Reconquista, and the expulsion decree that followed made confessional uniformity an instrument of state-building. None of this was absolutism (nobles, provinces, and the church kept real privileges), but the balance had shifted toward the center.

Lesson 1.5 · Unit 1 · CED topics 1.6–1.7

Technology, exploration, and rivals on the world stage

Europeans did not sail into the Atlantic because they were bolder than their ancestors. They sailed because a cluster of borrowed and improved technologies made the voyage survivable and because the eastern trade routes had become expensive. The caravel, small and fitted with lateen sails, could beat against the wind; the magnetic compass and the astrolabe gave direction and rough latitude; portolan charts and cannon mounted on shipboard did the rest.

Portugal moved first, working down the African coast under royal sponsorship for most of the fifteenth century. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 and opened a sea route to the Indian Ocean spice trade. Castile, unified and flush with victory in 1492, gambled on Columbus's westward miscalculation. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided the unexplored world between the two crowns along a line in the Atlantic: an agreement other states simply ignored. Magellan's expedition (1519–1522) completed the first circumnavigation, though Magellan died in the Philippines and only one ship returned. The Dutch, English, and French arrived a century later and came with a different instrument: the chartered joint-stock company, which pooled private capital and spread risk, and which would prove more durable than royal monopoly.

Lesson 1.6 · Unit 1 · CED topics 1.8–1.9

Colonial expansion, the Columbian Exchange, and the slave trade

Contact set off the largest biological exchange in recorded history. Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, and tobacco crossed east; wheat, rice, sugar cane, horses, cattle, and pigs crossed west. The food crops mattered enormously, the potato and maize would later sustain European population growth, but the deadliest traffic moved the other way. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus entered populations with no acquired immunity, and the resulting mortality, compounded by warfare and forced labour, destroyed the great majority of Indigenous populations in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica within a century.

Spain organized conquest around the encomienda, a grant of the right to Indigenous labour and tribute in exchange for a duty to protect and Christianize. In practice it was coerced labour, and it collapsed as the population it depended on collapsed. Silver found at Potosí in 1545 and Zacatecas in 1546 then made the empire enormously rich and required workers in vast numbers. Colonists turned to the Atlantic slave trade, which the Portuguese had already begun on the African coast. The sixteenth-century volume was modest against what followed, but the system was set: plantation agriculture and mining worked by enslaved Africans, with the profits returning to Europe. Some Spaniards objected. The Valladolid debate of 1550–1551 set Bartolomé de las Casas against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over whether Indigenous people could rightly be subjugated: an argument Las Casas largely won on paper, with limited effect on practice.

Unit 1 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 1 review: Renaissance and Exploration, c. 1450–c. 1648

Ten stimulus- and knowledge-based multiple-choice questions and two short-answer questions covering Italian and northern humanism, printing, the new monarchies, and the voyages that opened the Atlantic world: click an option to see why each answer is right or wrong, then write the SAQs on paper before opening the model.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, written 1513.

   "It may be answered that one should wish to be both [loved and feared], but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with."

   The passage best reflects which development in Renaissance thought?

   The evaluation of political conduct by its practical results rather than by Christian moral standards The revival of the medieval claim that rulers derive authority directly from God The argument that monarchy should be replaced by republican self-government The belief that scripture alone should guide the conduct of Christian princes

   Correct. Machiavelli judges the ruler by whether the strategy works, reasoning from Roman precedent rather than from Christian virtue: the humanist method applied to politics.

   Divine-right theory grounds obedience in God's will. Machiavelli grounds it in calculation about what keeps a prince secure, and never appeals to divine appointment here.

   Machiavelli did favour republics in his Discourses, but this passage is advice to a prince about holding power and says nothing about the best form of government.

   Appeals to scripture as the sole guide belong to the Reformation after 1517. This passage does the opposite, setting religious standards aside in favour of effectiveness.

2. Description of: Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1511.

   A mock oration spoken by the goddess Folly, who praises herself while cataloguing the absurdities of those who claim wisdom. Her longest passages mock theologians arguing over unanswerable technical questions and monks who count ceremonies as if piety were arithmetic.

   The work is best understood as an expression of which movement?

   Italian civic humanism, which tied classical learning to service in the republic Christian humanism, which applied classical scholarly method to reforming the church from within Protestant reform, which rejected the authority of the papacy over doctrine Scholasticism, which used formal logic to reconcile faith with Aristotelian philosophy

   Civic humanism concerned the citizen's duty to the state, as in Bruni's Florence. Erasmus's target here is clerical practice, not political participation.

   Correct. Erasmus used humanist scholarship and satire to attack abuses inside the church while remaining within it: the defining programme of Christian humanism.

   Erasmus never broke with Rome and opposed Luther on free will. Writing six years before the Ninety-Five Theses, he criticized abuses without challenging papal authority itself.

   Scholastic theologians are precisely who Folly mocks. The passage attacks their method rather than exemplifying it.

3. Which best explains why the printing press contributed to the spread of the Reformation after 1517?

   It allowed the Catholic Church to distribute standardized doctrine more effectively than reformers could It let cheap vernacular pamphlets be reprinted in many towns faster than authorities could suppress them It eliminated illiteracy across the German lands within a generation It was controlled by Protestant princes, who denied Catholic writers access to presses

   The church did use print, but it lost the pamphlet war badly in the 1520s. Reformers reached lay audiences in German while much Catholic output remained in Latin.

   Correct. Speed and dispersal were decisive: Luther's theses circulated in German within weeks, and no authority could seize copies in dozens of towns at once.

   Literacy rose but remained a minority accomplishment well past 1600. Pamphlets often worked by being read aloud to listeners who could not read them.

   Printing was a commercial trade operating across confessional lines, and Catholic polemic was printed throughout. Censorship was attempted by both sides, not monopolized.

4. The policies of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain after 1478 are best characterized as an attempt to

   Strengthen royal authority across separate kingdoms by enforcing religious uniformity Establish a centralized parliamentary monarchy on the English model Abolish noble privilege and tax exemption throughout Castile and Aragon Extend religious toleration in order to retain Jewish and Muslim commercial expertise

   Correct. Aragon and Castile kept separate laws and institutions, so a crown-run Inquisition from 1478 and the 1492 expulsion gave the monarchs a unifying instrument they otherwise lacked.

   Spain's representative bodies, the Cortes, were weakened rather than strengthened in this period, and no parliamentary check on the crown developed.

   Noble privilege and exemption from direct taxation survived in Spain into the eighteenth century. The new monarchies curbed noble violence, not noble wealth.

   The opposite occurred: the 1492 decree expelled Jews who would not convert, and Muslims faced forced conversion within a decade, at considerable economic cost.

5. Source: Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santángel, 1493.

   "I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them all I have taken possession for their Highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me."

   A historian would most need to account for which feature of this source when using it as evidence?

   It was written decades after the events it describes, relying on distant memory It was addressed to a financial backer and circulated to secure funding for further voyages It was a private diary never intended to be read by anyone else It was written by a royal official with no personal stake in the expedition's reputation

   Columbus wrote on the return voyage in 1493, within months of the landfall. Distance in time is not the problem with this document.

   Correct. Santángel had helped arrange financing, and the letter was printed across Europe within months, so the populous, rich islands and the effortless possession serve a fundraising purpose.

   The letter was printed and widely distributed almost immediately, which is the opposite of private. Its public circulation is central to how it should be read.

   Columbus commanded the expedition and depended on royal favour for a second voyage, giving him a direct personal interest in how the first was reported.

6. Description of: silver production and European price data, sixteenth century.

   Registered silver shipments from Spanish American mines rise steeply after the opening of Potosí in 1545. Across the same century, grain and other commodity prices in western Europe rise several-fold, while money rents fixed by long leases remain unchanged.

   The data best support which conclusion about sixteenth-century Europe?

   Inflation shifted wealth away from landlords on fixed rents toward merchants and commercial farmers American silver eliminated poverty among European peasants and wage labourers Spain used its silver to build the most advanced manufacturing economy in Europe Prices fell as the supply of goods expanded faster than the supply of money

   Correct. When prices rise and rents are fixed by long lease, the landlord's real income falls while those selling goods at rising prices gain: the core social effect of the price revolution.

   Wages lagged behind prices through the century, so real wages for labourers fell. The price revolution worsened rather than relieved poverty.

   Spanish silver largely paid for imports and wars, and Spain's manufacturing remained weak; much of the bullion ended up in the Netherlands, Italy, and Asia.

   The stimulus states that prices rose several-fold. Deflation is the opposite of what the data show.

7. Which best explains why Portugal pioneered a sea route to Asia in the fifteenth century?

   It possessed the largest population and richest treasury in Europe Sustained royal sponsorship combined with navigational technology suited to open-ocean sailing It had been granted a papal monopoly on all overseas trade before 1450 Its central location on Mediterranean trade routes gave it access to Asian goods

   Portugal was small and comparatively poor. Its advantage lay in focus and position on the Atlantic, not in scale of resources.

   Correct. Decades of crown-backed voyages down the African coast, plus the caravel, lateen sail, compass, and astrolabe, made Dias's 1488 rounding of the Cape and da Gama's 1498 arrival at Calicut possible.

   Tordesillas came in 1494, after the voyages had begun, and divided claims between Portugal and Castile rather than granting either a prior monopoly.

   Portugal sat on the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. Its distance from the Italian-controlled eastern trade is precisely why it sought an alternative route.

8. Humanist education differed most significantly from medieval scholastic education in its

   Rejection of Christianity in favour of classical paganism Emphasis on rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy drawn from recovered classical texts Exclusive use of the vernacular rather than Latin in teaching Focus on experimental investigation of the natural world

   Humanists were overwhelmingly Christian and commissioned religious art. They added a classical vocabulary of virtue rather than replacing their faith.

   Correct. The studia humanitatis centred on grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, against scholasticism's formal logic and Aristotelian metaphysics.

   Humanists prized classical Latin and Greek and often criticized medieval Latin as debased. Vernacular writing grew in this period but was not the humanist programme.

   Systematic experiment belongs to the Scientific Revolution of the following century. Humanists worked on texts.

9. Description of: a sixteenth-century woodcut of a printing workshop.

   A single room with two work stations: at the left a man inks a forme of set type with leather ink balls while another pulls the bar of a heavy screw press; at the right a compositor picks individual letters into a hand-held stick. Printed sheets hang overhead to dry.

   The image is most useful as evidence for which of the following?

   The decline of guild organization in sixteenth-century towns Printing as a capital-intensive urban craft requiring several trained workers The mechanization of production by water and steam power The spread of literacy among the rural peasantry

   The image shows a workshop but says nothing about guild regulation, which in fact governed most urban trades throughout this period.

   Correct. The press, type, and specialized division of labour between compositor and pressman all indicate substantial investment and skilled staff, not a household activity.

   The press shown is hand-operated by screw and lever. Water and steam power in manufacturing belong to a much later period.

   The image depicts production, not readership, and rural literacy remained low. An image of a workshop cannot document who read the output.

10. Description of: Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written 1542.

    A Dominican friar who had held an encomienda before renouncing it addresses the future Philip II, describing province by province the killings, forced labour, and population collapse he attributes to Spanish conduct, and arguing that Indigenous peoples are rational subjects capable of Christianity.

    The document is strongest as evidence for which of the following?

    Accurate population figures for the pre-contact Caribbean Contemporary Spanish debate over the legitimacy of conquest and coerced labour The absence of any European criticism of colonial practice before 1600 Indigenous peoples' own understanding of the events described

    Las Casas's numbers are rhetorical rather than statistical, chosen to shock the crown into action. They are the weakest part of the document.

    Correct. Written as the New Laws were being debated and answered by Sepúlveda at Valladolid in 1550–1551, it shows the conquest being contested inside Spain at the time.

    The document is itself European criticism, so it disproves rather than supports this claim.

    Las Casas was a Spanish friar writing for a Spanish king. Indigenous perspectives reach us through other sources, not this one.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE difference between Italian humanism and northern Christian humanism in the period 1450–1550.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way the printing press contributed to the difference you described in (a), or to the spread of either movement.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way humanist scholarship contributed to religious change in Europe in the period 1500–1600.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: Italian humanists applied classical learning mainly to secular subjects (rhetoric, history, politics, the duties of the citizen), while northern humanists such as Erasmus applied the same linguistic method to scripture and the church fathers to reform Christian practice. Do not accept: a purely geographic statement; "northern humanists were more religious" without specifying the scholarly method; or any claim that Italian humanists rejected Christianity.
   • (b) Accept: printing carried Italian texts and methods north cheaply and quickly; it made Erasmus's Greek New Testament available to scholars across Europe; it created a lay reading public that could be addressed in the vernacular. Must explain the mechanism, not merely name the press.
   • (c) Accept: Erasmus's Greek New Testament (1516) exposed discrepancies in the Latin Vulgate and gave reformers a textual basis for challenging official doctrine; humanist ad fontes method encouraged returning to scripture over tradition; humanist satire made clerical abuse a respectable public subject. Do not accept: naming Luther with no link to humanist scholarship.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni applied the recovery of classical texts mainly to secular concerns: rhetoric, history, and the duties of the citizen in the republic. Northern Christian humanists such as Erasmus used the same scholarly method on scripture and the early church, aiming to recover a simpler biblical Christianity.

   (b) The printing press carried humanist scholarship north at a cost scribal copying could never match. Erasmus's Greek New Testament of 1516 could be printed and distributed to scholars across Europe, so a textual method developed in Italian workshops became available to northern theologians within a single career.

   (c) Humanist scholarship supplied the Reformation with its central weapon. By comparing the Vulgate with the original Greek, Erasmus showed that the church's authorized Latin text contained errors, which allowed Luther and others to argue that official doctrine could be wrong and that scripture in its earliest form should be the standard.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way European monarchs strengthened royal authority in the period 1450–1550.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way overseas expansion was connected to the growth of state power in this period.
   3. Briefly explain ONE consequence of the Columbian Exchange for Europe in the period 1492–1600.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: regular taxation without consent (the French taille); curbing noble violence through royal courts (Star Chamber under Henry VII); a crown-controlled Inquisition in Spain from 1478; professional bureaucracies and standing forces; royal influence over church appointments. Do not accept: "they became absolute" with no mechanism.
   • (b) Accept: crowns licensed and financed voyages and claimed the territory and revenue, as with Castile and Columbus or the Portuguese crown's African programme; American silver funded Spanish armies and diplomacy; Tordesillas showed crowns disposing of territory by treaty. Must link expansion to state capacity.
   • (c) Accept: silver inflow and the price revolution, with its effects on rents and merchants; new crops such as the potato and maize supporting later population growth; new consumption of sugar and tobacco; the growth of Atlantic ports and the slave trade. Do not accept: effects on the Americas only, since the question asks about Europe.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Monarchs secured revenue that did not depend on the consent of representative bodies. In France, Louis XI collected the taille as a regular direct tax without summoning the Estates-General, which let the crown pay officials and troops without bargaining with the nobility.

   (b) Overseas expansion was a royal enterprise that returned royal revenue. Castile licensed and partly financed Columbus's voyage and claimed sovereignty over what he found, and after the opening of Potosí in 1545 American silver paid for the armies and diplomacy that made Spain the dominant power of the sixteenth century.

   (c) The inflow of American silver expanded Europe's money supply and contributed to a price revolution in which commodity prices rose several-fold across the sixteenth century. Landlords collecting rents fixed by long lease lost real income, while merchants and farmers selling at rising prices gained, shifting wealth toward commercial groups.

Lesson 2.1 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.2

Luther and the Protestant Reformation

In 1517 a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel was selling indulgences in the German lands to help finance the rebuilding of St. Peter's in Rome. An indulgence remitted the temporal punishment owed for sin; Tetzel's sales pitch implied it could spring a soul from purgatory on payment. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg, objected in the ordinary academic way, by posting ninety-five theses for disputation on 31 October 1517.

The ordinary way did not hold. Printers reproduced the theses in German within weeks, and a technical argument about penance became a public argument about papal authority and money. Pressed in debate, Luther followed his own logic further than he had intended: if salvation comes through faith alone (sola fide), granted by God's grace and known through scripture alone (sola scriptura), then the church's sacramental machinery and the pope's power to define doctrine are not what they claim. Summoned before Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused to recant and was declared an outlaw. Frederick the Wise of Saxony hid him at the Wartburg, where he translated the New Testament into German. The shelter is the point: Luther survived because territorial princes had their own reasons to resist emperor and pope.

Lesson 2.2 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.3

Protestant reform continues: Calvin, Zwingli, and the radicals

Once scripture alone became the standard, Protestants discovered they did not agree about what scripture said. Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich stripped churches of images and organs and read the Eucharist as purely symbolic. Luther, who held that Christ was really present, broke with him at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529: the first great Protestant schism, over a single sacrament, within twelve years of the Theses.

John Calvin gave the second generation its system. A French lawyer turned exile, he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and from 1541 built Geneva into a model reformed community, where a consistory of pastors and lay elders supervised belief and conduct. Calvinism's discipline and its portable, well-organized theology made it the international form of Protestantism, spreading to France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. More radical reformers went further than either: Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and often the authority of magistrates over faith, and were persecuted by Catholics and magisterial Protestants alike; especially after a militant group seized Münster in 1534–1535. England took a different road again, where Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy (1534) made the king head of the church for dynastic reasons before doctrine caught up, and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 built a deliberate compromise.

Lesson 2.3 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.5

The Catholic Reformation

Rome's response combined genuine internal reform with disciplined counterattack, which is why historians use two names: Catholic Reformation for the first, Counter-Reformation for the second. The Council of Trent, meeting in sessions between 1545 and 1563, did both. It reaffirmed every doctrine Protestants had challenged: salvation requires faith and works, all seven sacraments are valid, tradition stands alongside scripture, and the Latin Vulgate is authoritative. It also attacked the abuses reformers had complained about, forbidding the sale of church offices, requiring bishops to reside in their dioceses, and ordering a seminary in every diocese to produce an educated clergy.

New religious orders supplied the energy. Ignatius Loyola, a Basque soldier whose convalescence turned him to religion, founded the Society of Jesus, approved in 1540 and organized on military lines under a vow of obedience to the pope. The Jesuits became Europe's most effective schoolmasters and missionaries, from Poland and southern Germany, where they won territory back, to Asia and the Americas. Alongside them ran harder instruments: the Roman Inquisition, reorganized in 1542, and the Index of Prohibited Books, first issued in 1559. And alongside both ran a revival of mysticism, in figures such as Teresa of Ávila, that had little to do with institutional politics at all.

Lesson 2.4 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.4

The wars of religion, 1562–1648

For almost a century after Augsburg, European warfare ran along confessional lines, though never purely. France fell into civil war from 1562 between the Catholic crown and party and the Huguenot (Calvinist) nobility. The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of August 1572 began with the killing of Huguenot leaders gathered in Paris for a royal wedding and spread to thousands of deaths across France. The wars ended only when Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot, inherited the throne, converted to Catholicism in 1593, and issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting Protestants limited worship and fortified towns.

The same pattern played out elsewhere with different results. The Dutch provinces revolted against Philip II's Spain over taxation and religious repression, and the northern provinces eventually secured independence in practice. Philip's Armada against Protestant England failed in 1588. The worst came last: the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) began with a Bohemian revolt against Habsburg authority and drew in Denmark, Sweden, and finally France; Catholic France fighting on the Protestant side against Habsburg power, which shows plainly that dynastic interest had overtaken confession. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 extended Augsburg's principle to Calvinists, confirmed Dutch and Swiss independence, and left the German lands devastated.

Lesson 2.5 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.6

Sixteenth-century society: family, witch hunts, and popular culture

Most Europeans in this period lived in households that were economic units before they were anything else. Western Europe followed what demographers call the European marriage pattern: couples married late, in their twenties, once they could support a household, and a significant minority never married at all. Late marriage limited births and gave the family a different shape from societies where marriage came at puberty. Households took in servants and apprentices; the line between family and workforce was thin.

Onto this ordinary world the confessional age pressed hard. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities set out to discipline popular belief and behavior: regulating carnival, suppressing festivals they judged superstitious, prosecuting fornication and drunkenness, and insisting on catechism. The most lethal expression was the witch hunt. Prosecutions rose from the late fifteenth century and peaked roughly between 1580 and 1650, concentrated in the Holy Roman Empire and other fragmented jurisdictions. Modern estimates put executions in the range of forty to sixty thousand, with roughly three-quarters to four-fifths of the accused women: frequently older, poor, widowed, or otherwise dependent on neighbors' goodwill. Poor-law and vagrancy statutes across Europe in the same decades show a related anxiety about people outside the household order.

Lesson 2.6 · Unit 2 · CED topic 2.7

Mannerism and Baroque art as confessional argument

Art in this period argued. When the High Renaissance balance of Raphael and the early Michelangelo gave way after about 1520, what followed was Mannerism: elongated bodies, crowded and unstable compositions, acid color, deliberate difficulty. It is usually read as the visual register of an age of religious crisis and Italian political catastrophe: the sack of Rome in 1527 falls squarely in the middle of it. El Greco in Spain and Tintoretto in Venice are the figures to know.

The Baroque that emerged around 1600 was the Catholic Reformation's chosen instrument. Trent had insisted that images instruct and move the faithful, and Baroque artists obliged with drama: violent diagonals, theatrical light, emotion at its peak moment, and saints presented as overwhelming physical presences. Bernini's sculpture and architecture in Rome, Caravaggio's harsh naturalism, and Rubens's vast altarpieces in the Spanish Netherlands were designed to persuade viewers who might read no theology at all. Protestant regions took the opposite road. With religious images removed from churches, Dutch painters worked for a commercial market and produced portraits, landscapes, domestic interiors, and still life: the same technical brilliance turned on secular subjects and private buyers.

Unit 2 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 2 review: Age of Reformation, c. 1450–c. 1648

Ten questions on Luther and Calvin, the Catholic Reformation, the wars of religion from St. Bartholomew's Day to Westphalia, and the society that fought them, plus two short-answer questions on confessional change and its political consequences.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses, 1517, thesis 27.

   "They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory."

   The thesis was originally intended as

   A proposition for academic disputation among theologians A public manifesto calling for separation from the Roman church A legal petition to the imperial diet demanding the removal of the pope A sermon delivered in German to the congregation at Wittenberg

   Correct. Luther posted the theses in Latin for university debate in the ordinary academic manner; printers then translated and circulated them to a lay public he had not addressed.

   Luther did not call for separation in 1517 and still hoped for reform within the church. The break came over the following four years under pressure of debate.

   The theses were an academic document, not a petition, and Luther first faced the imperial diet at Worms in 1521, four years later.

   They were written in Latin, the language of the university, not preached in German. The German translations were the printers' work.

2. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) settled religious conflict in the Holy Roman Empire by

   Granting individuals freedom to choose their own confession Allowing each prince to determine whether his territory would be Lutheran or Catholic Recognizing Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism as equally lawful Restoring the pope's authority to appoint bishops throughout the empire

   The choice belonged to rulers, not subjects. Individuals who dissented from their prince's religion could emigrate, not worship freely where they were.

   Correct. Cuius regio, eius religio assigned the confessional question to each territorial prince, which settled the conflict politically rather than theologically.

   Calvinism was excluded in 1555 and gained recognition only at Westphalia in 1648: an omission that helped make the Thirty Years' War possible.

   Augsburg reduced rather than restored papal authority, since Lutheran princes controlled churches in their own territories.

3. Source: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III.

   "By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation."

   In practice, this doctrine most often encouraged Calvinist communities to

   Abandon moral effort, since salvation was already determined Enforce strict communal discipline as evidence of election Accept religious pluralism, since no church could identify the elect Reject all forms of organized church government

   This is the common misreading. Because no one could be certain of election, disciplined living was sought as a sign of it, which intensified rather than relaxed moral effort.

   Correct. Geneva's consistory of pastors and lay elders supervised belief and conduct closely, and the same disciplinary model travelled with Calvinism to France, Scotland, and the Netherlands.

   Calvin's Geneva executed Servetus for heresy in 1553 and tolerated little dissent. Pluralism was not the doctrine's practical result.

   Calvinism built strong church government through consistories and synods. Rejection of church structures was an Anabaptist rather than a Calvinist position.

4. Which best describes the work of the Council of Trent (1545–1563)?

   It conceded justification by faith alone while rejecting Protestant church government It reaffirmed contested doctrines while attacking clerical abuses and requiring seminaries It authorized vernacular scripture and abolished the Latin liturgy It negotiated a compromise settlement with Lutheran theologians

   Trent explicitly rejected justification by faith alone, holding that faith and works are both necessary. No doctrinal concession was made.

   Correct. Trent combined doctrinal firmness with genuine institutional reform: banning the sale of offices, requiring bishops to reside in their dioceses, and mandating a seminary in every diocese.

   Trent affirmed the authority of the Latin Vulgate and retained the Latin liturgy. Vernacular worship was a Protestant position.

   Protestants did not participate meaningfully, and Trent's decrees closed off compromise by defining the disputed doctrines against them.

5. Description of: the Edict of Nantes, issued by Henry IV of France, 1598.

   Grants Huguenots freedom of conscience and public worship in specified places, admits them to offices and universities, creates special chambers with Protestant judges, and allows them to garrison a number of fortified towns at royal expense for a fixed term.

   The provision for fortified towns most strongly suggests that the edict was

   A negotiated truce between parties that still did not trust one another A statement of principled religious liberty applying equally to all faiths An admission that the crown had converted to Protestantism A permanent constitutional settlement that later monarchs were bound to observe

   Correct. A genuine grant of liberty would not need to leave one party armed; the garrisons are security guarantees between recent combatants after thirty-six years of civil war.

   Toleration was limited and geographically restricted, Protestant worship was barred in Paris, and it applied to Huguenots specifically, not to all faiths.

   Henry IV converted to Catholicism in 1593 in order to secure the throne. The edict was issued by a Catholic king.

   Louis XIV revoked it in 1685, which demonstrates that it bound no successor. It lasted only as long as the crown found it useful.

6. France's entry into the Thirty Years' War on the side of Protestant Sweden best illustrates that

   Catholic France had secretly adopted Protestant doctrine under Richelieu Dynastic and strategic interest had come to outweigh confessional solidarity Religious motives had disappeared entirely from European politics by 1618 Sweden had agreed to convert to Catholicism in exchange for French subsidies

   France remained firmly Catholic and Richelieu was a cardinal. The alignment was strategic, not doctrinal.

   Correct. Richelieu judged Habsburg encirclement the greater threat to French security and subsidized, then joined, the Protestant side against fellow Catholics.

   The war began in 1618 as a confessional revolt in Bohemia and religion mattered greatly to many participants throughout. The shift was gradual, not total.

   No such agreement existed. Sweden remained Lutheran and intervened for its own Baltic interests as well as for Protestantism.

7. Description of: the pattern of testimony in German witchcraft trial records, late sixteenth century.

   Neighbours recall a quarrel, a refused loan or denied request for food, followed by misfortune: a cow that stopped giving milk, a child that sickened. The accused is usually an older woman, often widowed and dependent on charity. Under interrogation, frequently with torture, confessions converge on a pact with the devil, a detail the accusers had not mentioned.

   The divergence between neighbours' complaints and the confessions is best explained by

   The accused having genuinely practised organized devil worship Learned demonology supplied by interrogators being imposed on local grievances Neighbours deliberately concealing what they knew from the court Village communities being more educated in theology than magistrates were

   The demonic pact appears only after interrogation under torture, not in the original complaints: a pattern that points to the questioning rather than to the conduct.

   Correct. Villagers complained about harm to livestock and children; the elite theory of a satanic pact entered at the interrogation stage, showing two different mental worlds meeting in the courtroom.

   There is no evidence of concealment, and neighbours testified in detail about the harms they attributed to the accused.

   The reverse is true: magistrates and clergy held the learned demonology, drawn from texts villagers had not read.

8. Baroque religious art of the seventeenth century was most directly shaped by

   Protestant demands that churches be stripped of images The Council of Trent's instruction that religious images should instruct and move the faithful Renewed interest in the balanced, restrained proportions of classical antiquity The patronage of Dutch merchant households buying for private rooms

   Iconoclasm produced the opposite result: Protestant churches without religious images, which pushed Dutch painters toward secular genres.

   Correct. Trent made persuasion the purpose of sacred art, and Bernini, Rubens, and Caravaggio supplied drama, theatrical light, and emotion at its peak to serve it.

   That describes Renaissance classicism or later Neoclassicism. Baroque works through movement, diagonals, and intensity rather than restraint.

   Dutch private patronage produced portraits, landscapes, and still life: the contrasting Protestant market, not Baroque altarpieces.

9. Source: Ignatius Loyola, "Rules for Thinking with the Church," in the Spiritual Exercises.

   "That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black."

   The passage is best understood as a direct response to which Protestant claim?

   That salvation comes through faith alone rather than through works That the individual conscience, guided by scripture, judges religious truth That clergy should be permitted to marry That the Eucharist is symbolic rather than a real presence

   Justification is a doctrinal dispute Trent addressed elsewhere. This rule concerns authority, who decides, rather than how salvation works.

   Correct. Where Protestants made the believer with scripture the judge of truth, Loyola makes submission to the institution the test of genuine faith, even against one's own perception.

   Clerical marriage was a real point of difference but is not what this rule about obedience in judgment addresses.

   Eucharistic theology divided Protestants among themselves as well as from Rome, but the passage concerns obedience in general, not one sacrament.

10. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is significant for European politics primarily because it

    Established religious toleration for individuals throughout the Holy Roman Empire Confirmed territorial sovereignty and removed religion as a legitimate ground for intervention United the German states into a single centralized monarchy Restored papal authority over the appointment of bishops in Protestant territories

    Westphalia extended Augsburg's principle to Calvinism, but the choice still belonged to rulers rather than to individuals.

    Correct. Sovereign states recognizing no superior, settling disputes among themselves, became the organizing principle of European politics for the next century and a half.

    The opposite occurred: the settlement confirmed the independence of the German princes and left the empire more fragmented than before.

    Papal authority was reduced, and Pope Innocent X denounced the treaty for exactly that reason.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way the Protestant Reformation changed the relationship between religious and political authority in the period 1517–1600.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way the Catholic Church responded to the Protestant challenge.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way religious division contributed to warfare in Europe in the period 1550–1648.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: rulers gained control over churches in their territories, formalized by the Peace of Augsburg's cuius regio, eius religio; Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy made the monarch head of the English church; princes seized monastic lands. Do not accept: "people became Protestant" with no reference to authority.
   • (b) Accept: the Council of Trent reaffirming doctrine and requiring seminaries and resident bishops; the Jesuits as educators and missionaries recovering territory; the Roman Inquisition and the Index. Must explain how it responded to the challenge.
   • (c) Accept: the French Wars of Religion and St. Bartholomew's Day; the Dutch Revolt against Philip II; the Spanish Armada; the Thirty Years' War beginning as a Bohemian Protestant revolt against Habsburg authority. Credit answers noting that political motives increasingly mixed with or overtook religious ones, provided a religious dimension is explained.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) The Reformation transferred control of the church to secular rulers. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 established that each German prince would decide whether his territory was Lutheran or Catholic, making religious allegiance a matter of territorial politics rather than of a single universal church.

   (b) The Council of Trent required every diocese to establish a seminary, producing clergy trained in doctrine and able to preach. This addressed the clerical ignorance Protestants had criticized and gave the church parish priests capable of arguing its case, which helped it hold and in places recover territory.

   (c) Confessional division turned political disputes into wars of annihilation. In France, conflict between the Catholic crown and party and the Calvinist Huguenot nobility produced thirty-six years of civil war from 1562, including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, because neither side could accept the other's worship within one kingdom.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE characteristic of European society in the sixteenth century that contributed to the witch hunts.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason witchcraft prosecutions varied significantly between European regions.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way confessional competition affected everyday life in the period 1550–1650.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: village dependence on neighbourly charity, which made refusal and resentment dangerous; the vulnerability of older, widowed, or poor women; learned demonology treating witchcraft as a devilish pact; judicial use of torture; economic and subsistence stress. Do not accept: "people were superstitious" alone.
   • (b) Accept: strength of central judicial review, the Parlement of Paris regularly overturned local convictions while small jurisdictions in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire faced little oversight; differences in the use of torture; intensity of confessional competition. Must give an institutional or comparative explanation.
   • (c) Accept: church and civil authorities regulating festivals, carnival, and popular religion; prosecution of sexual conduct and drunkenness; compulsory catechism; poor laws distinguishing deserving from undeserving poor; confessional schooling. Must tie to ordinary life rather than to doctrine alone.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Village life depended heavily on informal charity between neighbors, and older widowed women without households of their own relied on it. When such a woman was refused help and misfortune followed, suspicion attached to her easily, which is why the great majority of the accused were poor, older, and female.

   (b) Prosecutions were far more common where central judicial review was weak. In the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, small local courts could use torture and execute with almost no oversight, while in France the Parlement of Paris reviewed and frequently overturned local witchcraft convictions, sharply limiting executions there.

   (c) Both Protestant and Catholic authorities set out to discipline popular behavior. They regulated or suppressed carnival and local festivals they considered superstitious, prosecuted fornication and drunkenness in church courts, and required parishioners to learn a catechism, so confessional competition reached directly into ordinary recreation and family life.

Lesson 3.1 · Unit 3 · CED topic 3.2

The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution

England took the road not taken on the continent. James I arrived from Scotland in 1603 insisting on divine-right kingship in a realm where Parliament controlled taxation by long custom. His son Charles I pushed harder: he accepted the Petition of Right in 1628, which barred taxation without parliamentary consent and arbitrary imprisonment, then ruled for eleven years without calling Parliament at all, raising money through devices such as ship money. Religion compounded the quarrel, since Charles's Arminian church policy looked to Puritans like Catholicism returning.

War with Scotland forced him to summon Parliament in 1640 for funds, and the Long Parliament that assembled refused to be dismissed. Civil war followed in 1642. Parliament's New Model Army won it, and in January 1649 Charles I was tried and executed: a reigning king killed by his own subjects under color of law. The republic that followed became Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate and did not survive him; the monarchy returned in 1660. But the underlying question was unresolved, and when the Catholic James II produced a male heir in 1688, parliamentary leaders invited his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to invade. James fled, and the settlement of 1689 fixed the terms on which the crown was held.

Lesson 3.2 · Unit 3 · CED topic 3.7

Absolutist approaches to power: Louis XIV

Louis XIV learned his politics as a child during the Fronde, a series of noble and parlementaire revolts between 1648 and 1653 that twice drove the court from Paris. When he began personal rule in 1661 he governed on the lesson: never again allow the great nobility an independent base. He appointed no first minister, ran policy through councils of middle-ranking professionals, and used intendants, royal agents in the provinces, to bypass local institutions.

Versailles was the instrument, not the ornament. Moving the court there in 1682 drew the high nobility into a world of ceremony where proximity to the king was the only currency, and where a duke competing for the honour of handing over the royal shirt was a duke not raising troops in his province. Colbert's mercantilism built the revenue: state manufactures, protective tariffs, a merchant fleet. Religious uniformity followed the same centralizing logic: the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 drove perhaps two hundred thousand Huguenots abroad, many of them skilled, to the benefit of England, the Dutch Republic, and Brandenburg. And the wars, nearly continuous after 1667, eventually consumed what Colbert had accumulated. Even here absolutism was limited in practice: provincial law, venal offices, and noble tax exemptions all survived.

Lesson 3.3 · Unit 3 · CED topic 3.7

Absolutism in central and eastern Europe

East of the Elbe, absolutism rested on a different bargain. Where western monarchs had to manage towns, lawyers, and commercial wealth, eastern rulers governed agrarian societies with weak towns and powerful landed nobles. The deal that emerged was blunt: the crown got political obedience and service, and the nobility got confirmed authority over an increasingly unfree peasantry. Serfdom, declining in the west, was tightening in the east through the seventeenth century.

Brandenburg-Prussia built the clearest version. The Hohenzollerns traded tax authority for Junker control of the land and Junker officers for the army, producing a small state with a disproportionate military. The Austrian Habsburgs ruled a composite monarchy of Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands with separate laws and privileges, holding it together by dynasty, Catholicism, and, after breaking the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, military success. Russia's transformation was the most abrupt. Peter the Great, who ruled to 1725, forced westernization on the nobility, subordinated the Orthodox Church to a state synod, created the Table of Ranks in 1722 that tied status to state service rather than birth, built St. Petersburg on conscripted labour, and defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War. The counter-example is Poland-Lithuania, where the liberum veto let a single deputy dissolve the Sejm and no central power ever consolidated.

Lesson 3.4 · Unit 3 · CED topics 3.3–3.4

Commercial capitalism and mercantilism

The economic center of Europe moved decisively to the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. Mediterranean city-states gave way to Amsterdam and then London, and with the shift came new instruments: joint-stock companies that pooled capital and limited individual risk, marine insurance, bills of exchange, and public banks. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, let a state borrow at scale against future tax revenue: a quiet innovation that would decide wars.

The prevailing theory was mercantilism. It assumed world wealth was roughly fixed, so a nation prospered by exporting more than it imported and accumulating bullion; colonies existed to supply raw materials and buy finished goods. England's Navigation Acts required colonial trade to move in English ships, and France under Colbert subsidized manufactures behind tariff walls. Because the theory implied that one nation's gain was another's loss, it made commercial rivalry a cause of war: the Anglo-Dutch wars are the clearest case. Underneath, agriculture was changing too: enclosure of common fields, convertible husbandry, and new fodder crops raised yields, which fed growing cities and freed labour from the land.

Lesson 3.5 · Unit 3 · CED topic 3.5

The Dutch Golden Age

The seventeenth century's richest society was also its least absolutist. The United Provinces that emerged from the revolt against Spain were a federation, not a kingdom: each province kept its own assembly, the States General handled common affairs, and executive power was split between that body and the stadtholder. Real authority lay with the regent oligarchies of the merchant towns, above all Amsterdam. No monarch, no unified court, and a republic surrounded by monarchies.

Commerce paid for it. The Dutch dominated the Baltic grain trade and European shipping with the cheap, capacious fluyt, and the Amsterdam exchange bank of 1609 made the city Europe's clearing house. The VOC, chartered in 1602, was granted powers to make treaties, wage war, and govern territory: a company exercising sovereignty. Relative religious toleration, unusual by contemporary standards, drew Huguenot, Jewish, and dissenting refugees with capital and skills, and a permissive press made the republic Europe's printing house for books banned elsewhere. Wealth also produced an art market without parallel, since Calvinist churches commissioned no images and painters sold instead to private households. Decline came from outside: repeated wars with England and France in the later seventeenth century drained a small population's resources, and by the eighteenth century the republic was a financial power rather than a commercial one.

Lesson 3.6 · Unit 3 · CED topic 3.6

The balance of power and the state system

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is usually taken as the founding moment of the modern state system, and the label is useful if not taken too literally. What the settlement established in practice was that Europe would be organized as a set of territorial sovereigns recognizing no superior, neither emperor nor pope, and settling disputes by negotiation and war among themselves. Religion ceased to be a legitimate basis for intervening in another state's internal affairs.

What replaced it was the balance of power: the principle that no single state should be allowed to dominate, and that others should combine against whichever one threatened to. Louis XIV's ambitions made the doctrine explicit, since coalition after coalition formed against France. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was fought precisely to prevent the French and Spanish crowns from uniting, and the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 settled it by allowing Louis's grandson to keep Spain on condition the two thrones never be joined: writing the balance into treaty law. Britain took Gibraltar and the asiento slave-trade contract, and emerged as the balance's habitual arbiter. States now ran standing armies, permanent diplomatic corps, and tax systems built to support them.

Unit 3 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 3 review: Absolutism and Constitutionalism, c. 1648–c. 1815

Ten questions on the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, Louis XIV and the eastern absolutisms, mercantilism, the Dutch Golden Age, and the balance of power, plus two short-answer questions comparing the two roads to state power.

Multiple choice

1. Source: the English Bill of Rights, 1689.

   "That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, … is illegal. … That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law."

   These clauses were most directly responses to

   Specific practices of Stuart monarchs during the preceding sixty years Abuses committed by Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in the 1650s Demands made by Chartist petitioners for broader representation The need to fund war against France without raising taxes

   Correct. Each clause names something a Stuart king had done (Charles I's ship money and personal rule, James II's standing army), so the document converts recent grievances into statute.

   Cromwell's rule was resented, but the 1689 settlement was drafted against James II and the Stuart prerogative claims, not against the republic three decades earlier.

   Chartism belongs to the 1830s and 1840s, nearly 150 years later, and demanded democratic suffrage rather than limits on royal prerogative.

   The settlement required parliamentary consent for revenue, which made war finance depend on Parliament rather than allowing the crown to avoid it.

2. Louis XIV's decision to move the royal court to Versailles in 1682 primarily served to

   Reduce the cost of maintaining the monarchy during a fiscal crisis Draw the great nobility away from provincial power bases into dependence on royal favour Place the king closer to France's eastern frontier for military command Give the Parlement of Paris a larger role in royal government

   Versailles was ruinously expensive. Its purpose was political control, achieved at great cost rather than in order to save money.

   Correct. A duke competing for ceremonial privileges at court was a duke not raising troops in his province: the lesson Louis drew from the Fronde of his childhood.

   Versailles lies just outside Paris, far from the eastern frontier, and Louis directed campaigns through ministers rather than from the field.

   Louis curtailed the parlements' capacity to obstruct royal edicts. Versailles removed the court from Paris, where the parlement sat.

3. Source: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

   "The only way to erect such a common power … is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills … unto one will."

   Hobbes's justification for absolute sovereignty differed from that of Bossuet in that Hobbes grounded it in

   The consequences of its absence rather than in divine appointment Scripture's account of the authority God granted to kings The hereditary right of established dynasties to rule The natural superiority of aristocratic birth over common judgment

   Correct. Hobbes argues from the intolerable condition of life without a common power (a secular, consequentialist case) where Bossuet argued that the royal throne is established by God.

   That is Bossuet's argument, not Hobbes's. Hobbes reasons from human nature and the state of nature rather than from scripture.

   Hobbes's sovereign could be one man or an assembly, and his argument does not depend on heredity at all.

   Hobbes begins from the rough natural equality of human beings, which is why no one can claim authority by birth in his account.

4. Absolutism in Brandenburg-Prussia and Russia differed from French absolutism chiefly in that eastern rulers

   Abolished serfdom in order to create a free labour market Strengthened noble authority over the peasantry in exchange for noble service to the state Accepted permanent limits on their power imposed by representative assemblies Relied on wealthy merchant towns rather than on landed nobles for revenue

   Serfdom was tightening east of the Elbe in exactly this period, not being abolished. Russia emancipated its serfs only in 1861.

   Correct. The Hohenzollerns confirmed Junker control of the land and drew officers from them; Peter's Table of Ranks bound the nobility to state service. Power was built through the nobility, not against it.

   Eastern rulers weakened or ignored representative bodies. Poland, where the Sejm retained power through the liberum veto, is the counter-example that failed to consolidate.

   Eastern towns were small and weak, which is precisely why rulers depended on landed nobles rather than on urban wealth.

5. Source: Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade, published 1664.

   "The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Forraign Trade, wherein wee must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value."

   Mun's argument is best understood in light of the fact that he

   Was a government official responsible for collecting customs revenue Was an East India Company director defending its export of silver to Asia Opposed all forms of chartered monopoly trading company Advocated free trade against the prevailing mercantilist consensus

   Mun was a merchant and company director, not a customs official. His interest was commercial rather than administrative.

   Correct. By insisting the balance be judged across all trade rather than transaction by transaction, he defended precisely the practice his company was accused of: economic doctrine emerging from commercial self-defence.

   He was a director of the largest such company and wrote to defend it against its critics.

   The passage states the mercantilist rule itself. The free-trade critique came from Adam Smith more than a century later.

6. The Dutch Republic's commercial dominance in the seventeenth century rested most directly on

   Financial institutions that let merchants raise and move capital cheaply A large population that supplied abundant cheap labour Extensive domestic deposits of coal and iron ore A centralized absolute monarchy able to direct economic policy

   Correct. The Amsterdam exchange bank of 1609 and transferable VOC shares lowered the cost of capital, financing large fleets and long voyages: the republic's decisive advantage.

   The Dutch population was small, under two million, and wages were high. Scarcity of labour eventually limited the republic's capacity to sustain prolonged war.

   The Dutch lacked coal and iron and imported fuel, relying on peat and on wind power. Resource endowment was not the source of their wealth.

   The republic was a federation of provinces run largely by merchant regents, with no monarch: the clearest contemporary alternative to absolutism.

7. Description of: the Peace of Utrecht, 1713.

   Recognizes Philip V as king of Spain while requiring renunciations ensuring the French and Spanish crowns are never held by one person; transfers the Spanish Netherlands and Italian possessions to Austria; grants Britain Gibraltar, Minorca, and the asiento. Several articles state the arrangements are made to secure the peace and equilibrium of Europe.

   The explicit appeal to "equilibrium" is historically significant because it shows that

   European states had agreed to abolish warfare among themselves The balance of power had become a stated principle that treaties were written to serve Religious confession had again become the basis of European alliances The papacy had resumed its role as arbiter of disputes between Catholic powers

   Eighteenth-century Europe was full of wars. The settlement limited their aims rather than ending the practice.

   Correct. The balance of power moved from a description of how states behaved to an explicit objective written into treaty text: the organizing logic of the next century.

   The opposite: Catholic Austria, Protestant Britain, and the Calvinist Dutch had allied against Catholic France without controversy.

   The negotiations were conducted among states, and papal influence over such settlements had declined sharply since Westphalia.

8. Which best explains why the English crown, unlike the French, could not govern for long periods without its representative body?

   English monarchs lacked any personal wealth or landed estates Parliamentary consent was legally required for taxation, so extraordinary revenue depended on it The English nobility maintained private armies that the crown could not defeat English kings were elected by Parliament rather than inheriting the throne

   English monarchs held substantial crown lands and ordinary revenues. The constraint was on extraordinary taxation, not on royal property.

   Correct. Charles I's eleven-year personal rule ended the moment war with Scotland required funds beyond what prerogative devices like ship money could raise.

   Noble private armies had been curtailed since the Tudors. Parliament's power was fiscal and legal rather than military.

   The English crown was hereditary. Parliament altered the succession in 1689, but monarchs were not elected.

9. Description of: Peter the Great's decrees on dress and beards, and the Table of Ranks (1722).

   Nobles, officials, and townsmen must shave and wear German or Hungarian coats; those keeping a beard pay a graduated annual tax and carry a token proving payment. The Table of Ranks establishes fourteen parallel grades in army, navy, and civil service, and provides that reaching a specified grade confers noble status regardless of birth.

   Taken together, these measures indicate that Peter's primary goal was to

   Introduce representative institutions modelled on western European parliaments Create a nobility whose status and identity depended on service to the state Improve the legal position of the peasantry and reduce their obligations Reduce the cost of government by eliminating the hereditary aristocracy

   Peter created no representative body. His westernization was administrative, military, and cultural, not constitutional.

   Correct. Compulsory western appearance made obedience visible, and the Table of Ranks tied status to state service rather than birth, giving Peter the trained servants his war with Sweden demanded.

   Peasants and clergy were largely exempt from the dress rules, and serfdom tightened under Peter, with conscripted labour used to build St. Petersburg.

   The Table of Ranks expanded the nobility by opening it to talent rather than abolishing it, and the reforms were extremely expensive.

10. Which statement best assesses the limits of Louis XIV's absolutism?

    He was unable to prevent the Estates-General from meeting annually to review his edicts Noble and clerical exemption from direct taxation persisted, constraining royal finances Provincial governors retained the legal right to veto royal appointments He was required to obtain papal approval before declaring war

    The Estates-General did not meet at all between 1614 and 1789. That was a measure of royal strength, not weakness.

    Correct. Louis concentrated decision-making but never touched the fiscal privileges of the first two estates, leaving a state that could fight Europe for fifty years and not pay for it: the contradiction that produced 1789.

    Louis used intendants precisely to bypass provincial officials, who held no such veto.

    Louis frequently acted against papal wishes, notably in asserting Gallican control over the French church.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE difference between the development of royal power in England and in France in the seventeenth century.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason for the difference you described in (a).
   3. Briefly explain ONE way commercial or financial developments affected state power in the period 1600–1750.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: England's monarchy became limited by statute after 1689 while France's became more absolute; Parliament's consent was required for English taxation while Louis XIV governed without the Estates-General; England had no standing army in peacetime without consent. Do not accept: "England was free and France was not."
   • (b) Accept: Parliament's legal control of taxation made it impossible to dispense with when extraordinary revenue was needed, as Charles I discovered in 1640; the French crown could levy the taille without consent; England's island position reduced the need for a large standing army. Must explain causally.
   • (c) Accept: the Bank of England and funded debt letting Britain borrow cheaply and at scale; Dutch financial institutions financing fleets; mercantilist policy and the Navigation Acts tying trade to state power; chartered companies exercising sovereign powers abroad. Must link finance or commerce to state capacity.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) In France royal power became less constrained across the century, with Louis XIV governing without summoning the Estates-General at all, while in England the Bill of Rights of 1689 made it illegal for the monarch to suspend laws, levy taxes, or keep a peacetime standing army without Parliament's consent.

   (b) The difference rested on control of revenue. French kings could collect the taille as a direct tax without consent, so they could fund armies and officials independently, whereas English monarchs legally required parliamentary approval for taxation, which is why Charles I's eleven-year personal rule collapsed as soon as war with Scotland demanded money he could not raise otherwise.

   (c) The creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and a funded national debt allowed the British state to borrow very large sums at low interest against taxes Parliament had guaranteed. This let Britain sustain long naval wars against France, a larger and wealthier country whose crown was a poorer credit risk and paid far higher rates.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE method absolutist rulers used to increase their authority in the period 1648–1750.
   2. Briefly explain ONE limitation on absolutist power in this period.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way the balance of power shaped European diplomacy after 1648.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: intendants bypassing provincial institutions; court ceremony at Versailles domesticating the nobility; standing armies; state control of the church (revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Peter's synod); a service nobility under the Table of Ranks. Must name a mechanism.
   • (b) Accept: noble and clerical tax exemption; venal offices the crown could not recall; separate provincial legal customs; dependence on nobles for officers and administration, especially in the east; the practical limits of communication. Do not accept: "the people could revolt" with no institutional content.
   • (c) Accept: coalitions forming against any dominant power, especially against Louis XIV; the War of the Spanish Succession fought to prevent a Bourbon union; Utrecht writing equilibrium into treaty; Britain acting as the habitual arbiter. Must show the principle operating.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Louis XIV governed the French provinces through intendants, royal agents sent out from the center with authority over taxation, justice, and policing. Because they owed their position entirely to the crown and served away from their home regions, they allowed the king to bypass provincial estates and local officeholders.

   (b) Absolutist rulers could not touch the fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. In France the first two estates remained largely exempt from direct taxation throughout Louis XIV's reign, so a state powerful enough to fight most of Europe for fifty years was never able to fund those wars from its wealthiest subjects.

   (c) States repeatedly combined against whichever power threatened to dominate the continent. When Louis XIV's grandson stood to inherit Spain, Britain, Austria, and the Dutch Republic fought the War of the Spanish Succession to prevent it, and the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 permanently separated the two crowns in the name of European equilibrium.

Lesson 4.1 · Unit 4 · CED topic 4.2

The Scientific Revolution

In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published a mathematical model placing the sun rather than the earth at the center, and the reordering that followed took a century and a half. Tycho Brahe compiled observations of unprecedented accuracy without accepting the new system; Johannes Kepler used Brahe's data to show the orbits were ellipses, not circles, which finally made heliocentrism fit the sky. Galileo turned a telescope on the heavens in 1609 and found mountains on the moon, moons around Jupiter, and phases of Venus: evidence that the celestial realm was made of ordinary matter.

The method mattered as much as the findings. Francis Bacon argued for induction: gather observations systematically and reason upward. René Descartes argued for deduction from indubitable first principles, and for a mechanical universe describable in mathematics. Isaac Newton's Principia of 1687 joined the two traditions and the two realms, showing that a single law of universal gravitation governed falling apples and planetary orbits alike. Institutions consolidated the change: the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris gave the new science patrons, correspondence networks, and journals. Women participated where household workshops allowed it: Maria Winkelmann discovered a comet while working as an astronomer's assistant, and Émilie du Châtelet's French translation of Newton remained standard for two centuries.

Lesson 4.2 · Unit 4 · CED topic 4.3

The Enlightenment: reason applied to society

If natural law governed the heavens, the eighteenth century's leading question was whether comparable laws governed politics, economics, and morals, and whether societies could be reformed once those laws were known. The thinkers who pursued it were not professional philosophers but a loose international network of writers, and their common conviction was that inherited institutions should have to justify themselves at the bar of reason.

John Locke supplied the foundations, arguing that government arises from a contract to protect natural rights and may be dissolved when it violates them, and that the mind begins as a blank slate written on by experience, which implied that better institutions could produce better people. Montesquieu proposed separating and balancing powers to prevent tyranny. Voltaire made religious toleration and freedom of expression his lifelong campaign, attacking judicial cruelty and clerical privilege. Rousseau argued that legitimate authority rests on the general will of the community, a doctrine both democratic and open to authoritarian use. Diderot's Encyclopédie gathered the whole programme into twenty-eight volumes designed to make knowledge public and criticism ordinary. Adam Smith turned the same analysis on trade, arguing in 1776 that wealth came from productive labour and specialization rather than hoarded bullion, and that mercantilist restriction destroyed value.

Lesson 4.3 · Unit 4 · CED topics 4.3–4.5

The Enlightenment's publics: salons, coffeehouses, and print

Ideas needed somewhere to circulate, and the eighteenth century built it. Historians call the result the public sphere: a space of discussion outside both the court and the church, where private people formed collective opinion on matters of common concern. Its institutions were unglamorous: coffeehouses, reading societies, lending libraries, masonic lodges, newspapers, and the salon.

Salons were run by women, and that gave educated women a role in intellectual life they held nowhere else. A hostess such as Madame Geoffrin in Paris selected the guests, set the topics, and enforced a conversational etiquette in which a marquis and a penniless writer could argue as equals. Print expanded alongside: a reading revolution shifted people from re-reading a few devotional books to consuming many varied ones, and an illegal trade smuggled banned works across the French border in quantity. Censorship existed everywhere and was evaded everywhere, often by printing in the Dutch Republic or Switzerland. The programme had limits its participants noticed. Beccaria applied it to criminal justice in 1764; Mary Wollstonecraft applied it in 1792 to the one hierarchy most philosophes had left untouched, arguing that women appeared frivolous because they were educated to be so.

Lesson 4.4 · Unit 4 · CED topic 4.4

Eighteenth-century society and demographics

Europe's population, roughly flat for the previous century, began climbing after about 1700 and rose by perhaps half again by 1800. The cause was falling mortality rather than rising birth rates: the disappearance of plague after its last major outbreaks, better nutrition from new crops and improved farming, and the retreat of famine as transport and markets spread grain more evenly. More people survived infancy, and more of them needed work.

Agriculture met part of the demand. Enclosure consolidated scattered strips and common land into private farms, convertible husbandry replaced fallow with fodder crops that fed more livestock and returned more manure, and the potato spread as a high-yield subsistence crop. Output rose, but so did rural inequality, since enclosure stripped smallholders and cottagers of the common rights that had made their marginal holdings viable. Rural manufacturing absorbed some of the displaced: under the putting-out system, merchants supplied raw material to peasant households that spun and wove at home, paying by the piece. A consumer revolution followed in the towns, where tea, sugar, tobacco, cotton cloth, and crockery became ordinary purchases for people well below the elite: the market that industrial production would soon serve.

Lesson 4.5 · Unit 4 · CED topic 4.5

Culture and the arts in the eighteenth century

Eighteenth-century art moved with its audience. The Rococo that succeeded the Baroque abandoned the church's monumental drama for the aristocratic interior: smaller canvases, pastel colors, asymmetrical ornament, and subjects of leisure, flirtation, and pastoral fantasy. It suited a nobility that had been drawn into court and town life and wanted decoration for private rooms rather than persuasion in public naves.

From mid-century a reaction set in. Neoclassicism took its subjects from Roman history and its values from the Enlightenment (civic duty, self-sacrifice, austerity), and its clean lines and sober color were a deliberate rebuke to Rococo frivolity. Jacques-Louis David's Roman scenes made painting into moral instruction, and the style would become the visual language of the French Revolution. The same widening of audience reshaped the other arts. The novel emerged as the dominant new literary form, aimed at a growing readership that included many women. Music moved from aristocratic patronage toward public concerts sold by ticket, and the dense counterpoint of the Baroque gave way to the clearer, more tuneful Classical style of Haydn and Mozart. In each case, art was adjusting to buyers rather than only to patrons.

Lesson 4.6 · Unit 4 · CED topic 4.6

Enlightened absolutism and its limits

Several eighteenth-century rulers adopted Enlightenment language and some Enlightenment policy without surrendering any power: a combination historians call enlightened absolutism. Frederick the Great of Prussia corresponded with Voltaire, described himself as the first servant of the state, allowed broad religious toleration, reformed the legal code, and abolished judicial torture. He also seized Silesia from Austria in 1740 in a war of pure opportunism and left Junker control of the serfs untouched outside his own domains.

Joseph II of Austria went furthest and failed hardest. His Patent of Toleration extended rights to Protestants and Jews, he abolished serfdom, dissolved contemplative monasteries, and tried to impose German as a single administrative language across a multiethnic empire. Noble and Hungarian resistance was fierce, and most of it was reversed at or soon after his death in 1790. Catherine the Great of Russia read the philosophes, corresponded with Diderot, and convened a commission in 1767 with an Instruction drawn largely from Montesquieu and Beccaria, then produced no new code, and after Pugachev's rebellion of 1773–1775 tightened serfdom and confirmed noble privileges by charter in 1785. The clearest measure of the whole phenomenon is Poland: Prussia, Austria, and Russia partitioned a neighboring state out of existence in 1772, 1793, and 1795.

Unit 4 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 4 review: Scientific, Philosophical, and Political Developments

Ten questions on the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and its publics, eighteenth-century society and the arts, and the limits of enlightened absolutism, plus two short-answer questions on reason applied to nature and to society.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615.

   "The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes."

   Galileo's argument here is best characterized as a claim that

   Scripture and natural philosophy address different questions and so cannot contradict each other Scripture contains no reliable teaching on any subject The church should abandon its claim to authority over doctrine Astronomical observation should be subordinated to theological interpretation

   Correct. Galileo, a devout Catholic, separates the domains: scripture teaches salvation, astronomy describes the heavens, so a conflict between them is only apparent.

   He affirms scripture's authority on its own subject, salvation. His argument is about jurisdiction, not about scripture's reliability.

   Galileo sought to persuade church authorities, not to strip them of doctrinal authority, and remained within the church throughout.

   This reverses his claim. He argues that astronomical questions should be settled by observation rather than by scriptural interpretation.

2. Kepler's contribution was essential to the acceptance of heliocentrism because he

   Was the first to propose that the earth orbits the sun Showed that orbits are elliptical, which made the model fit observed positions accurately Invented the telescope and used it to observe the moons of Jupiter Demonstrated that a single force governs both terrestrial and celestial motion

   Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1543, decades before Kepler worked on Brahe's data.

   Correct. Copernicus had kept circular orbits, which left the model no more accurate than the old one; elliptical orbits finally made heliocentrism match the observations.

   Galileo made the telescopic observations of Jupiter's moons in 1609–1610. Kepler's work was mathematical, using Brahe's naked-eye data.

   Universal gravitation was Newton's achievement in the Principia of 1687.

3. Bacon and Descartes differed principally in that Bacon emphasized

   Systematic observation reasoned upward to general conclusions Deduction from indubitable first principles The authority of Aristotle in questions of natural philosophy Mathematical description of a mechanical universe

   Correct. Bacon's Novum Organum argued for induction (gather observations methodically, then generalize) against both scholastic logic and pure deduction.

   That is Descartes's method, beginning from principles he could not doubt and reasoning outward.

   Both men rejected Aristotelian authority. Attacking it was their common starting point.

   The mechanical, mathematically described universe is characteristically Cartesian, not Baconian.

4. Source: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689.

   "The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property."

   A historian would most usefully note that this work was published

   During the reign of Charles I, as a defence of royal prerogative Immediately after the Glorious Revolution, justifying the removal of a king In the middle of the French Revolution, in support of the National Assembly Before the English Civil War, anticipating the conflict between crown and Parliament

   Locke's argument limits royal authority rather than defending it, and Charles I was executed forty years before publication.

   Correct. Published anonymously in 1689, it reads as a justification of what had just happened, a monarch removed for violating his trust, which is why later revolutions found it so useful.

   The French Revolution began a century later, in 1789. Its leaders drew on Locke but did not prompt him.

   The civil war began in 1642, nearly fifty years before publication.

5. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws contributed most directly to later political practice through its argument for

   Direct democracy exercised through the general will of the people Dividing and balancing governmental powers to prevent tyranny Free trade and the removal of mercantilist restrictions The abolition of hereditary monarchy in favour of a republic

   The general will is Rousseau's concept, and Montesquieu distrusted concentrated authority of any kind, including popular.

   Correct. Separating legislative, executive, and judicial functions so that each checks the others became a template for written constitutions.

   Free trade was Adam Smith's argument in 1776. Montesquieu wrote about the structure of government.

   Montesquieu admired the English constitutional monarchy and did not call for abolishing kingship.

6. Salons contributed to the Enlightenment primarily by

   Providing state funding for scientific research academies Creating spaces where writers, nobles, and officials debated with rank set aside Printing and distributing banned books across the French border Admitting women to universities on equal terms with men

   Academies such as the Académie des Sciences were separate crown institutions. Salons were private gatherings in women's homes.

   Correct. A hostess such as Madame Geoffrin selected guests and enforced conversational rules under which a marquis and a penniless writer could argue as equals, circulating ideas among people with influence.

   The clandestine book trade was carried on by printers and smugglers, often operating from the Dutch Republic or Switzerland.

   European universities remained closed to women throughout this period. Salons gave women intellectual influence outside the universities, not within them.

7. Source: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792.

   "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. … I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves."

   Wollstonecraft's argument rests on which Enlightenment premise?

   That character is formed by education and environment rather than fixed by nature That women possess a distinct moral sense superior to men's That political authority derives from divine appointment That traditional custom is the safest guide to social arrangements

   Correct. She argues women appear frivolous because they are educated to be so: Locke's premise that the mind is shaped by experience, turned on the education of women.

   She argues for equal rational capacity, not for a separate or superior female nature, which would concede the difference she disputes.

   Divine-right argument is what Enlightenment writers attacked. Nothing in the passage appeals to it.

   Deference to custom is the conservative position Wollstonecraft is arguing against.

8. Source: Frederick II of Prussia, Essay on the Forms of Government, 1777.

   "He is only the first servant of the state, who is obliged to act with probity and prudence."

   Read against Frederick's actual policies, the passage is best used as evidence for

   The genuine abolition of serfdom throughout Prussian territory How absolutism adapted its language without surrendering its social foundations The creation of a Prussian representative assembly to hold the king accountable Frederick's decision to renounce territorial expansion by war

   Frederick left serfdom on noble estates untouched, limiting reform to his own royal domains, because he depended on the Junkers for officers.

   Correct. He defines the monarch's duty as service while conceding nothing about who judges whether it is performed: Enlightenment vocabulary serving unchanged practice.

   No such assembly existed. Frederick's reforms were administrative and legal, never constitutional.

   Frederick seized Silesia from Austria in 1740 in a war of opportunity and later joined the partitions of Poland.

9. The reversal of most of Joseph II's reforms after 1790 best illustrates that enlightened absolutism was limited by

   The financial exhaustion caused by the Seven Years' War Rulers' dependence on a nobility whose privileges reform threatened Papal opposition, which could compel Catholic monarchs to withdraw legislation Popular demand for the restoration of traditional religious practice

   The war ended in 1763, well before Joseph's reign began in 1780, and his difficulties were political rather than fiscal.

   Correct. Joseph abolished serfdom and attacked noble and Hungarian privilege; resistance from those groups was strong enough to undo the measures at and after his death.

   Joseph dissolved contemplative monasteries and subordinated the church to the state despite papal objection, which he was able to sustain.

   Resistance came chiefly from nobles and the Hungarian estates defending privilege and autonomy, not from popular religious demand.

10. The partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 are most often cited as evidence that

    Enlightenment principles had begun to restrain the foreign policy of major powers Raison d'état continued to govern international relations regardless of enlightened rhetoric Poland's neighbours acted to protect its constitutional reforms from foreign interference The balance of power established at Utrecht had made territorial annexation impossible

    The opposite: three rulers who corresponded with philosophes erased a sovereign state, showing enlightenment imposed no restraint at all.

    Correct. Prussia, Austria, and Russia, the three states most identified with enlightened absolutism, partitioned a neighbour out of existence purely for advantage.

    Poland's 1791 constitution was a reform effort that its neighbours suppressed rather than protected, using it as a pretext for further partition.

    The partitions are a clear case of annexation succeeding, which the balance of power failed to prevent because the three partitioning powers cooperated.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way the Scientific Revolution changed what counted as reliable knowledge.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way Enlightenment thinkers applied that change to the study of society.
   3. Briefly explain ONE limitation of Enlightenment thought as it was applied in the eighteenth century.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: observation, mathematics, and repeatable demonstration replaced the authority of Aristotle and of scriptural interpretation; findings became cumulative and correctable; scientific societies published results so others could repeat them. Do not accept: "people stopped believing in God."
   • (b) Accept: Locke reasoning from a state of nature to the ends of government; Montesquieu comparing constitutions to derive principles; Smith analysing markets; Beccaria applying utility to punishment. Must show the method being transferred.
   • (c) Accept: most philosophes did not extend rights to women, the poor, or the enslaved; enlightened rulers reformed only where it strengthened the state; colonial slavery continued and expanded; the partitions of Poland. Do not accept: vague claims that it was "not very effective."
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Claims about the natural world came to be settled by observation, mathematics, and repeatable demonstration rather than by the authority of ancient writers. Galileo's telescopic evidence could be checked by anyone with a telescope, which is why Kepler could correct Copernicus and Newton could subsume both.

   (b) Enlightenment writers applied the same standard to human institutions. Montesquieu compared the constitutions of different states in order to derive general principles about what prevents tyranny, treating political arrangements as a subject for systematic analysis rather than as inherited custom beyond question.

   (c) Enlightenment universalism was applied very selectively. Most philosophes assumed political rights belonged to propertied men, and the same decades saw the Atlantic slave trade reach its peak, so the premise that all should be judged by reason coexisted with the exclusion of women, the poor, and the enslaved.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE reform enacted by an enlightened absolutist ruler.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason such rulers pursued reforms of this kind.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way eighteenth-century social or economic change affected ordinary people.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: Frederick II's religious toleration, legal codification, or abolition of judicial torture; Joseph II's Patent of Toleration (1781), abolition of serfdom, or monastic dissolution; Catherine II's Instruction of 1767. Must name ruler and measure.
   • (b) Accept: reforms that increased state reach at the expense of church, noble, or local authority; the need for educated and healthy subjects and soldiers; desire for standing among the philosophes; efficiency of a uniform legal and administrative system. Must explain the ruler's interest.
   • (c) Accept: enclosure stripping common rights and pushing smallholders into wage labour; the putting-out system bringing piece-rate manufacturing into rural households; falling mortality and population growth; the consumer revolution making tea, sugar, and cotton ordinary purchases. Must connect to people's actual conditions.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Joseph II of Austria issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781, granting Protestants and Jews rights of worship and access to occupations from which they had previously been excluded in the Habsburg lands.

   (b) Such reforms strengthened the state at the expense of rival institutions. Toleration weakened the Catholic Church's monopoly over religious life and brought previously excluded subjects into economic and military service, so the measure increased royal authority while also satisfying enlightened opinion abroad.

   (c) Enclosure consolidated common fields into private farms and stripped cottagers of the grazing and gleaning rights that had made small holdings viable. Many rural families lost the margin that kept them independent and had to take wage work or piece-rate spinning and weaving under the putting-out system instead.

Lesson 5.1 · Unit 5 · CED topics 5.2–5.3

Global markets and Britain's ascendancy

By the middle of the eighteenth century European prosperity ran on an Atlantic system. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton came from plantations worked by enslaved Africans; European manufactures and Indian textiles went to Africa to purchase them; and the profits financed shipping, insurance, and banking in Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and London. Asian trade in tea, spices, and cottons ran alongside through chartered companies that had become territorial powers in their own right.

The Seven Years' War (1756–1763) decided who would dominate it. Fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India, it ended with Britain taking Canada and French possessions in India, and left the French navy crippled. The deeper British advantage was financial. The Bank of England and a funded national debt let the government borrow enormous sums against reliable future taxes, paying lower interest than France could obtain, so Britain could sustain naval war longer than richer rivals. France, with a larger population and economy, could not tax its privileged orders and financed its wars by expensive short-term borrowing. The two states emerged from 1763 on opposite trajectories, and France's decision to fund the American revolt in 1778, a strategic success, pushed its finances past recovery.

Lesson 5.2 · Unit 5 · CED topic 5.4

The outbreak of the French Revolution, 1789

The Revolution began as a fiscal emergency. Unable to borrow further and blocked by the parlements and an Assembly of Notables from taxing the privileged orders, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614. The procedural question of how it would vote (by order, giving clergy and nobility a permanent two-to-one majority, or by head, where the Third Estate's numbers would tell) was the whole political question in disguise.

The Third Estate broke the deadlock by declaring itself the National Assembly and swearing at the Tennis Court on 20 June not to disperse until France had a constitution. Popular action then outran the deputies. Parisians stormed the Bastille on 14 July, fearing a royal coup and wanting its arms; across the countryside the Great Fear sent peasants against seigneurial records. The Assembly responded on the night of 4 August by renouncing feudal dues, tithes, venal offices, and provincial privileges wholesale, and on 26 August issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In October, market women marched on Versailles and brought the royal family back to Paris, where the Assembly followed. In five months an absolute monarchy had become a constitutional one, and sovereignty had been relocated from the king to the nation.

Lesson 5.3 · Unit 5 · CED topics 5.4–5.5

Radicalization, Terror, and Thermidor

Two decisions turned a constitutional revolution into a radical one. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 reorganized the church as a branch of the state and required an oath of loyalty; roughly half the clergy refused, and devout Catholics across the countryside who had supported 1789 now found the Revolution attacking their parish priest. Then in April 1792 the Assembly declared war on Austria. Military defeat, suspicion of the king's loyalty, and fear of internal treason fused into a permanent emergency.

The monarchy fell in August 1792; prisoners were massacred in September; Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. With civil war in the Vendée and foreign armies on the frontiers, the Convention delegated emergency power to the Committee of Public Safety. The Terror that followed combined mass mobilization, the levée en masse raised an army of unprecedented size, with revolutionary tribunals that executed perhaps seventeen thousand people by sentence, with many more dying in prison or in the suppression of revolt. Women had been central to revolutionary crowds and founded political clubs, but the Jacobins banned women's clubs in October 1793, and Olympe de Gouges, who had demanded equal rights, was guillotined the following month. When the Convention finally turned on Robespierre in July 1794, the Terror ended as abruptly as it had begun, leaving the propertied Directory to govern an exhausted republic.

Lesson 5.4 · Unit 5 · CED topic 5.5

The Revolution beyond France

The Declaration of 1789 was written in universal language, and people outside the circle its authors had in mind took it at its word. Nowhere more consequentially than Saint-Domingue, France's richest colony, where enslaved people vastly outnumbered free inhabitants and produced a large share of the world's sugar and coffee. A massive slave revolt began in 1791. Under Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became a general and then governor, the insurgents defeated French, Spanish, and British forces in turn.

The French Convention abolished slavery throughout the empire in February 1794: the first such act by a European state, and a recognition of a fact already established on the ground. Napoleon reversed it in 1802 and sent an army to restore slavery; Toussaint was seized and died in a French prison, but the war continued and Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804, the only state ever created by a successful large-scale slave revolt. Elsewhere French armies exported revolutionary law into the Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy, and the German lands, abolishing serfdom and guild restrictions and imposing legal equality, while requisitioning supplies and installing client governments, so that the same occupation both spread revolutionary principles and provoked the national resentment that would eventually be turned against France.

Lesson 5.5 · Unit 5 · CED topic 5.6

Napoleon: rise, dominance, defeat

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in the coup of Brumaire in November 1799, offering an exhausted France order without a return to the old regime. He largely delivered. The Concordat of 1801 settled the religious quarrel by recognizing Catholicism as the faith of most French people while keeping church lands sold during the Revolution in their new owners' hands. He centralized administration through prefects, founded the Bank of France, reorganized secondary education, and in 1804 promulgated the Civil Code, which fixed legal equality among men, secular civil status, and the property settlement of 1789 in permanent form.

He also made himself emperor in 1804 and spent a decade at war. Victory at Austerlitz in 1805 and the reorganization of the German lands dismantled the Holy Roman Empire. Three things then undid him. The Continental System, an attempt to close Europe to British trade, damaged allies and clients and could not be enforced against a superior navy. The Peninsular War after 1808 tied down French armies against Spanish guerrillas and British forces indefinitely. And the invasion of Russia in 1812 destroyed the Grande Armée, most of it by disease, hunger, and cold rather than battle. Defeat came in 1814, then Elba, then the Hundred Days and Waterloo in June 1815.

Lesson 5.6 · Unit 5 · CED topics 5.7–5.8

The Congress of Vienna and Romanticism

The powers that defeated Napoleon met at Vienna in 1814–1815 to rebuild a Europe that had been remade by twenty-three years of revolution and war. Metternich of Austria dominated proceedings, with Castlereagh for Britain, Alexander I of Russia, and, remarkably for a defeated state, Talleyrand for France. They worked from three principles: legitimacy, restoring recognized dynasties; compensation, adjusting territory so that the victors gained proportionally; and balance, ensuring no state could again dominate. France was treated with restraint precisely so that it would not seek revenge, and a strengthened ring of states was built along its borders.

The settlement worked as security policy and failed as politics. No general European war occurred for a century, but the Congress ignored the two forces the revolutionary era had released, nationalism and liberalism, redistributing Italians, Germans, Poles, and Belgians among dynasties without regard to national feeling. The Concert of Europe and its congresses then spent three decades suppressing the resulting revolts. Romanticism, meanwhile, was already rejecting the assumptions the settlement rested on. Where the Enlightenment had prized reason, universality, and restraint, Romantic writers and painters prized emotion, imagination, nature, the medieval past, and the particular genius of each people: a set of values that fed directly into the nationalism Metternich was trying to contain.

Unit 5 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 5 review: Conflict, Crisis, and Reaction in the Late 18th Century

Ten questions on Britain's ascendancy, the French Revolution from 1789 to Thermidor, its export abroad, Napoleon, and the settlement at Vienna, plus two short-answer questions on revolution and reaction.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 26 August 1789.

   "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. … Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity … clearly demands it."

   The juxtaposition of these two articles helps explain why the Declaration could be used to justify

   Both the abolition of feudal dues and the exclusion of the poor from active citizenship The immediate establishment of universal suffrage including women The restoration of the privileges of the nobility and clergy The abolition of private property throughout France

   Correct. Universal equality justified sweeping away seigneurial privilege, while the sanctity of property supported restricting political rights to men of means: the document's central tension.

   Women were excluded from political rights, and the 1791 constitution divided citizens into active and passive by tax qualification.

   The Declaration followed the night of 4 August, which had abolished those privileges. It was written against them.

   Article 17 declares property inviolable and sacred, which is the opposite of abolishing it.

2. The immediate cause of the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789 was

   A widespread peasant uprising demanding political representation A fiscal crisis the crown could not resolve without taxing the privileged orders Defeat in war with Britain requiring the cession of French territory The death of Louis XVI and a disputed succession

   The Great Fear in the countryside came in July 1789, after the Estates-General had already convened. Rural revolt was a consequence, not the cause.

   Correct. Debt service consumed most ordinary revenue, the parlements and Assembly of Notables blocked new taxes on the privileged, and the crown could borrow no further.

   France's intervention in the American war was a strategic success; the damage was financial rather than territorial.

   Louis XVI was alive and reigning in 1789, and was executed in January 1793.

3. The National Assembly's renunciation of feudal privileges on 4 August 1789 is best understood as

   A long-planned reform that the deputies had promised in their election campaigns A response to peasant revolt that recognized in law what was already happening by force A concession demanded by Louis XVI in exchange for accepting a constitution A measure imposed on France by foreign powers after military defeat

   The deputies had not planned it; the session was called in response to the crisis and the renunciations came in a single dramatic night.

   Correct. With the Great Fear spreading and peasants burning seigneurial records across France, the Assembly abolished dues it could no longer enforce.

   Louis XVI resisted rather than demanded the August decrees and delayed sanctioning them.

   France was not at war in August 1789; war with Austria began in April 1792.

4. Source: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, 1791.

   "Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. … Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum."

   De Gouges's decision to rewrite the 1789 Declaration article by article was rhetorically effective because it

   Forced readers to notice what the original document had omitted Concealed her argument from censors who would otherwise have suppressed it Demonstrated that the revolutionaries had never intended to grant men rights either Appealed to traditional religious authority against revolutionary innovation

   Correct. Every clause was recognizable, so the substitution of "woman" made the original's silence impossible to overlook: holding the Revolution to its own premise.

   The parallel structure made the argument more conspicuous, not less. She was executed in 1793.

   She accepted that men had been granted rights; her complaint was that women had been excluded from the same grant.

   She argued from revolutionary principles of natural rights, not from religious tradition.

5. Which best explains the radicalization of the Revolution after 1791?

   The success of the Constitution of 1791 in satisfying popular demands War and military defeat, which turned political disagreement into suspicion of treason Britain's decision to restore Louis XVI by invading through the Vendée The abolition of slavery in the colonies, which divided the Assembly

   The 1791 constitution satisfied few: it divided citizens by tax qualification and collapsed within a year.

   Correct. War from April 1792, defeat, and the king's suspected collusion produced a permanent emergency in which dissent looked like conspiracy, justifying the Committee of Public Safety.

   The Vendée rising was an internal counter-revolutionary revolt, not a British invasion, and it followed rather than caused radicalization.

   Abolition came in February 1794, during the Terror, and was a consequence of radicalization and events in Saint-Domingue rather than its cause.

6. Description of: the decree of the French National Convention abolishing slavery in the colonies, February 1794.

   Extremely short. Declares slavery abolished throughout the colonies, states that all men resident there without distinction of colour are French citizens, and orders immediate execution. No compensation, timetable, or transitional apprenticeship is provided.

   The decree's brevity and absence of transitional provisions most strongly suggest that it

   Resulted from a long abolitionist campaign that had prepared detailed legislation Ratified a situation the Convention could no longer control in Saint-Domingue Was intended to be permanent and was never subsequently reversed Applied only to colonies that had remained loyal to the Republic

   Detailed abolitionist legislation elsewhere included compensation and apprenticeship schemes. Their absence here indicates emergency rather than preparation.

   Correct. Enslaved people had been in revolt since 1791 and the colony was effectively outside French control; the decree recognized facts and turned the insurgents into allies against Britain and Spain.

   Napoleon restored slavery in 1802 and sent an army to enforce it, which the Haitians defeated.

   The decree applied to all colonies and made no distinction based on loyalty.

7. Source: the French Civil Code (Napoleonic Code), 1804, Article 213.

   "The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband."

   The Code as a whole is best characterized as

   A complete restoration of the legal order of the old regime Preserving revolutionary gains valued by propertied men while reversing others An extension of revolutionary equality to women and the propertyless alike A purely symbolic document with little effect outside France

   The Code confirmed the abolition of feudalism, careers open to talent, and secure title to land bought during the Revolution: none of which the old regime allowed.

   Correct. It kept legal equality among men and the property settlement of 1789 while restoring husbands' authority and curtailing the divorce and property rights women had gained in the 1790s.

   Article 213 does the opposite for women, and the Code protected property owners rather than the propertyless.

   The Code was imposed across occupied Europe and outlasted Napoleon's empire by generations, forming the basis of many modern legal systems.

8. The Continental System failed primarily because

   Britain's naval superiority made the blockade unenforceable while it harmed France's own allies Britain possessed no overseas markets to replace European trade France lacked any army capable of occupying the ports concerned The system was abandoned voluntarily within a year of its proclamation

   Correct. The Royal Navy could not be excluded from the seas, smuggling was extensive, and client states resenting the loss of British goods became unreliable: a chain leading to the Peninsular War and the Russian campaign.

   Britain expanded trade with the Americas and Asia during the blockade, which is part of why it survived.

   France occupied much of the European coastline; enforcement failed at sea and through smuggling, not for want of soldiers.

   Napoleon maintained and extended the system from 1806 until his fall, and invaded Russia partly over its violation.

9. The Congress of Vienna's treatment of France after 1815 is best explained by the statesmen's desire to

   Reward France for abandoning Napoleon during the Hundred Days Avoid creating a resentful power that would seek to overturn the settlement Establish a French-led federation of European states Apply the principle of national self-determination to French-speaking regions

   France was a defeated aggressor, and the restraint reflected calculation about future stability rather than reward.

   Correct. Moderate terms and the restoration of the Bourbons were designed to give France a stake in the new order, and a ring of strengthened states was built along its frontiers as insurance.

   The settlement was designed to contain France, not to place it at the head of Europe.

   The Congress worked from dynastic legitimacy and explicitly disregarded national self-determination, which is its most criticized feature.

10. Romanticism is best understood as a reaction against

    The revival of classical learning during the Renaissance Enlightenment emphasis on universal reason and classical restraint in the arts The doctrine of predestination as taught by Calvinist churches The scientific findings of Newton, which Romantics sought to disprove experimentally

    Romanticism came three centuries after the Renaissance and often admired medieval rather than classical models.

    Correct. Romantics prized emotion, imagination, nature, the medieval past, and the distinctive genius of each people against Enlightenment universalism and Neoclassical form.

    Predestination was a sixteenth-century theological controversy, not the target of a nineteenth-century artistic movement.

    Romantics objected to a purely mechanical view of nature but did not attempt to refute Newton's physics experimentally.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE cause of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way popular action shaped the course of the Revolution between 1789 and 1794.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way the Revolution affected territories outside France.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: fiscal crisis and unpayable debt after the American war; refusal of the privileged orders to accept taxation; bad harvests and bread prices in 1788–1789; Enlightenment criticism of privilege; the deadlock over voting by order. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: the storming of the Bastille making royal dissolution of the Assembly impossible; the Great Fear forcing the abolition of feudalism on 4 August; the October march bringing the king to Paris; sans-culotte pressure driving the Convention toward the Terror. Must show the causal pressure.
   • (c) Accept: the Haitian Revolution and the 1794 abolition decree; sister republics and the export of revolutionary law; the spread of nationalism in reaction to French occupation; the Napoleonic Code adopted across Europe. Must name a specific territory or effect.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) The monarchy faced a fiscal crisis it could not resolve. Debt from the Seven Years' War and from intervention in the American war consumed most ordinary revenue, and when the parlements and the Assembly of Notables blocked taxing the nobility and clergy, Louis XVI had to summon the Estates-General for the first time since 1614.

   (b) Peasant revolt during the Great Fear forced the National Assembly's hand. With rural crowds burning seigneurial records across France in July 1789, the deputies renounced feudal dues, tithes, and privileges on the night of 4 August: recognizing in law what peasants were already achieving by force.

   (c) Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue invoked the Declaration's claim that men are born free and equal and revolted from 1791. Their military success compelled the Convention to abolish slavery throughout the colonies in 1794, and the war they continued against Napoleon's attempt to restore it produced Haitian independence in 1804.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way Napoleon preserved changes made by the French Revolution.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way Napoleon reversed changes made by the Revolution.
   3. Briefly explain ONE way the Congress of Vienna's settlement created long-term problems for Europe.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: the Civil Code confirming legal equality among men, careers open to talent, and secure title to land sold during the Revolution; the Concordat leaving church lands with their purchasers; abolition of feudal dues carried into occupied territories. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: censorship and secret police; the end of representative government and elected assemblies; making himself emperor in 1804; restoring husbands' legal authority and restricting divorce; restoring slavery in the colonies in 1802. Must be specific.
   • (c) Accept: nationalism disregarded, leaving Germans, Italians, Poles, and Belgians under foreign or divided rule and producing revolts in 1830 and 1848; liberal demands suppressed rather than accommodated; the Concert committed to repressing constitutional movements. Must name the later consequence.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) The Civil Code of 1804 confirmed legal equality among men, careers open to talent, and secure ownership for those who had bought confiscated church and noble land during the Revolution, making the abolition of feudal privilege permanent in France and in much of the territory Napoleon controlled.

   (b) He destroyed the Revolution's political liberties. Napoleon censored the press, employed secret police, replaced representative government with plebiscites whose outcome was never in doubt, and crowned himself emperor in 1804, ending the republic the Revolution had created.

   (c) The Congress redistributed territory according to dynastic legitimacy and the balance of power while ignoring national feeling, leaving Italians and Germans divided under Austrian influence and Poland partitioned. Nationalist grievances produced repeated revolts, most seriously in 1848, and eventually the unification of Italy and Germany that overturned the settlement.

Lesson 6.1 · Unit 6 · CED topic 6.2

The Industrial Revolution begins in Britain

Industrialization began in British cotton. Spinning was mechanized first (the jenny, the water frame, then Crompton's mule), and because machines were too large and too power-hungry for a cottage, production moved into mills where owners could supervise labour and impose the clock. Weaving followed with the power loom. Steam made the system general: Watt's improved engine, and especially the rotary version of the 1780s, freed factories from riverbanks and let them cluster near coal and cities.

The question the exam asks is why Britain and not elsewhere, and the answer is a combination rather than any single cause. Britain had accessible coal near navigable water and iron ore; an agricultural revolution that fed a growing urban population and released rural labour; the largest colonial market and merchant fleet for both raw cotton and finished cloth; a financial system that could lend cheaply; and a legal order that enforced contracts and patents without guild restriction or internal tariffs. Transport compounded everything: canals first, then railways, which after the Liverpool and Manchester line of 1830 cut freight costs, opened inland markets, and became a vast market for iron and coal in their own right.

Lesson 6.2 · Unit 6 · CED topics 6.2–6.3

Industrialization spreads across Europe

Industry moved across Europe unevenly and from west to east, and later industrializers did not repeat the British path. Belgium, with coal and a dense textile tradition, came first on the continent. France industrialized more gradually, keeping smaller firms and a larger agricultural sector: long read as failure, now more often as a different and reasonably successful adaptation to French conditions. The German states were held back by political fragmentation until the Zollverein customs union of 1834 created a single market; after 1850, German heavy industry expanded very rapidly, aided by technical education and close ties between banks and manufacturers.

From the 1860s a second phase changed the leaders. The Bessemer process made cheap steel; chemicals, electricity, and later the internal combustion engine created industries that depended on formal science rather than on workshop tinkering. Germany, with its universities and research laboratories, and the United States, with its vast internal market, moved ahead of Britain in the new sectors. Russia industrialized last and most abruptly, driven by the state rather than by private demand: serfdom was abolished in 1861, and from the 1890s government policy directed foreign capital into railways and heavy industry, producing modern factories inside an overwhelmingly peasant society.

Lesson 6.3 · Unit 6 · CED topic 6.4

Social effects: class, cities, and the family

Industrial cities grew faster than anyone could build for them. Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham filled with migrants housed in back-to-back terraces without drains or clean water, and the results were measurable in mortality: urban life expectancy fell well below rural figures, and cholera arrived in devastating epidemics in the early 1830s and again at the end of the 1840s. Edwin Chadwick's sanitary report of 1842 established that disease tracked filth and poverty, and the first Public Health Act followed in 1848.

Work changed as much as housing. The factory separated home from workplace and replaced task rhythms with the clock and the fine. Women and children had always worked, but now they worked away from the household and for a wage, and the conditions were visible enough to investigate: parliamentary inquiries into child labour in the 1830s and 1840s produced the Factory Act of 1833 and the Ten Hours Act of 1847. As male wages slowly rose, an ideology of separate spheres hardened, holding that a respectable man supported a wife who remained at home; it described middle-class life more accurately than working-class reality, where family survival still needed several incomes. Out of shared conditions and shared grievances came something new: a working class conscious of itself, organized in friendly societies, unions, and political movements.

Lesson 6.4 · Unit 6 · CED topics 6.6 and 6.9

Liberalism and the reform of the state

Nineteenth-century liberalism was the political creed of the industrial and professional middle class, and it is easy to misread through modern usage. It demanded constitutional government, the rule of law, careers open to talent, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, and free trade, and it was emphatically not democratic. Most liberals held that the vote belonged to men with property and education, on the grounds that independence of judgment required independence of means.

Britain shows the programme working incrementally. The Reform Act of 1832 redistributed seats from depopulated boroughs to industrial cities and widened the franchise to perhaps a fifth of adult men: decisive for the political weight of manufacturing, irrelevant for workers. Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 ended agricultural protection in favour of cheap food and free trade, a defeat for the landed interest by the industrial one. Those excluded organized separately: Chartism, the first mass working-class political movement, demanded universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, and payment of members so that working men could serve. Its petitions were rejected and the movement faded after 1848, though nearly all its demands were eventually met. Liberalism's own logic kept extending: John Stuart Mill defended individual liberty against majority as well as state coercion, and argued in 1869 for the subjection of women as the great remaining injustice.

Lesson 6.5 · Unit 6 · CED topic 6.7

Socialism, Marx, and the labour movement

The first socialists proposed to replace competition with cooperation and set out to demonstrate it. Robert Owen ran his New Lanark mills with shorter hours, decent housing, and schooling, and argued that character was formed by environment; Charles Fourier designed self-sufficient communities; Henri de Saint-Simon envisaged an industrial society directed by scientists and engineers. Marx and Engels dismissed them all as utopian for hoping to persuade the propertied to give up property.

Their own account, set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and developed in Capital, was that history is driven by conflict between classes defined by their relation to the means of production; that capitalism concentrates ownership and creates an ever-larger proletariat; and that its own contradictions would bring revolution and a classless society. What actually grew in the decades after 1850 was less dramatic and more effective: legal trade unions bargaining over wages and hours, cooperative societies, and mass socialist parties, of which the German Social Democratic Party became the largest in Europe. Success produced a split. Eduard Bernstein argued at the end of the century that since workers' living standards were visibly rising and the vote was spreading, socialism should pursue reform through parliaments: revisionism, against orthodox Marxists who held to revolution. Anarchists rejected the state altogether and the parliamentary road with it.

Lesson 6.6 · Unit 6 · CED topics 6.5 and 6.7

1848: revolution across the continent

In the space of weeks in early 1848, revolution spread further and faster than at any point in European history. A bad harvest, a financial crisis, and urban unemployment supplied the tinder; the fall of Louis Philippe in Paris in February supplied the spark. Metternich fled Vienna in March. Rulers across the German states, Italy, and the Habsburg lands conceded constitutions and assemblies within days.

Almost all of it was reversed within eighteen months, and the reasons are the lesson. The revolutionary coalitions split along class lines: in Paris, moderate republicans closed the National Workshops and crushed the workers' rising of the June Days with artillery, after which propertied France voted overwhelmingly for Louis-Napoleon, who made himself emperor within four years. They split along national lines too: the Frankfurt Parliament spent months debating German unity, quarrelled over whether to include Austria's Germans, and finally offered the imperial crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia, who refused to take a crown from commoners; meanwhile Czechs refused to join a German nation and Hungarians governed Croats and Romanians who wanted no part of Hungary. And the armies stayed loyal. Once the initial panic passed, Habsburg forces retook Prague, Vienna, and northern Italy, and a Russian army helped crush Hungary in 1849.

Unit 6 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 6 review: Industrialization and Its Effects, c. 1815–c. 1914

Ten questions on industry's spread across Europe, its social costs, and the liberal, socialist, and reformist answers to it, including the revolutions of 1848, plus two short-answer questions on industrial society and its politics.

Multiple choice

1. Which combination best explains why industrialization began in Britain?

   Cheap coal near navigable water together with relatively high wages that rewarded mechanization A large peasant population willing to work for extremely low wages State ownership of mines and factories directed by a central planning ministry Guild regulations that guaranteed skilled artisans control over production methods

   Correct. Expensive labour made substituting machines profitable, and cheap fuel made running them viable; neither factor alone would have produced the outcome.

   British wages were high by European standards, which is precisely why replacing workers with machines paid. Cheap labour reduced the incentive to mechanize.

   British industry was privately financed and owned. State direction of industry characterized later Russian development, not the British case.

   Guild restrictions had weakened in Britain, which allowed new production methods. Strong guilds elsewhere slowed change.

2. Source: testimony of Elizabeth Bentley before the Sadler Committee, 1832.

   "What time did you begin to work at a factory? — When I was six years old. … What were your hours of labour in that mill? — From five in the morning till nine at night, when they were thronged."

   In using this source, a historian should most importantly note that

   Sadler was campaigning for a ten hours bill and selected and questioned the witnesses The testimony was given anonymously and cannot be attributed to a real person Parliamentary committees had no power to compel or record evidence Factory owners were given equal opportunity to present their case to the committee

   Correct. The proceedings were designed to build a case for legislation, so the testimony shows conditions at their worst and how reformers shaped opinion, rather than a statistical average.

   Witnesses were named and their evidence recorded in the published report.

   Committees took sworn evidence and published it; the Sadler Report was itself widely circulated.

   Manufacturers complained at the time that they were not given such an opportunity, which is part of why the report was contested.

3. The historical debate over the standard of living during early industrialization is best resolved by noting that

   All measures agree that living standards rose steadily from 1780 onward Real wages eventually rose while health, hours, and workplace autonomy deteriorated first No quantitative evidence about the period survives Industrial workers were uniformly better off than agricultural labourers from the outset

   Real wages stagnated until roughly the 1840s, and height data suggest nutrition worsened in the early decades. The measures do not agree.

   Correct. The first industrial generation bore the costs (urban mortality, longer hours, loss of control over work), and a later one collected the wage gains.

   Wage series, price data, height records, and mortality statistics all survive and are the basis of the debate.

   Urban life expectancy fell well below rural figures in the early industrial decades, so the claim does not hold for the period concerned.

4. Public health legislation in mid-nineteenth-century Britain emerged most directly from

   Germ theory, which had established the microbial causes of cholera by 1840 Investigations showing that disease and mortality tracked overcrowding and poor sanitation Demands from factory owners for a healthier and more productive workforce The extension of the franchise to the urban working class in 1832

   Germ theory was established by Pasteur and Koch decades later. Early reformers worked from statistical correlation and miasma theory.

   Correct. Chadwick's 1842 sanitary report demonstrated that mortality tracked filth and poverty, and the Public Health Act followed in 1848 after further cholera epidemics.

   Many employers resisted sanitary rates and regulation as costly interference.

   The 1832 Reform Act extended the vote to roughly a fifth of adult men and excluded the working class entirely.

5. Source: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

   "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

   Mill's essay differs from earlier liberal writing chiefly in identifying the principal threat to liberty as

   The absolute monarch's claim to rule by divine right Majority opinion and social pressure in an increasingly democratic society The established church's control over education and censorship Foreign invasion and the suspension of civil law in wartime

   That was Locke's target in 1689. By 1859 Britain's monarchy was already constitutionally limited.

   Correct. Mill feared a conformist public opinion coercing individuals as the franchise widened: liberalism turning to face a threat its anti-absolutist form never confronted.

   Mill opposed religious coercion, but the essay's distinctive argument concerns social and majority pressure generally.

   Wartime emergency is not the essay's subject; it addresses the ordinary limits of coercion in peacetime society.

6. Chartism differed from the liberalism of the 1832 Reform Act principally in demanding

   Universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, and payment of members of Parliament The abolition of private property and the collectivization of industry Protective tariffs on imported grain to support British agriculture The restoration of guild control over wages and apprenticeship

   Correct. The People's Charter's six points were political and democratic, aimed at the exclusion that the 1832 Act had left in place for working men.

   Chartism was a movement for political rights, not for abolishing property; that programme belongs to socialism.

   Chartists generally opposed the Corn Laws, which raised the price of bread.

   Some Chartists had artisan grievances, but the Charter itself demanded parliamentary reform, not guild restoration.

7. Source: Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.

   "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. … The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

   Which statement about the Manifesto's historical significance is most accurate?

   It directly caused the revolutions that broke out across Europe in 1848 It was barely noticed in 1848 and became influential only decades later It was commissioned by the largest trade union federation in Europe It persuaded most European socialists to abandon revolution for parliamentary reform

   The revolutions had their own causes (harvest failure, financial crisis, and liberal and national demands), and were already under way as the pamphlet appeared.

   Correct. Written for the small Communist League and published in the weeks before the risings, it attracted little attention at the time; its influence dates from after 1870.

   It was written for the Communist League, a tiny organization, not for a mass union federation.

   The turn to parliamentary reform came with Bernstein's revisionism at the end of the century, against the Manifesto's revolutionary argument.

8. The Zollverein of 1834 contributed to German industrialization mainly by

   Nationalizing coal and iron production under Prussian state control Removing internal tariffs so that a single large market existed across the German states Establishing technical universities in every member state Guaranteeing workers the right to form trade unions

   The Zollverein was a customs union, not a nationalization programme; industry remained privately owned.

   Correct. Political fragmentation had denied German producers a large internal market, and removing the tariff barriers between states supplied one ahead of political unification.

   German technical education mattered greatly but developed separately, and was not the customs union's function.

   Union rights came much later and were restricted under Bismarck's anti-socialist laws of 1878.

9. The Second Industrial Revolution differed from the first chiefly in that it

   Depended on formal scientific research rather than on workshop experimentation Relied primarily on water power rather than on steam Took place almost entirely within Britain Reduced the scale of firms and returned production to household workshops

   Correct. Steel, chemicals, and electricity required laboratories and trained scientists, which is why Germany and the United States, with strong technical education, overtook Britain in the new sectors.

   Water power belonged to the earliest phase of mechanized spinning; the second phase added electricity and the internal combustion engine.

   Germany and the United States led it, and Britain lost its earlier dominance in precisely these industries.

   Firms grew far larger, with cartels and corporations replacing family businesses in heavy industry.

10. The revolutions of 1848 failed most fundamentally because

    Their leaders refused any compromise with existing monarchs The coalitions that made them divided along class and national lines while the armies stayed loyal Industrial workers were too numerous and well organized for liberals to control Britain and Russia jointly invaded to restore the Vienna settlement

    The Frankfurt Parliament offered the imperial crown to the king of Prussia, which was a compromise; he refused to take it from commoners.

    Correct. Liberals shot workers in the June Days, nationalities made incompatible claims, and no revolutionary body controlled an army, so the Habsburg and Prussian officer corps waited and then restored order.

    Workers were a minority even in the most industrial regions, and in Paris the June rising was defeated by artillery.

    Britain did not intervene militarily. Russian troops helped crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849, but there was no joint invasion.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way industrialization changed working life in the period 1780–1850.
   2. Briefly explain ONE response by governments or workers to the conditions you described.
   3. Briefly explain ONE reason industrialization spread unevenly across Europe.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: separation of home from workplace; employer-controlled time discipline with fines; women's and children's factory labour; loss of artisan control over pace and method; migration to overcrowded industrial towns. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847; the Public Health Act of 1848; trade unions and friendly societies; Chartism; Owenite cooperation. Must connect the response to a condition.
   • (c) Accept: differences in coal and iron endowment; political fragmentation and internal tariffs before the Zollverein; availability of capital and banking; state direction in Russia; serfdom limiting labour mobility in the east. Must explain the cause of unevenness.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Factory production separated home from workplace and replaced task rhythms with employer-controlled time. Workers who had previously set their own pace in household production now worked fixed shifts of twelve hours or more under supervision, with fines or physical punishment for lateness.

   (b) Parliament responded with factory legislation after inquiries such as the Sadler Committee publicized conditions. The Factory Act of 1833 barred children under nine from textile mills and limited the hours of those aged nine to thirteen, and the Ten Hours Act of 1847 capped the working day for women and young people.

   (c) Political fragmentation delayed industrialization in the German lands. Producers faced tariffs crossing between dozens of states, which denied them a large internal market until the Zollverein removed those barriers in 1834, after which German heavy industry expanded rapidly.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE goal of nineteenth-century liberalism.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way socialism differed from liberalism in its analysis of industrial society.
   3. Briefly explain ONE reason the revolutions of 1848 failed to achieve lasting change.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: constitutional government and the rule of law; free trade; careers open to talent; freedom of speech, religion, and assembly; a franchise based on property and education. Do not accept: universal democracy, which most liberals opposed.
   • (b) Accept: socialists located the problem in private ownership of the means of production and in class relations, while liberals saw free contract between individuals; Marx predicted class struggle and revolution rather than reform; socialists sought collective rather than individual solutions. Must contrast the analysis.
   • (c) Accept: the split between liberals and workers, shown by the June Days; competing national claims among Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, and Romanians; revolutionaries' lack of control over armies; Frederick William IV's refusal of the Frankfurt crown. Must explain why it mattered.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Liberals sought constitutional government limiting the ruler by law, together with legal equality, free trade, and careers open to talent. They generally wanted the vote restricted to men with property and education, on the view that independent judgment required independent means.

   (b) Socialists located the problem in ownership rather than in legal freedom. Marx and Engels argued in 1848 that society is divided by relation to the means of production and that conflict between those classes drives history, whereas liberals treated employer and worker as free individuals contracting on equal terms.

   (c) The revolutionary coalitions broke apart once initial victories were won. In Paris, moderate republicans closed the National Workshops and used the army to crush the workers' rising in the June Days, destroying the alliance that had overthrown Louis Philippe and frightening propertied voters into supporting Louis-Napoleon.

Lesson 7.1 · Unit 7 · CED topics 7.2–7.3

Nationalism and the unification of Italy

Nationalism changed sides in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before 1848 it was a liberal and often revolutionary creed, holding that peoples sharing a language and culture should govern themselves and that dynastic borders were illegitimate. After 1848 conservative statesmen discovered it could be harnessed to build strong states, and that doing so required armies and diplomacy rather than assemblies.

Italy shows the transition in a single generation. Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy had preached a democratic republic created by popular insurrection, and had failed repeatedly, most completely in 1848–1849. Count Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, took the opposite approach: modernize the Piedmontese economy and army, then acquire a great-power ally. He secured French support at Plombières in 1858, provoked Austria into war in 1859, and gained Lombardy while central Italian states voted to join. Then the movement outran him. Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed to Sicily in 1860 with about a thousand volunteers, conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and handed his conquests to the Piedmontese king rather than proclaiming a republic. The Kingdom of Italy was declared in 1861; Venetia followed in 1866 as the price of alliance with Prussia, and Rome in 1870 when French troops withdrew. The result was a constitutional monarchy under Piedmont, not Mazzini's republic.

Lesson 7.2 · Unit 7 · CED topic 7.3

The unification of Germany and its consequences

Otto von Bismarck became minister-president of Prussia in 1862 during a constitutional crisis: the liberal majority in the Prussian parliament refused to fund army reform, and Bismarck collected the taxes without authorization for four years. He then used the army he had built to achieve, on conservative terms, the national unity liberals had failed to achieve in 1848, and in doing so converted most of them into supporters of the regime.

He fought three short wars, each with the diplomatic ground prepared. Denmark in 1864, in alliance with Austria, produced the disputed duchies that gave him his pretext against Austria. Austria in 1866 was defeated in seven weeks and excluded from German affairs, with terms deliberately lenient to keep it available as a future ally. France in 1870 was manoeuvred into declaring war, which brought the southern German states in on Prussia's side, and the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871. The new Reich was federal and had a Reichstag elected by universal male suffrage, but the chancellor answered to the emperor rather than to parliament, and Prussia dominated its institutions. Bismarck spent his remaining twenty years securing it: the Kulturkampf against Catholic influence, anti-socialist laws combined with the world's first state social insurance, and an alliance system designed above all to keep France isolated.

Lesson 7.3 · Unit 7 · CED topic 7.5

Mass politics, reform, and their limits

Politics became a mass activity in the decades before 1914. The franchise widened until most adult men in western Europe could vote, and with it came the apparatus of modern political life: disciplined parties, a cheap popular press, mass rallies, and campaigns aimed at people who had never held office. Governments responded with concessions: Bismarck's sickness, accident, and old-age insurance in the 1880s, British pensions and national insurance after 1908, expanded state schooling almost everywhere.

Mass politics also had an ugly face. The Dreyfus Affair in France began in 1894 when a Jewish artillery officer was convicted of treason on forged evidence, and the army's refusal to admit error turned it into a national crisis pitting republicans and intellectuals against the army, the church, and a virulent anti-Semitic press. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated in 1906, but the affair convinced Theodor Herzl, reporting on it, that assimilation would not protect European Jews, and he convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Women's campaigns for the vote intensified across the same years, moving from constitutional petitioning to militant tactics in Britain after 1903, and were met with imprisonment and force-feeding; Finland became the first European territory to grant women the vote in 1906.

Lesson 7.4 · Unit 7 · CED topic 7.4

Darwin, Social Darwinism, and the authority of science

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and proposed that species change over time through natural selection acting on inherited variation. The argument required no designer and no fixed hierarchy of creation, and when The Descent of Man placed humans inside the same process in 1871, the challenge to a literal reading of Genesis became explicit. Scientific authority was rising generally: Pasteur and Koch established that specific microorganisms cause specific diseases, which made antisepsis, vaccination, and public sanitation into demonstrably life-saving practices.

The prestige of biology was then borrowed for purposes Darwin had not intended. Herbert Spencer coined "survival of the fittest" and applied competitive struggle to societies, classes, and races, producing arguments that poverty was nature's verdict, that charity interfered with progress, and that European domination of other peoples reflected fitness rather than firepower. Francis Galton's eugenics proposed to improve populations by controlling who reproduced. These claims were scientifically weak, they confused natural selection with progress toward European norms, but they were enormously influential precisely because they wore the authority of the era's most successful science. Sigmund Freud's argument that behavior is driven by unconscious drives undercut the rational self from another direction entirely.

Lesson 7.5 · Unit 7 · CED topic 7.6

New Imperialism: motives and methods

Between about 1870 and 1914 European powers took control of most of Africa and much of Asia and the Pacific with astonishing speed. In 1870 European holdings in Africa were mostly coastal trading stations; by 1914 nearly the whole continent was claimed, with Ethiopia and Liberia the exceptions. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 set the rules for this partition among the European powers themselves, requiring that claims be backed by effective occupation. No African ruler was present.

Motives were genuinely mixed, which is why the exam asks you to weigh them. Economic arguments pointed to raw materials, markets, and outlets for investment, though most colonies never repaid their costs. Strategic logic mattered greatly, Britain's hold on Egypt after 1882 was about the Suez route to India, and once one power moved, others grabbed territory to deny it to rivals. Domestic politics supplied another driver, as empire offered national prestige and a distraction from class conflict. Cultural justification came from the civilizing mission and from Social Darwinist racial hierarchy. What made it possible was technology: quinine prophylaxis against malaria opened the African interior, steamships and the telegraph moved troops and orders, and breech-loading rifles and then the machine gun made the military disparity overwhelming.

Lesson 7.6 · Unit 7 · CED topics 7.7–7.8

Imperialism's effects and nineteenth-century culture

Conquest was contested everywhere. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 nearly ended British rule and resulted in the Crown taking over from the East India Company. Ethiopia defeated an Italian invasion decisively at Adwa in 1896 and remained independent: the clearest demonstration that European victory depended on a technological gap rather than on any inherent superiority. The Boxer Uprising in China was crushed by a multinational expedition in 1900. Colonial rule redirected economies toward export crops and minerals, imposed borders that ignored existing polities, and created Western-educated elites who would later lead independence movements using European political vocabulary.

Doubt appeared at home as well. The Boer War of 1899–1902 required enormous forces against a small settler population, used concentration camps in which many civilians died, and provoked serious criticism in Britain. J. A. Hobson argued in 1902 that imperialism served narrow financial interests at the general public's expense: an analysis Lenin would later adapt. Culture registered the century's disorientation in its own way. Realism had set out to depict society without idealization; Impressionism broke with the studio finish and the Salon; Post-Impressionists and then the early Modernists abandoned representational conventions altogether, so that by 1907 painting had begun to dismantle the perspective system invented in the Renaissance five hundred years earlier.

Unit 7 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 7 review: 19th-Century Perspectives and Political Developments

Ten questions on Italian and German unification, mass politics and its limits, Darwin and Social Darwinism, and the New Imperialism, plus two short-answer questions on nationalism and empire.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man, 1860.

   "Your country is the sign of the Mission which God has given you to fulfil towards Humanity. … In labouring for our own country on the right principle, we labour for Humanity."

   Mazzini's conception of nationalism differs most sharply from that of the late nineteenth century in its

   Presentation of national loyalty as a duty that serves humanity as a whole Insistence that nations are defined by biological race rather than by language Argument that national unity must be achieved by great-power diplomacy Rejection of any role for religion in national identity

   Correct. Early liberal nationalism treated each nation's freedom as a contribution to a shared human project, not as rivalry: the opposite of the exclusive, competitive nationalism of the century's end.

   Racial definitions of nationhood belong to the later period Mazzini is being contrasted with, and he appeals to mission and duty instead.

   That is Cavour's method, which Mazzini opposed. He favoured popular insurrection.

   The passage invokes God directly, tying national mission to religious duty.

2. Garibaldi's decision in 1860 to deliver his conquests to Victor Emmanuel rather than proclaim a republic is significant because it

   Ended the Italian unification movement for a further twenty years Subordinated the democratic strand of nationalism to the dynastic one, avoiding civil war Placed Rome under Italian control and resolved the dispute with the papacy Secured Austrian recognition of the new Italian kingdom

   The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed the following year, in 1861; the decision accelerated unification rather than halting it.

   Correct. A republican south against a monarchist north would have meant civil war, so the Mazzinian strand gave way: producing a constitutional monarchy under Piedmont rather than the republic Mazzini wanted.

   Rome was taken only in 1870, and the papacy remained hostile, forbidding Catholics to participate in Italian politics.

   Austria had been defeated in 1859 and lost Venetia in 1866; recognition was not what Garibaldi's handover achieved.

3. Source: Otto von Bismarck, speech to the Prussian budget committee, September 1862.

   "Not by speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood."

   Bismarck delivered this while

   Refusing to accept the liberal parliament's authority over the army budget Accepting the imperial crown on behalf of Wilhelm I at Versailles Negotiating the terms of the Zollverein customs union Announcing the introduction of universal male suffrage for the Reichstag

   Correct. He was telling a hostile liberal committee that the national unity it wanted could be had only by means it had rejected, and he then collected taxes without authorization for four years.

   The proclamation at Versailles came in January 1871, nearly a decade later.

   The Zollverein dated from 1834, long before Bismarck took office in 1862.

   Universal male suffrage for the Reichstag came with the constitutions of 1867 and 1871, after the wars this speech anticipated.

4. German unification most fundamentally altered the European state system because it

   Removed Austria from the European great-power system entirely Replaced a fragmented centre, which the Vienna settlement had relied on, with a dominant power Established the first European state with universal male suffrage Ended the practice of forming alliances between European powers

   Austria remained a great power and became Germany's principal ally after 1879, though excluded from German affairs.

   Correct. Vienna had depended on German division to keep the centre of Europe weak; a single empire with the strongest army and fastest-growing industry forced every other power to recalculate.

   France had introduced universal male suffrage earlier, and the German chancellor answered to the emperor rather than to the elected Reichstag.

   Bismarck built an elaborate alliance system precisely to manage the new situation, and the alliances of 1914 grew out of it.

5. Source: Émile Zola, "J'Accuse…!", open letter published in L'Aurore, January 1898.

   "I accuse the War Office of having conducted an abominable campaign in the press … in order to cover up its own misdeeds. … As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, I feel neither resentment nor hatred toward them."

   Zola named specific officers on a newspaper front page primarily in order to

   Avoid legal liability by distributing responsibility among many individuals Provoke a libel prosecution that would force the evidence into open court Secure a government appointment investigating the army's conduct Demonstrate that the press had no influence on French public opinion

   Naming officers invited rather than avoided prosecution, and he was in fact convicted and fled to England.

   Correct. A libel trial was the mechanism by which suppressed evidence could be examined publicly: the strategy is the document's purpose.

   Zola was a novelist, not a candidate for office, and the letter attacks the government rather than applying to it.

   The letter's impact demonstrated the opposite: the mass press could force a state institution into daylight.

6. Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.

   "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself … will have a better chance of surviving."

   Social Darwinists went beyond this passage principally by claiming that

   Struggle between classes, nations, and races produced progress and justified existing hierarchies Species change gradually over very long periods of geological time Acquired characteristics are inherited by an organism's offspring Human beings share common ancestry with other animal species

   Correct. Darwin describes differential survival within a species with no claim about progress or societies; Spencer and others supplied both, then used them to justify laissez-faire and empire.

   Gradual change over long time-scales is Darwin's own position, stated in the book.

   Inheritance of acquired characteristics is Lamarck's theory, which natural selection was proposed to replace.

   Darwin himself made this argument in The Descent of Man in 1871; it is not a Social Darwinist addition.

7. The wide range of causes Social Darwinism was used to justify (opposition to factory regulation, to poor relief, and to colonial self-government alike) best suggests that it

   Was a rigorous scientific theory with broad predictive power Functioned mainly as a language legitimating positions people already held Was confined to a small group of academic biologists Originated as a criticism of European imperial expansion

   It confused natural selection with progress toward European norms and made no testable predictions; its weakness as science is well established.

   Correct. One idea serving so many different interests indicates that it supplied respectable scientific vocabulary for arguments that existed independently of it.

   It was enormously popular among politicians, journalists, and businessmen, far beyond professional biology.

   It was used overwhelmingly to justify imperial expansion, not to criticize it; Hobson's critique came from economics instead.

8. Description of: the General Act of the Berlin Conference, 1885, and a contemporary partition map of Africa.

   The Act declares free trade in the Congo and Niger basins, forbids the slave trade, and requires that a power claiming coastal territory notify the others and establish effective authority. Maps show territory assigned in straight lines and geometric blocks cutting across river systems and existing African polities.

   The most historically significant feature of the conference was that

   It successfully ended the slave trade throughout the African interior Its rules governed relations among European powers, with no African representation It granted independence to existing African states within recognized borders It prohibited the acquisition of further African territory after 1885

   The declaration against the slave trade coexisted with the legitimation of Leopold's Congo Free State, where forced labour killed on a vast scale.

   Correct. The Act existed to prevent European wars over African territory; no African ruler attended, and the straight-line borders show how little the signatories knew or cared about what they divided.

   It did the opposite, providing the framework by which existing African polities were absorbed into European claims.

   The effective-occupation rule accelerated acquisition, and most of the partition occurred after 1885.

9. Which best explains the timing and speed of the New Imperialism after 1870?

   Colonial possessions had become reliably profitable for the states that held them New claimants entered the system, making acquisition a defensive necessity against rivals European populations had begun to decline, creating a need for settlement territory African and Asian states had invited European administration to modernize their economies

   Colonial ledgers show most possessions costing more in administration and defence than they returned, and powers seized territory of little commercial value.

   Correct. A unified Germany and Italy entered as claimants and France sought prestige after 1871, so territory not taken would be taken by a rival, and cheap enabling technology let the logic run to completion in thirty years.

   European populations were growing rapidly in this period, and few colonies attracted significant European settlement.

   Conquest was overwhelmingly resisted, from the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to Adwa in 1896 and the Boxer Uprising in 1900.

10. Ethiopia's victory over Italy at Adwa in 1896 is historically significant chiefly because it

    Demonstrated that European success depended on a technological gap rather than inherent superiority Persuaded the European powers to abandon the partition of Africa Resulted in Italy losing all of its overseas possessions Was achieved without any modern firearms on the Ethiopian side

    Correct. Ethiopia's ability to acquire modern weapons and field a large coordinated army defeated a European invasion outright, undercutting claims of racial fitness that Social Darwinists used to justify conquest.

    The partition continued and accelerated after 1896; Ethiopia remained an exception rather than a turning point for the continent.

    Italy retained Eritrea and Somaliland and later invaded Ethiopia again in 1935.

    Menelik II had acquired substantial quantities of modern rifles and artillery, which is a central reason the battle went as it did.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way nationalism changed between the 1830s and the 1890s.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason Italian or German unification succeeded where the revolutions of 1848 had failed.
   3. Briefly explain ONE consequence of unification for the European balance of power.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: nationalism shifted from a liberal, democratic, and often revolutionary creed to a conservative instrument used by states; late-century nationalism became exclusive, competitive, and frequently racial and anti-Semitic. Do not accept: "it became more popular" with no change in content.
   • (b) Accept: unification was achieved by states with armies and diplomacy rather than by assemblies; Cavour's French alliance and war with Austria, Bismarck's three wars; conservative leadership avoided the class splits that divided 1848. Must explain the difference in method.
   • (c) Accept: a unified Germany with the strongest army replaced the fragmented center the Vienna settlement depended on, forcing realignment and eventually producing the alliance blocs of 1914; Austria was excluded from Germany and turned toward the Balkans. Must state the systemic consequence.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Nationalism changed sides politically. In the 1830s Mazzini presented national freedom as a democratic and republican duty owed to humanity as a whole, while by the 1890s conservative statesmen had harnessed nationalism to state power and it had become exclusive and competitive, frequently carrying racial and anti-Semitic content.

   (b) Unification succeeded because it was pursued by states with armies rather than by parliaments. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 debated for months and controlled no troops, whereas Bismarck built the Prussian army over parliamentary objection and fought three short wars between 1864 and 1871 to achieve unity on conservative terms.

   (c) German unification destroyed the balance the Congress of Vienna had built, which relied on keeping central Europe divided. A single empire with Europe's strongest army and fastest-growing industry forced France, Russia, and Britain to realign, eventually producing the two alliance blocs that went to war in 1914.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE motive for European imperial expansion after 1870.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason European powers were able to conquer territory so rapidly in this period.
   3. Briefly explain ONE long-term effect of imperialism on colonized societies.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: raw materials, markets, and outlets for investment; strategic routes such as Suez; national prestige and domestic politics; the civilizing mission and Social Darwinist racial hierarchy; missionary activity. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: quinine prophylaxis opening the African interior; steamships, railways, and the telegraph; breech-loading rifles and machine guns producing overwhelming firepower; exploitation of divisions among local polities. Must explain the mechanism.
   • (c) Accept: economies redirected toward export crops and extraction; borders drawn across existing polities; Western-educated elites who later led independence movements; population movement and labour coercion. Must state a durable consequence.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Strategic considerations drove much expansion. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 largely to secure the Suez Canal, the route to India, rather than for the value of Egyptian territory itself, and once one power moved, others seized territory to deny it to rivals.

   (b) Technological advantages made conquest cheap in European lives. Quinine prophylaxis allowed Europeans to survive in regions where malaria had previously stopped them, while breech-loading rifles and machine guns gave small forces overwhelming firepower against armies that lacked them.

   (c) Colonial rule created Western-educated elites who later led independence movements. Schools founded to staff colonial administration taught European languages and political concepts such as national self-determination, and their graduates used that vocabulary to demand for their own peoples the sovereignty Europeans claimed for themselves.

Lesson 8.1 · Unit 8 · CED topic 8.2

The road to war and the First World War

Europe in 1914 was organized into two alliance blocs: Germany and Austria-Hungary against France and Russia, with Britain aligned to the second by understanding rather than treaty. An Anglo-German naval race, a series of Moroccan and Balkan crises, and military plans built on rigid timetables meant that a local conflict could escalate before diplomats could intervene. When a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinated the Austrian heir in Sarajevo in June 1914, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia with German backing, Russia mobilized in Serbia's support, and Germany's war plan required an immediate attack westward through Belgium. Within six weeks the continent was at war.

Everyone expected a short campaign. The German advance was halted at the Marne in September 1914, and the armies dug in along a line that barely moved for three years while machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery made attack enormously costly: Verdun and the Somme in 1916 each produced hundreds of thousands of casualties for almost no ground. Industrial societies responded by mobilizing everything: conscription, rationing, state direction of factories, censorship and propaganda, and women entering munitions work and transport in vast numbers. Colonial troops and labourers were brought from Africa and Asia, making it a genuinely world war. In 1917 Russia left and the United States entered, and when the last German offensives failed in 1918 the exhausted Central Powers collapsed. Roughly nine to ten million soldiers were dead, and four empires had ceased to exist.

Lesson 8.2 · Unit 8 · CED topic 8.3

The Russian Revolution and its effects

Russia entered the war with the largest army in Europe and the least capacity to supply it. By early 1917, military defeat, transport breakdown, and bread shortages in the capital produced strikes and mutinies that the garrison refused to suppress, and Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March. Power then split between a Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists and the Petrograd Soviet of workers' and soldiers' deputies: a dual power in which the government held office and the Soviet held the loyalty of the troops.

The Provisional Government made a fatal choice: it continued the war. Lenin, returned from exile in April, offered the opposite: peace, land, and bread, and all power to the soviets. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 they had a programme that matched what soldiers and peasants wanted. They signed a punishing separate peace at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, then fought a civil war against White armies and foreign intervention forces until 1921, holding the center with the Red Army, requisitioning grain under War Communism, and using terror against opponents. The economic collapse that followed forced Lenin's partial retreat into the New Economic Policy in 1921. After his death in 1924 Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals, and by 1928 controlled the first state in the world governed by a communist party.

Lesson 8.3 · Unit 8 · CED topic 8.4

Versailles and the peace settlement

The peacemakers who gathered in Paris in 1919 wanted incompatible things. Woodrow Wilson arrived with the Fourteen Points, national self-determination, and a League of Nations to replace the alliance system. Georges Clemenceau wanted security guarantees against a Germany that had invaded France twice in fifty years and remained larger and more industrial. David Lloyd George needed to satisfy a British public that had been promised German payment, while avoiding a settlement so harsh it would drive Germany to communism or revenge. Neither Germany nor Bolshevik Russia was represented.

The resulting treaty required Germany to accept responsibility for the war's damage, pay reparations later fixed at an enormous sum, lose territory in the east and west, demilitarize the Rhineland, and reduce its army to a hundred thousand men. Self-determination was applied seriously in central Europe, where new states emerged from the fallen empires, but the region's peoples were too intermixed for clean lines, so every successor state contained large unhappy minorities, and millions of Germans found themselves under Polish or Czechoslovak rule. Outside Europe the principle was not applied at all: German and Ottoman territories became League mandates administered by Britain and France, which was empire under a new name. And the League itself was crippled at birth when the United States Senate refused ratification.

Lesson 8.4 · Unit 8 · CED topics 8.5 and 8.7

The interwar crisis: economy and democracy

The 1920s were unstable before they were prosperous. Germany's currency collapsed in 1923 during the French occupation of the Ruhr, wiping out savings held in marks and teaching the German middle class that a democratic state could not protect their property. The Dawes Plan of 1924 restructured reparations and brought American loans, and for five years the European economy grew and diplomacy improved: a recovery that depended entirely on continued American lending.

When that lending stopped after the Wall Street crash of 1929, the structure came apart. Trade contracted as governments raised tariffs, banks failed across central Europe, and unemployment reached six million in Germany by 1932: roughly a third of the workforce. Orthodox economics prescribed balanced budgets and wage cuts, which deepened the collapse, and democratic governments that followed the prescription discredited themselves. Voters moved to the extremes. In France a Popular Front of socialists, radicals, and communists took office in 1936 and won real reforms before fracturing; in Spain a military rising against a Popular Front government produced a civil war from 1936 in which Germany and Italy backed Franco while the Soviet Union backed the Republic, and the western democracies declined to intervene. By the late 1930s parliamentary democracy survived in only a handful of European states.

Lesson 8.5 · Unit 8 · CED topic 8.6

Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism

Fascism emerged from the First World War's aftermath: veterans who felt betrayed by the peace, middle classes frightened by communism, and elites willing to use street violence against the left. Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922 when the king invited him to form a government rather than face his militia, and built a one-party state around the nation, the leader, and the corporate organization of economic life. Hitler's National Socialism shared the ultranationalism, the leader principle, and the contempt for parliamentary politics, but placed race at its center in a way Italian fascism did not.

Hitler was appointed chancellor legally in January 1933 by conservatives who believed they could control him. Within months the Reichstag fire emergency and the Enabling Act had dismantled constitutional government; parties and independent unions were abolished, opponents imprisoned, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship and legal protection. In the Soviet Union, Stalin pursued a different project by comparable methods: forced collectivization of agriculture from 1928 and Five-Year Plans that built heavy industry at enormous human cost, including a catastrophic famine in Ukraine and elsewhere in 1932–1933, followed by purges in 1936–1938 that destroyed the party, army command, and much of the administrative class.

Lesson 8.6 · Unit 8 · CED topics 8.8–8.9

The Second World War and the Holocaust

Hitler dismantled the Versailles settlement in stages while Britain and France, remembering the last war and unready for another, conceded: remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, annexing Austria in March 1938, and taking the Czechoslovak borderlands by agreement at Munich that September. Appeasement ended when Germany seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, proving the claims had never been about German-speaking populations. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 secured Hitler's eastern flank and divided Poland, and the invasion of 1 September brought Britain and France into the war.

Germany overran Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France within nine months, but failed to defeat Britain from the air, and in June 1941 invaded the Soviet Union. The Eastern Front became the war's decisive theatre and by far its most destructive; the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 began a retreat that ended in Berlin in May 1945. Behind the front, the Nazi regime carried out the systematic murder of Europe's Jews: escalating from persecution and ghettos to mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen after June 1941, and then to the extermination camps coordinated after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. About six million Jews were killed. Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political prisoners, and others were murdered in vast numbers alongside them. Total war deaths approached sixty million, the majority civilian.

Unit 8 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 8 review: 20th-Century Global Conflicts, c. 1914–present

Ten questions on the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Versailles, the interwar collapse, the dictatorships, and the Second World War and the Holocaust, plus two short-answer questions on total war and its political consequences.

Multiple choice

1. Which best explains why the assassination at Sarajevo produced a general European war within six weeks?

   Every European state had signed a single treaty requiring collective retaliation Alliance commitments combined with mobilization plans built on rigid timetables The assassin was acting on the direct orders of the Russian government Britain declared war on Germany before any other power had mobilized

   There was no single collective treaty; Europe was divided into two opposing blocs with separate and partly secret commitments.

   Correct. Austrian action against Serbia drew in Russia, whose mobilization triggered Germany's plan requiring an immediate westward attack through Belgium: leaving diplomats almost no time.

   Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb nationalist with links to a Serbian secret society; no Russian order existed.

   Britain entered last among the major powers, after the German invasion of Belgium.

2. Description of: an official British photograph of a front-line trench, 1916, and a contemporary recruiting poster.

   The photograph shows a revetted cut in chalk soil with duckboards over standing water and men in helmets on a firing step; beyond the parapet the ground is churned and treeless. The poster shows a single uniformed figure in clean profile against a flat color field with a slogan appealing to duty, and no depiction of the front.

   Taken together, the two images are most useful as evidence for

   The precise casualty rates suffered in major offensives How governments managed civilian understanding of the war Soldiers' private opinions about the competence of their commanders The tactical innovations that ended the stalemate in 1918

   Neither image contains casualty data, and censorship forbade photographs of British dead.

   Correct. Both were produced by or for the state under censorship (one a sanitized documentary record, the other pure recruitment), so together they document official management of the home front.

   Private opinion appears in letters and diaries, not in officially produced photographs and posters.

   The images are from 1916 and show static trench conditions, not the combined-arms methods of 1918.

3. The prolonged stalemate on the Western Front is best explained by

   Defensive technology and rail-borne reserves outmatching the offensive means available A mutual agreement among commanders to avoid large-scale offensives Shortages of ammunition that prevented either side from attacking The refusal of conscripted soldiers on both sides to leave their trenches

   Correct. Machine guns, wire, and artillery in prepared positions, plus railways moving defenders faster than attackers could advance on foot, gave defence a decisive edge until 1918.

   Commanders mounted repeated massive offensives: Verdun and the Somme in 1916 alone produced hundreds of thousands of casualties.

   Industrial economies produced shells in enormous and growing quantities; the 1915 British shell crisis was a shortfall in supply, not a general inability to attack.

   Mutinies occurred, notably in the French army in 1917, but they were exceptions rather than the cause of three years of stalemate.

4. Source: V. I. Lenin, the April Theses, published in Pravda, 1917.

   "No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear … Not a parliamentary republic … but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom."

   The immediate audience Lenin most needed to persuade with this document was

   The Provisional Government's liberal ministers Bolsheviks in Petrograd who had been cooperating with the Provisional Government Foreign socialist parties attending an international congress Officers of the Russian general staff considering a coup

   He was attacking the government, not appealing to it, and had no interest in persuading its ministers.

   Correct. Most Bolsheviks in the capital favoured cooperation; Lenin wrote to break that consensus, which is why the language admits no compromise.

   The theses were published in the Bolshevik paper in Russia and addressed Russian party policy in the immediate situation.

   Lenin sought power through the soviets and opposed the officer corps, which later backed the Whites in the civil war.

5. The decisive reason the Provisional Government lost support between March and October 1917 was its

   Decision to abolish the monarchy against widespread popular opposition Decision to continue the war, which alienated soldiers and peasants alike Immediate redistribution of noble estates, which alarmed the middle class Refusal to permit the soviets to meet or organize

   The monarchy's fall was widely welcomed; Nicholas II abdicated amid strikes and mutiny with very little support for his restoration.

   Correct. Continuing the war meant further offensives soldiers would not mount and left land reform postponed, so the Bolsheviks' promise of peace and endorsement of land seizures matched what soldiers and peasants wanted.

   It postponed land reform until a constituent assembly, which is precisely why peasants seized land themselves without waiting.

   The Petrograd Soviet operated openly and held the loyalty of the troops throughout: the dual power that defined the period.

6. Source: Treaty of Versailles, 1919, Article 231.

   "The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage … as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."

   The most useful observation a historian can make about this clause is that

   Its drafters intended a legal basis for reparations, but Germans received it as a verdict of sole guilt It was the only article of the treaty that Germany was permitted to negotiate It applied uniquely to Germany and appeared in no other peace treaty It required Germany to pay reparations in full within five years of signature

   Correct. Allied lawyers drafted it to establish liability so a bill could follow; German politics read it as a moral condemnation, and the gap between intent and reception is the historically important fact.

   Germany was not represented at the conference and negotiated none of the treaty's terms.

   Nearly identical wording appeared in the treaties with Austria and Hungary, which is evidence that the clause was a legal formula rather than a special judgment.

   The sum was fixed separately in 1921 and payment was rescheduled repeatedly, notably by the Dawes Plan of 1924.

7. Description of: German unemployment figures and Reichstag election results, 1928–1933.

   Registered unemployment rises from roughly 1.4 million in 1928 to over 6 million by early 1932. The Nazi share of the vote rises from under 3 per cent in 1928 to about 37 per cent in July 1932; the Communist share also rises, while moderate liberal parties lose most of their support.

   A careful historian would caution that these two series together

   Prove that the unemployed were the core of Nazi electoral support Show correlation but not which groups actually shifted their votes Demonstrate that unemployment had no effect on German politics Are unreliable because election returns in this period were not recorded

   Nazi support was in fact strongest among Protestant rural and middle-class voters, while many unemployed workers voted Communist.

   Correct. Two trends moving together do not establish who moved; the composition of each group has to be examined before causation can be claimed.

   The Depression clearly destabilized German politics; the caution concerns the precise mechanism, not whether there was an effect.

   Weimar election returns are well documented and reliable; it is the registered unemployment figure that undercounts.

8. Description of: the legal texts and official material of the Nazi racial state, 1933–1938.

   The 1935 Reich Citizenship Law distinguishes citizens of German blood from mere subjects, and an accompanying law forbids marriage between Jews and Germans. Supplementary decrees define Jewish descent by counting grandparents; later regulations exclude Jews from professions and schools and require registration of property. Posters and schoolbooks present the measures using biological and medical imagery.

   The bureaucratic and medical vocabulary of these materials is historically significant because it

   Shows that the regime intended the measures to be temporary Made participation routine for the officials, registrars, and teachers who implemented them Indicates that most Germans privately opposed the legislation Proves that the persecution had scientific justification

   The regulations expanded continuously from 1933 onward, with no provision for expiry.

   Correct. Presenting persecution as administration and public hygiene normalized it for the ordinary functionaries who carried it out: the mechanism that later made mass murder administratively possible.

   These are state-produced documents and cannot show private opinion; they document what the regime wanted normalized.

   Racial science of this kind was pseudoscience. The vocabulary lent an appearance of authority, which is a different matter from justification.

9. Which represents the most significant difference between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union?

   Only one of the two used terror, camps, and a single-party state Nazi Germany defined its enemies biologically, while Soviet categories were based on class and political conduct Only one of the two pursued rapid industrialization Only one of the two employed mass propaganda and a cult of the leader

   Both used terror, camps, and single-party rule: the convergence of method is precisely why the comparison is made.

   Correct. A category defined by ancestry admits no redemption, while kulak or wrecker was defined by conduct or position and could in principle be revised, which is why "totalitarian" describes how they ruled without explaining what they were for.

   Both pursued rapid industrialization, the Soviet Union through the Five-Year Plans and Germany through rearmament.

   Both built extensive propaganda apparatus and leader cults.

10. Historians generally describe the Holocaust as an escalation rather than the execution of a fixed plan because

    Policy moved through forced emigration, ghettoization, and mass shooting before the death camps No documentary evidence about Nazi policy toward Jews survives The Nazi leadership had shown no hostility toward Jews before 1941 The killing was carried out entirely without central coordination

    Correct. Each stage was adopted when the previous one was judged inadequate to a goal that grew more radical as conquest brought more people under German control, with the invasion of the Soviet Union the decisive turn.

    Extensive perpetrator documentation survives (railway schedules, unit reports, ministry correspondence), and was used at Nuremberg.

    Anti-Semitism was central to Nazi ideology from the outset, and the Nuremberg Laws date from 1935.

    The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the programme across ministries, and the camps were centrally run.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way the First World War transformed European societies at home.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way the peace settlement of 1919 contributed to later instability.
   3. Briefly explain ONE reason the Bolsheviks were able to take and hold power in Russia.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: state direction of industry and rationing; conscription; censorship and propaganda; women entering munitions work and transport in large numbers and subsequent suffrage extensions; enormous casualties reshaping populations. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: the war-guilt clause and reparations as a durable German grievance; a treaty harsh enough to enrage but not to disable Germany; successor states with large discontented minorities; the absence of enforcement once the United States withdrew. Must link to later instability.
   • (c) Accept: the promise of immediate peace and endorsement of peasant land seizures; the Provisional Government's decision to continue the war; control of the Petrograd Soviet and its loyalty among troops; Red Army victory in the civil war and War Communism. Must explain the mechanism.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Total war required states to direct their whole economies. Governments conscripted men, rationed food, took control of factories and raw materials, and censored the press, while women entered munitions work and transport in very large numbers: a mobilization of civilian life that no previous European war had demanded.

   (b) The settlement was harsh enough to humiliate Germany but not harsh enough to disable it. Germany kept its industrial base, national unity, and a population larger than France's, so it retained both the grievance created by the war-guilt clause and reparations and the capacity to act on it once enforcement collapsed.

   (c) The Bolsheviks alone offered what soldiers and peasants wanted. While the Provisional Government continued the war, Lenin promised immediate peace and endorsed the land seizures peasants were already carrying out, so when the Bolsheviks moved in October the garrison and the Petrograd Soviet would not defend the government.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE way the Great Depression affected European politics.
   2. Briefly explain ONE similarity between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.
   3. Briefly explain ONE difference between them.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: discrediting moderate governments that applied deflationary policy; the rise of Nazi and Communist voting in Germany; Popular Fronts in France and Spain; the collapse of parliamentary democracy across much of the continent by 1939. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: single-party rule and destruction of independent institutions; terror, secret police, and camps; leader cults; mass propaganda and mobilizing organizations; state direction of the economy. Must be specific.
   • (c) Accept: biological versus class-and-conduct definitions of enemies; racial hierarchy and conquest versus a classless industrial future; private ownership retained in Germany against collectivization in the USSR. Must contrast purposes or categories, not merely name the two states.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) The Depression discredited the moderate parties that governed through it. Governments responded with balanced budgets and wage cuts, which deepened unemployment and made parliamentary politics appear powerless, so German voters abandoned the liberal center for the Nazis and Communists, who together won a Reichstag majority hostile to the republic by July 1932.

   (b) Both destroyed independent institutions and ruled through a single party sustained by terror. Each abolished rival parties and free trade unions, built a secret police and a camp system for real and imagined enemies, and mobilized society through propaganda and mass organizations under a cult of the leader.

   (c) They defined their enemies differently, and the difference was decisive for their victims. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 identified Jews by ancestry, a category no individual could alter, whereas Soviet victims were targeted as kulaks, wreckers, or disloyal party members: categories defined by conduct or position that the regime could in principle revise.

Lesson 9.1 · Unit 9 · CED topics 9.2–9.3

Rebuilding Europe and the origins of the Cold War

Europe in 1945 was ruined and occupied. Cities lay in rubble, tens of millions were dead, and some twelve million displaced people were moving across a continent whose food and transport systems had collapsed. The wartime allies had agreed at Yalta on free elections in liberated Europe and at Potsdam on the occupation of Germany, but the agreements were vague and the armies were already where they were going to stay. Soviet-backed governments consolidated across eastern Europe between 1945 and 1948; the Czechoslovak coup of February 1948 removed the last coalition government in the region.

The American response hardened into containment. The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 committed the United States to supporting states under communist pressure, beginning with Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan that followed offered roughly thirteen billion dollars of aid for European recovery: a programme that was simultaneously humanitarian, strategically calculated to make communism less attractive by restoring prosperity, and commercially useful to American exporters. The Soviet Union forbade its satellites to participate, which sharpened the division it was designed to prevent. When the western powers moved toward a separate West German currency in 1948, Stalin blockaded Berlin; the airlift sustained the city for eleven months. NATO followed in 1949, two German states were founded the same year, and the Warsaw Pact completed the architecture in 1955.

Lesson 9.2 · Unit 9 · CED topic 9.4

Two superpowers and a divided continent

For the first time in four centuries, Europe's fate was decided by powers based outside it. The Soviet Union held the east and the United States guaranteed the west, both armed with nuclear weapons after the Soviet test of 1949, and the resulting standoff was simultaneously terrifying and stabilizing: the cost of direct war between them was unthinkable, so the confrontation was conducted through proxies, crises, and the permanent division of Germany.

The limits of the arrangement were tested inside the Soviet bloc and enforced there. Hungary's 1956 rising, which declared neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, was crushed by Soviet armour while the west, preoccupied with Suez, did not intervene. Czechoslovakia's attempt in 1968 to build socialism with a human face ended the same way, followed by the Brezhnev Doctrine asserting a right to intervene wherever socialism was threatened. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, stopped the emigration that was draining East Germany of its young and skilled. Europe's own retreat from world power ran alongside: decolonization accelerated after 1945, and the Suez crisis of 1956, in which American pressure forced Britain and France to abandon an invasion of Egypt, demonstrated publicly that the old powers could no longer act independently. Détente from the late 1960s brought arms control and, at Helsinki in 1975, recognition of existing borders in exchange for human-rights commitments that dissidents would later use against their own governments.

Lesson 9.3 · Unit 9 · CED topic 9.6

Western Europe: welfare states, integration, and immigration

Western Europe's post-war decades brought the fastest sustained growth in its history: roughly a quarter-century sometimes called the thirty glorious years. Governments across the political spectrum built comprehensive welfare states on the assumption that the state should guarantee a floor below which no citizen would fall: national health provision, unemployment and sickness insurance, pensions, family allowances, and expanded public education. Britain's National Health Service, founded in 1948, was the most visible example of a pattern repeated in different forms across the region.

Integration proceeded alongside, and it began as a security project rather than an economic one. Placing French and German coal and steel under a common authority was intended to make war between them materially impossible; the resulting European Coal and Steel Community led to the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the European Economic Community, which widened into the European Union at Maastricht in 1992 and eventually into a common currency. Growth also required labour that domestic populations could not supply. West Germany recruited guest workers from Turkey, Italy, and Yugoslavia; Britain and France drew migrants from colonies and former colonies. The assumption that these workers would return proved wrong, and Europe became permanently multiethnic: a development that produced both new communities and durable political conflict. The upheavals of 1968, when student and worker protest shook France and spread widely, and the second-wave feminist movement that followed, showed prosperity generating demands of its own.

Lesson 9.4 · Unit 9 · CED topic 9.7

The fall of communism and its aftermath

Soviet-bloc economies stagnated through the 1970s and 1980s. Central planning had built heavy industry effectively and proved poor at consumer goods, quality, and innovation; living standards visibly lagged behind western Europe, and the comparison was impossible to hide. Poland produced the first sustained challenge: Solidarity, an independent trade union founded in 1980 with roughly ten million members, survived martial law and remained a parallel authority the government could suppress but not destroy.

Mikhail Gorbachev, taking power in 1985, tried to save the system by reforming it. Glasnost allowed criticism, including of the party's own history, and perestroika attempted to loosen economic control, but partial reform disrupted the planned economy without producing a working market, and open discussion legitimized grievances the system could not satisfy. His decisive choice was negative: he made clear the Soviet Union would not use force to keep the satellite regimes in power. Without that guarantee they fell within months in 1989, mostly peacefully, and the Berlin Wall opened in November. Germany reunified in 1990, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in December 1991. The transition was not uniformly peaceful. Yugoslavia broke apart in wars through the 1990s in which ethnic cleansing returned to Europe, culminating in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 and the Kosovo conflict of 1999.

Lesson 9.5 · Unit 9 · CED topics 9.5 and 9.8

Contemporary Europe: culture, demography, and identity

The intellectual temper of post-war Europe was shaped by what the continent had just done to itself. Existentialism insisted that individuals create meaning through choice in a universe that supplies none; postmodern thought went further, treating grand explanatory systems, including the Enlightenment's own story of progress through reason, as claims to power rather than discoveries of truth. Religious practice declined steeply across most of western Europe, producing societies more secular than any in the continent's recorded history, while immigration made them more religiously plural at the same time.

Demography became the defining long-term challenge. Birth rates fell below replacement across nearly all of Europe while life expectancy rose, producing populations that are ageing and, in several countries, shrinking, with consequences for pensions, health systems, and labour supply that no European state has fully resolved. Migration supplies workers and provokes political conflict over integration, asylum, and national identity, sharply so after the arrivals of 2015. The European Union expanded eastward after 2004, absorbing states that had been behind the iron curtain fifteen years earlier, then faced a sovereign debt crisis that exposed the difficulty of a shared currency without shared fiscal policy, and a British vote to leave in 2016. The question the unit ends on is genuinely open: whether Europe is a set of nations that cooperate, or something with an identity of its own.

Unit 9 review · 10 multiple-choice · 2 short-answer

Unit 9 review: Cold War and Contemporary Europe, c. 1914–present

Ten questions on reconstruction and the Cold War division, Western welfare states and integration, 1989 and the fall of communism, and contemporary Europe, plus two short-answer questions on division and reunion.

Multiple choice

1. Source: President Harry S. Truman, address to Congress, March 1947, and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Harvard address, June 1947.

   Truman: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Marshall: "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos."

   The difference in framing between the two speeches is best explained by

   Each speaker addressing a different audience whose support was needed on different terms A fundamental disagreement between Truman and Marshall over containment Marshall's speech having been delivered before the Cold War had begun Truman's address being a private communication never intended for publication

   Correct. Truman needed a reluctant Congress to fund commitments, so he offered a sweeping principle; Marshall framed aid as economic and non-ideological so the Soviet Union could apply and be seen to refuse.

   Both served the same administration and the same containment policy; the registers differ, not the strategy.

   Marshall spoke three months after Truman, with the division of Europe already well advanced.

   It was a public address to a joint session of Congress, deliberately publicized.

2. The concept of a "security dilemma" applied to the early Cold War means that

   Neither side possessed the military capacity to defend its own territory Each side's defensive measures appeared to the other as evidence of hostile intent Both superpowers had secretly agreed to divide Europe at the Yalta Conference Nuclear weapons made all conventional forces militarily irrelevant

   Both possessed formidable forces; the problem was interpretation of intent, not incapacity.

   Correct. Soviet buffer states looked like expansion to the west, and American economic reconstruction looked like encirclement to Moscow, so defensive steps produced escalation without either side needing hostile designs.

   Yalta produced vague commitments to free elections rather than an explicit division, and the disagreement over what had been agreed was itself a source of conflict.

   Large conventional forces remained central throughout, and NATO and the Warsaw Pact were built around them.

3. The Soviet decision to forbid its satellites from accepting Marshall aid had the effect of

   Deepening the very division of Europe the aid programme was said to be preventing Persuading the United States to abandon the programme entirely Accelerating economic recovery in eastern Europe relative to the west Bringing the Soviet Union into NATO as an associate member

   Correct. Refusal drew the economic line that the political division then followed, and the gap in living standards it helped create became visible evidence against the eastern system.

   The programme went ahead and delivered roughly thirteen billion dollars to western Europe between 1948 and 1952.

   Eastern economies recovered more slowly and were reoriented toward Soviet needs, falling further behind the west.

   NATO was founded in 1949 explicitly as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which formed the Warsaw Pact in response.

4. Description of: the Helsinki Final Act, 1975.

   Affirms the inviolability of existing European frontiers, sovereign equality, and non-intervention; provides for economic, scientific, and environmental cooperation; and commits signatories to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to facilitate contacts and the freer movement of people and information. All thirty-five participating states signed, including the Soviet Union.

   The human-rights provisions proved significant chiefly because

   They were enforced by an international court with power to impose sanctions Dissidents used text their own governments had signed as a basis for domestic demands They required the immediate dismantling of the Berlin Wall The Soviet Union refused to sign that section of the agreement

   No enforcement mechanism existed, which is precisely why Soviet negotiators accepted the clauses.

   Correct. Monitoring groups formed across the bloc, and demands framed as compliance with a treaty their governments had signed could no longer be dismissed as foreign interference.

   The Act contained no such requirement; the Wall opened in 1989, fourteen years later.

   The Soviet Union signed the Final Act in full, treating the human-rights section as a tolerable price for recognition of post-war borders.

5. The Suez crisis of 1956 is most significant in European history because it

   Marked the beginning of Egyptian control over the canal's construction Demonstrated that Britain and France could no longer act militarily without American approval Led directly to the creation of the European Economic Community Resulted in Soviet troops being stationed permanently in Egypt

   The canal was built in the nineteenth century; 1956 concerned its nationalization by Nasser and the invasion that followed.

   Correct. American financial pressure forced the two former great powers to abandon the operation, showing publicly that independent European great-power action had ended.

   The EEC was created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, arising from the coal and steel community rather than from Suez, though the crisis reinforced integrationist arguments.

   The Soviet Union threatened intervention rhetorically but did not station troops in Egypt as a result.

6. Description of: the Schuman Declaration, May 1950.

   Proposes placing all French and German coal and steel production under a common High Authority, open to other European countries. States that Europe will not be made all at once but through concrete achievements that first create a solidarity in fact, and that war between France and Germany should become not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.

   The declaration indicates that European integration began principally as

   A security project pursued through economic means A federal constitutional design for a United States of Europe An American initiative imposed as a condition of Marshall aid A cultural movement to promote a shared European identity

   Correct. The stated aim is to make Franco-German war materially impossible by removing separate national control of the industries armaments depend on.

   The declaration explicitly rejects making Europe all at once or by a single plan, proposing one sector and concrete steps instead.

   The proposal came from the French foreign minister. American policy encouraged European cooperation but did not author this initiative.

   The declaration concerns coal, steel, and the prevention of war, not cultural identity.

7. Western European welfare states established after 1945 rested on the principle that

   Private charity should replace state provision for the poor The state should guarantee a minimum standard of security for all citizens Only workers in heavy industry should receive social insurance Social provision should be funded entirely by voluntary contributions

   The post-war settlement moved decisively from charitable and poor-law provision to universal entitlement.

   Correct. Health provision, unemployment and sickness insurance, pensions, family allowances, and expanded education were built as citizen entitlements, of which the British NHS of 1948 was the most visible example.

   Coverage was extended broadly across the population rather than restricted to particular industries.

   These systems were funded by taxation and compulsory contributions, not by voluntary giving.

8. The most decisive factor in the collapse of eastern European communist regimes in 1989 was

   Gorbachev's signal that Soviet forces would not intervene to preserve them Military intervention by NATO forces on behalf of opposition movements The sudden death of several long-serving communist leaders A joint decision by the regimes themselves to hold free elections

   Correct. Soviet troops had restored communist rule in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968; withdrawing that guarantee changed the calculation for oppositions and party leaderships simultaneously.

   NATO did not intervene. The revolutions were overwhelmingly internal and largely peaceful.

   Leadership changes occurred but followed from the crisis rather than causing the simultaneous collapse across several states.

   Free elections were conceded under pressure from mass mobilization, not initiated jointly by the regimes.

9. The wars accompanying Yugoslavia's breakup differed from the revolutions of 1989 elsewhere in eastern Europe chiefly because the conflict was

   Between a communist government and a unified national opposition Between communities within one state, which no external withdrawal could resolve Driven entirely by external intervention from neighbouring powers Resolved peacefully through negotiated partition in 1991

   That describes Poland or Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia the opposition was not unified but divided along national lines.

   Correct. Elsewhere an unpopular system depended on Soviet backing; in Yugoslavia rival national communities claimed the same territory, so removing outside support resolved nothing.

   External powers became involved, but the conflict originated in competing claims among Yugoslavia's own peoples.

   The breakup produced a decade of war including the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 and the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

10. Description of: European demographic and religious-practice data, c. 1960–2020.

    Total fertility in western European states falls from above the replacement level of about 2.1 in the early 1960s to figures between roughly 1.3 and 1.9 by the 2000s. Life expectancy rises by more than a decade. Survey series on religious attendance show weekly participation falling from large majorities in several Catholic countries in the 1960s to small minorities by the 2010s.

    A historian should treat which of these findings with the greatest caution, and why?

    The fertility figures, because birth registration was not compulsory in this period The religious attendance figures, because self-reported survey data tends to overstate attendance The life expectancy figures, because they depend on projections rather than records All three equally, because no European state collected reliable statistics after 1960

    Birth registration was compulsory and comprehensive across western Europe, making fertility data highly reliable.

    Correct. Attendance figures come from surveys and depend on what respondents report, which historically overstates participation because people report what they consider respectable.

    Life expectancy is calculated from registered deaths by age, which is observational rather than projected.

    Civil registration in this period is among the most reliable historical data available; the caution applies specifically to survey-based measures.

Short answer

1. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE reason the wartime alliance broke down after 1945.
   2. Briefly explain ONE way the Cold War affected western European states.
   3. Briefly explain ONE reason communist regimes in eastern Europe collapsed in 1989.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: Soviet installation of friendly governments against the Yalta promise of free elections; western reconstruction of Germany; mutual misreading of defensive measures; disputes over reparations and occupation policy. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: American security guarantees allowing lower defense spending and funding for welfare states; Marshall aid financing recovery; NATO membership and strategic subordination shown at Suez; the external umbrella making Franco-German integration possible. Must explain the effect.
   • (c) Accept: Gorbachev's refusal to intervene militarily; economic stagnation and visible comparison with western living standards; Solidarity's survival in Poland; Helsinki-based dissident monitoring. Must explain why it was decisive.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Each side read the other's security measures as aggression. The Soviet Union installed friendly governments across eastern Europe to create a buffer against future invasion, having been invaded twice through that region, but the western powers saw this as a violation of the Yalta commitment to free elections and as evidence of expansionist intent.

   (b) American security guarantees allowed western European states to spend on reconstruction rather than on defending themselves against one another. States that had fought three wars in seventy years could pool coal and steel from 1950 because the external umbrella removed the security competition that had previously made Franco-German cooperation impossible.

   (c) Gorbachev made clear that Soviet forces would not be used to keep the satellite governments in power. Since Soviet intervention had restored communist rule in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, withdrawing that guarantee left regimes with little popular support facing mass demonstrations they could not suppress alone.

2. Answer (a), (b), and (c).

   1. Briefly describe ONE reason western European states pursued economic integration after 1950.
   2. Briefly explain ONE reason integration encountered greater difficulty after about 2000.
   3. Briefly explain ONE major demographic or social challenge facing Europe in the twenty-first century.
   Your response
   Scoring notes

   • (a) Accept: preventing another Franco-German war by pooling coal and steel; rebuilding trade and prosperity; strengthening western Europe against the Soviet bloc; securing German recovery without German rearmament. Must be specific.
   • (b) Accept: the eurozone debt crisis exposing a shared currency without shared fiscal policy; slower growth distributing real costs rather than shared gains; enlargement increasing diversity of interests; migration disputes; Brexit. Must explain the difficulty.
   • (c) Accept: below-replacement fertility with rising longevity, straining pensions and health systems; dependence on immigration for labour combined with political conflict over integration and asylum; regional depopulation. Must explain the consequence.
   Show a 3/3 response

   (a) Integration was designed to make another Franco-German war impossible. The Schuman Declaration of 1950 proposed pooling French and German coal and steel under a common authority so that neither state would separately control the industries needed for armaments, turning a security guarantee into an economic institution.

   (b) Integration had been carried for decades by rapid growth that produced winners without obvious losers. When the eurozone debt crisis after 2009 exposed the difficulty of a shared currency without shared fiscal policy, member states faced real and unequally distributed costs, and the permissive consensus behind the project broke down: contributing to the British vote to leave in 2016.

   (c) Birth rates across Europe have fallen below replacement while life expectancy has risen, producing ageing and in some countries shrinking populations. This strains pension and health systems funded by taxes on a shrinking workforce and creates demand for immigrant labour, which has itself become a central political conflict over integration and national identity.

DBQ 1 · Unit 2 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which the Protestant Reformation changed the relationship between religious and secular authority in the period 1517–1648.

DBQ 2 · Unit 4 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which Enlightenment thought challenged existing social and political hierarchies in the eighteenth century.

DBQ 3 · Unit 5 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which the French Revolution transformed French society in the period 1789–1815.

DBQ 4 · Unit 6 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which industrialization changed the lives of working people in Europe in the period 1780–1900.

DBQ 5 · Unit 7 · 60 minutes (15 reading + 45 writing)

Evaluate the extent to which nationalism shaped European politics in the period 1815–1914.

LEQ 1 · Units 1–2 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which the printing press changed European intellectual and religious life in the period 1450–1600.

LEQ 2 · Units 3–4 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which absolutist rulers succeeded in centralizing state power in the period 1648–1789.

LEQ 3 · Units 5–6 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the most significant cause of the revolutions of 1848.

LEQ 4 · Units 7–8 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which imperial rivalry contributed to the outbreak of the First World War.

LEQ 5 · Units 8–9 · 40 minutes

Evaluate the extent to which the Cold War shaped Western European politics and society in the period 1945–1991.

Unit recap

Unit recap

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