Twelve Periods, One Exam: The Threads That Run 1648 to the Present

The idea

Twelve bands, one chain, every link taught in the eighteen units before this one. Westphalia left Europe's states sovereign in sixteen forty-eight, and the first band asks how they ruled: Louis XIV built the absolutist model and bankrupted it; the Dutch and the English showed that a state could grow stronger by limiting its king; Prussia, Austria and Russia built absolutisms on serfdom, Peter's by a Table of Ranks. Commerce reordered their power, sugar, slaves and companies, and Utrecht made a balance the century fought to keep. Meanwhile Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton taught Europe to read the world by method, and Locke taught it that the mind is paper experience writes on. The Enlightenment turned that reason on the society of orders, and enlightened despots borrowed it while partitioning Poland. In seventeen eighty-nine bankruptcy became revolution, revolution became Terror, Terror became Napoleon, and Napoleon exported the Revolution to a Europe that defeated him and rebuilt the balance at Vienna. Britain meanwhile turned coal into industry and industry into class, and the four ideologies of the next generation, conservatism, liberalism, nationalism and socialism, fought it out in eighteen thirty and forty-eight and lost to the old order. Then the old order took nationalism for itself: Cavour and Bismarck built Italy and Germany by war, Austria compromised, Russia freed its serfs into debt, and Bismarck's alliances kept an armed peace while science remade life, Darwin remade thought, and Europe took four-fifths of the globe. The alliances, the armies and the resentments met at Sarajevo; four years of trenches took twenty million and three empires; Russia went to Lenin, Versailles satisfied no one, and the democracies of nineteen twenty despised themselves by nineteen thirty-three, when a Depression handed Germany to Hitler as Italy had been handed to Mussolini. The second war took sixty million and six million by timetable, and left Europe divided at Berlin between two outside powers. It lost its empires in sixteen years, built a welfare state and then a Union, and watched the other half of the continent freed in nineteen eighty-nine when Gorbachev let go. That is the exam, and the next question on it is one link of this chain.