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| Ideas based on the theory that the wealth of the country was based on its resources like population, agricultural produce, or gold and silver mines. The more resources the country had and the more gold or silver a person had, the richer it/she/he was considered. According to this model, monarchs should be actively involved in economics. Led to countries actively seeking resources and favoring own companies over those of other countries. Also led to expansion. |
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| the 18th century equivalent of public policy, which exercised a wide influence on politically active bureaucracy. It was a “hotbed” of a more spiritual form of Lutheranism called Pietism. It said that the state should not focus on maintaining law, but should also focus on gaining collective prosperity. This showed that public opinion was becoming more important. |
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| Frederick William I was the elector of Brandenburg and the duke of Prussia. He is known as the Great Elector because of his military and political skill. His domestic reforms gave Prussia a strong position in the political order of north-central Europe, which set Prussia up for elevation from duchy to kingdom (which was later achieved by his successor). He was known for building up his military and alliances and was able to gain subsidies. |
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| Glorious Revolution and Declaration of Rights |
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| Known as the Glorious Revolution because no blood was shed in England. After the death of Charles II of England, the throne was given to his brother, James II. His reign was controversial because James was the first Catholic monarch since the Reformation (the last one tried to reconvert all of England to Catholicism), so he wasn’t trusted by Protestant England. Also, a bill had just been past excluding Catholics from the throne, but James did so anyway. Eventually, the Dutch king, William III, who was the husband of James’ oldest daughter, ended up becoming king after James II fled the country. William had widespread support. The Declaration of Rights stated that only Parliament had the right to make or unmake laws, which made it so that all money could be raised only by Parliament and that elections and debates must have been free of influence of the crown. Essentially, this was the start of the first true constitutional monarchy. The monarchs still had influence, but no real, given power. This set the tone for modern democracy. |
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| The daughter of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. She ascended the throne after reaching full maturity. She was arrogant and convinced that God had created her for greatness. At the time that she had inherited the throne, Sweden controlled most of the Baltic. Christina spent most of her reign trying to give her court most of the splendor that she thought it deserved, encouraging philosophers and commissioning art and music. Because her throne had come with problems, she had to sell large pieces of land to nobles in order to pay off debts. This move benefitted the royal treasury, but also led to a second serfdom; she increased absolute power in Sweden. Later, she stepped down from being queen and converted to Catholicism. |
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| King of Poland, who was given subsidies by the king of France for agreeing never to support Austria. During the Ottoman’s siege of Vienna, he came to the rescue of the Hapsburgs (Austrian) in order to defend Christendom. |
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| Holy Roman Emperor after the 30 years war. By default Leopold I had to assume the role of senior partner in the Hapsburg dynasty. He led the Austrians/Christians to the victory over the Turks, which led to great prestige of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Many of the nobles in his government were protestant, but Leopold favored Catholics, which resulted in Hungary remaining the center of unrest and revolution against the Hapsburg authority for the next century. |
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| He was the leader of the Austrian army after the siege of Vienna. He drastically increased their territory in Eastern Europe. He was also the leader of the Austrian army during the Spanish war of succession. He and the English duke of Marlboro were very successful against the French. |
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| Peace treaty accepting Peter V as the king of Spain, but barred him from inheriting the throne of France. This meant that France and Spain would remain separate kingdoms. Great Britain came out on top, mainly because of its colonial acquisitions and the Austrian Hapsburgs received Spanish territories in the Netherlands and Italy. It helped establish the idea of nations and national sovereignty. It also gave Austria vast holdings across Europe. |
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| Was done especially in Prussia, but also throughout Eastern Europe. It’s the idea that in order for the king to have more power over the nobles, he should give the nobles more power over their serfs. It led to the reinstitution of previously free people as serfs, but also led to an increase in royal authority, meaning that it was essential for creating a centralized, absolute estate. |
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| Brought Russia into the greater European orbit. He inherited a kingdom that was unstable, but changed that. He trained a regiment of great troops and eventually made an alliance with Leopold I against the Turks. He passed new legislation, which reduced all peasants to the same level and subjected them to new tax, military conscription, to forced public work, and were forbidden to leave the estates on which they were born. He wanted to replace Sweden as a great power, but was defeated. He modernized the Russian army and modernized their culture in order to make them more in line with Western European culture. |
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| Began after the discovery of the Americas. European species were brought to the Americas (sometimes deliberately in order to recreate European lifestyles overseas and sometimes accidentally). Led to the “exchange” of diseases, which harshly affected the Native American populations, but helped Europeans because it introduced new crops like potatoes. Diseases like measles, influenza and smallpox were especially bad for the Native Americans because cures were unknown to the natives |
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| People pooling their money in order to share the risk and benefits of a business venture. This was essential for the creation of colonial empires because at the beginning, trading overseas was very expensive and very risky. This allowed each investor to share the risk and reward. Joint Stock Companies were mostly government sponsored and were given a government monopoly on certain goods. An example of this is the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC. |
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| The Tulip, the Mississippi, and the South Sea Bubbles: |
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| : The tulip was when the Dutch bought a bunch of tulips (because they were seen as a status symbol and were extremely valuable) and sold them for really high prices, but then people realized that they were just tulips and not worth as much as they had invested in them, meaning that a lot of people lost a ton of money. The Mississippi: John Law decided to back his bank with lands owned by the Mississippi Company, which covered the entire Mississippi Valley. Law’s bank and the Mississippi experienced investment troubles because the value of their notes far exceeded any amount of returns that the Mississippi had the ability to get. Prices increased fivefold that summer and the next year, Law announced that share values would have to be reduced. This caused panic and selling occurred fast. By November the company dissolved. The English experienced similar with the South Sea Bubble. The point of all these was to show that there wasn’t any real regulation within these companies and they were vulnerable to speculation. |
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| VOC-Dutch East India Co.: |
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| Commissioned by the Dutch government to control the spice trade in the Indies. They were founded in 1602 and began to create trade monopolies with the native traders. They also set up colonies and created forts throughout the Indies and Africa. It showed that private, merchant run companies back by the government were far superior to the standard government monopoly that the Spanish government used prior. Because it was a private company, they had incentives to grow. |
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| After the Dutch West Indian company started claiming that the slave trade was their biggest and chief concerns of the company, the English tried to take away the Dutch advantage by forming the Royal African Company, which would make the English in charge of the slave trade. The effects were obvious when, while working together against the navy of Louis XIV, the Dutch were subordinate to the English. This showed the power of the English and Joint Stock Companies. |
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| Newton and Liebniz (joint significance): |
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| The two feuded over who deserved primary credit for the development of things like calculus. The emergence of the critical spirit enabled even more people to participate as well. Showed that ideas were being spread and developed independently and also that there was a large number of people working on and interested in the same problems. |
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| One of the first influential writers of the time to recognize that the new natural philosophy was a complete departure from the ideas of the ancients. In his book, he set out the stages for a new intellectual structure that would replace the old natural philosophy. He claimed that our senses are imperfect, everyone sees the world differently, words don’t always think of the same thing so it is hard to be sure that knowledge has been communicated properly, and finally, there are competing philosophies that give order to our sensory experiences. He is also considered to be the first sociologist of scientific communities and his solutions were considered the most influential of the time (for scientists to come together to discuss problems and to concentrate on carrying out experiments). He said that Ancients’ knowledge was based off observation and therefore shouldn’t be held in as high esteem as knowledge based off of experiments. |
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| I think therefore I am.” He also came up with the mathematical formula for reflection and refraction of light and Cartesian coordinates. He also developed a mechanical theory of natural philosophy. He said that nature has two fundamental properties. Nature also has qualities like color, light, texture, ect. He also promoted the idea that one should doubt everything, which led to critical thinking. |
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| French philosopher who tried to show that God and reason could be related, but didn’t go against each other. He didn’t like the traditional forms of Catholicism and found that several of the Catholic beliefs were irrational and unfounded. |
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| Known as François-Marie Arouet until a period of brief period of imprisonment led him to the pen name of Voltaire. After being attacked and beaten by a nobleman, Voltaire became interested in English civil liberties and other aspects of English life. He published Letters Concerning the English Nation, which was meant to express his affection for England and to provoke established opinion in France. This led to a warrant for his arrest. He continued to write works that would bring the Enlightenment beyond the salons and royal courts to the entire reading public. He was also a pen pal to a number of monarchs. He was the typical Enlightenment thinker and taught about rationality and went against the teachings of the church. |
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| Marie de Romieu, Lucrezia Marinella, and Anna Marie van Schurman (Joint Significance): |
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| All published works about why and how women were equal to men and why they should be treated as so. The works were all respectable, but because they were women, they weren’t taken seriously until later when a man published the same ideas |
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| Poullain de la Barre and the “Woman Question”: |
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| He said that the belief in women’s inferiority originated in men’s taking advantage of their greatest strengths in the earliest period of human history and was perpetuated because it was in men’s interest to magnify the importance of their own sex. Customary ideas of women’s inability to reason, their unfitness for public office, their lack of courage, were merely the result of preiudice, perpetuated by supposedly learned men who had no better reason for believing it than what they themselves had been taught. Poullain’s writings became part of the quarrel about women and were picked up and opposed by more conservatice writers, but also found support. He was the first person to raise this question and used Enlightenment ideas to doubt and question social norms. |
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| Spy and political writer (but former businessman). He wrote pamphlets on all sorts of topics, one of which offended the government and he was forced to flee and spend six months in prison. Still though, he made friends in high places that suggested that he work for the government. In this job he did more than merely state facts, but also traveled, collected opinions, reported, and watched the press. Wrote about the Act of Union, which answered the anti-union questions raised by the Scots. With his help, the Act of Union was eventually ratified. This showed how pamphlet writing could be used to affect public opinion. |
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| Would make a union between the Scottish and English parliaments, combining them to one. (Before, they were in a personal union). The British were in favor of this along with the wealthy Scots. This showed the growing power of the English government over the Scottish, eliminating their independence. |
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| Social places that developed in England, in which newspapers were provided and merchants and upperclassmen met and discussed politics and current events. They developed in public as a result of the more liberal government. Significance would be that the coffee houses (and French salons) provided a place to freely discuss ideas. |
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| The first home of Enlightenment ideas. The “greatest wits” of the time (both male and female) met here to discuss literature, philosophy, sex, and court intrigues. Unlike the Coffee Houses, they were private (as a result of the absolute monarchy). |
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| While salons did exist in Berlin and Vienna, they weren’t as prevalent because they weren’t the sole means of communicating intellectual ideas. Intellectual debates were largely held in universities. |
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| The Tatler, the Spectator, and the Female Spectator |
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| : Newspapers that were published anonymously. These were the first independent publications that offered viewpoints that contrasted with those of the governments. Generally, they used peaceful but witty dialogue to bring philosophy out into the open. |
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| A book written about everyday life for the upper class. It created a new genre of novels about everyday life and eventual happy endings, which were read for the sake of enjoyment as opposed to gaining knowledge. |
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| Most governments controlled the censorship of newspapers and pamphlets; nothing would be published if it were against the government’s belief. Many people, though, were able to get around censorship and get their ideas out. Censorship then, did not really stop people from publishing contrasting ideas because if someone wanted to get their opinion out, they would. |
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| John Wilkes began publishing a newspaper, (North Briton), which claimed that the “Liberty of the Press is the birthright of Briton.” The paper proceeded to attack government policies. Issue 45 led to the government issuing a warrant for all those connected to the paper. Wilkes refused to treat the warrant as legal for his arrest because it didn’t specifically say his name, but he was taken to court eventually. By the time that he was taken to court though, all of London was awaiting the outcome. When the judge dismissed the charges, the crowds cheered “Wilkes and Liberty!” The outcome of these issues was that warrants now needed to be sworn in the name of a specific person and be used against only him. Wilkes effectively used the press to get the government to bow to his wishes and support everyone’ s liberties. This is an example of the government bowing to popular opinion and popular elections. |
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| Particularly interested in human morality and the question of whether people were born with a “natural morality,” regardless of religion. He said that it was not enough to study morality as a matter of individual conscience and individual behavior and instead it was necessary how people behave in community because people are first and foremost social animals. He published these ideas in the Theory of Moral Science, which would make him famous. As a result, he was given the job of tutor to a nobleman. While tutoring, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the Scottish Enlightenment’s most famous answer to the question of what features of human society hold it together. He claimed that the wealth of nations came from the productivity of its labor force. It was not about an individual acquiring goods and services, but rather about the exchange of goods and services. This led to the undoing of the mercantilism system because it was now important to see not just the product, but the labor that went in to the product as well. |
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| Friends with Smith. His first public performance as a philosopher came after writing A Treatise of Human Nature. He did not seek to answer the question of laws of nature, like gravity, but instead wanted to discover why people believed laws like gravity to be true. He was considered by his native Scottish society to be a skeptic who did not believe in God, but really was a living example of Smith’s theory that natural morality is imbedded in social behavior and not religion. |
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| French Chemist and government financier to Antione Laurent Lavoisier. He discovered oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen and called these discoveries “New Chemistry.” The New Chemistry was characteristic of Enlightenment ideals in its emphasis on experiment and concern for language (common vocab now used to describe). He always repeated the same experiments in order to get the same results, establishing a scientific method of repeated trials. |
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| One of the French philosophers. He published the Persian Letters and the Spirit of Laws. The Persian Laws put European practices into perspective, showing that European culture wasn’t international and some customs might seem weird to outsiders. Spirit of Laws said that while people were subject to laws relating to nature, God, and social life, they were also subject to human laws, which could vary. Basically, it said that the same laws do not apply to everyone. He thought that the government should have three independent branches, with each having checks and balances on each other, like the U.S. has. |
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| French philosopher. He was most famous for his work, The Social Contract. He argued that man is born free, but society holds him back. He saw politics as the establishment of general will and this general will was created by a social contract, so each person was under the power of the general will. This could lead to the idea of a revolution being okay if the government was not working for the greater good. This subsequently had a great influence on all revolutionary and social movements. |
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| An enlightened pope and ruler of the Papal States. He allowed the discussion of social and economic issues and supported science for the first time. He even allowed some women to teach and attend school. He also made an attempt at liberalizing the Catholic Church and bringing it into line with Enlightenment thought. |
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| A document that provided a legal basis for the permanent union of Hapsburgs lands. All the Hapsburg lands would automatically be inherited by the firstborn male heir, or in the case of Maria Theresa, the firstborn’s eldest child. This changed the Hapsburg lands from a personal union into a political union. It would eventually lead to clear succession of the Hapsburg lands and also the legal basis for Maria Theresa to succeed the throne. |
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| Jewish German philosopher. He was incredibly popular amongst the scholarly and aristocratic circle, but because he was a Jew, he was limited. He became known as a Socrates of Berlin. He was able to take contemporary philosophical ideas and simplify them for the general audience. |
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| Gotthold Lessing and Nathan the Wise |
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| A famous German playwright who was a freethinker and lived primarly on his writings. Nathan the Wise was his most famous play. It was about a Jew living in a Christian community and the Jew was the most “Christian” in the community. The character was directly based on Moses Mendelssohn and hoped open up the debate over the assimilation of Jews into culture. |
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| Allowing the religious minorities to live and perform their services as long as they don’t interfere with others or make it public. An example of this would be what Joseph II of Austria did to the Jews in 1781. It allowed them to have a synagogue, but it couldn’t look like a synagogue; while there were still restrictions on Jews, some of the more humiliating ones were lifted. It shows that Enlightenment ideas were being taken up even in Catholic countries. The penalties facing the Jews were both unethical and uneconomical. |
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| Religious Freedom/Equality |
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| The idea that everyone can worship equally; there would be no state sponsored religion and no religion would be held above the others. It was the ideal of many philosophers and later began to be practiced in America. |
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| : A minister to Maria Theresa, who is best known for his diplomatic revolution, in which the traditional enemy of Austria (France) became an ally of Austria. He thought that even though the Hapsburgs had traditionally been enemies of the French, it didn’t make sense in the modern world. This showed that you had to make alliances for reasons of state and not for dynastic purposes. It greatly surprised the European world, especially the Prussians. |
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| Daughter of Maria Theresa. Married to King Louis XVI as part of Austria switching alliances from England to France. She lived in luxury in France and was largely hated by the French people. |
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| An Enlightened, Austrian minister to Maria Theresa and Joseph II, who thought less in dynastic terms and more for the good of the state. This showed that sometimes you need to go against traditions in order to create a new rational state. |
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| Emperor Joseph II’s enlightened approach to the state, which caused loosening up of social control, increasing education, and supporting the arts. It led to the Toleration Edict of the Jews and the establishments of many new schools and hospitals. Its significance was that it was an attempt of the Austrian Hapsburgs to modernize and increase their holdings. |
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| He was born the duke of Hollstein, a small German state. He was brought there to become heir to Czarina Elizabeth. He worshipped Frederick II of Prussia and as a result, called peace with Prussia just as they were about to defeat them. He was overthrown by his wife, Catherine. |
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| Stanislaus-Augustus Poniatowski |
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| King of Poland, but largely served as a puppet to Catherine II. He was intelligent, enlightened, and a Polish patriot. He sought to bring enlightenment ideas and unity to the Polish estate. However, he was sandwiched between three strong estates, so Poland was largely petitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. |
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| One of the many love affairs of Catherine the Great. He was a great administrator and helped in the Partition of Poland. More? |
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| Large landowners would buy the surrounding smaller farms in order to create one large one. All of the farmers who formally had their own plot would now work for other farmers. As time progressed, Parliament began to support these enclosures. On a whole, these larger plots were more efficient and increased productivity and caused several small farm owners to flee the countryside and go into the cities. |
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| This includes the four course crop rotation and new crops which both yielded more calories per acre and didn’t harm the land as much. This led to a vast increase in food, which meant that more people could be supported. It also meant that a smaller percent of people were needed to work in agriculture so more people could work in factories. |
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