III. the 18th century equilibrium

A Sketch of the Capitalist Revolution in Europe (III)

Eighteen-century continental Europe had arrived of something like an equilibrium. True, wars between the various states still broke out over territorial and dynastic disputes, but they never approached the duration or intensity of the competition between France and Spain in the 16th c, or the 30-years war at the beginning of the 17th, or even the repeated wars of Louis XIV's reign in France. Likewise, a truce of sorts had emerged in the centuries-long fight between monarchs and nobles: the former enjoyed formal superiority, while the latter maintained (or even reasserted) a dominant position in the offices of the royal administration. Something was brewing in England, which manifested itself in its taking an increasing role in overseas trade at the expense of the Dutch not to mention its victory over the French in the struggle over imperial dominance of the Americas. However, for the rest of Europe this did not have the appearance of the an epochal shift. So what if London was the new Amsterdam, which had anyways only been the new Antwerp, which itself had risen at the expense of the Italian mercantile cities? And after all, England swiftly lost the majority of its North American colonies to rebellion--in a kind of pyrrhic revenge for the French.