This is the first detailed and comprehensive study of the British foreign policy before and during the war that led to the loss of the American colonies. Using a wide range of sources, Scott examines the problems faced by Britain after the Seven Years War and the way in which they were exacerbated during the mid-1760s by its British statesmen. He proceeds to chart the limited recovery started later in the decade, the renewed setbacks following the American revolt in 1775, and the subsequent intervention of France and Spain. The resulting isolation is shown to have been the result of a...

This substantial collection of specially commissioned chapters addresses the theme of sovereignty and the sources and variety of political power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, from Russia to Spain and from the Italian peninsula to the Dutch Republic. A unifying theme, taken up in a substantial editorial introduction, is the determination to move away from cliches such as 'the rise of the modern state'. Instead, emphasis is placed upon the composite nature of early modern political structures and upon the significant number of bodies and individuals who were recognised as...

During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the European states-system was transformed by the military rise of Prussia and Russia. Eastern Europe became pre-eminent and during the 1770s, Poland was partitioned for the first time by its three neighbors, and two--Russia and Austria--also seized territory from the Ottoman empire. Europe's political center of gravity moved sharply eastwards, and by the later 1770s Russia was emerging as the leading continental state. Based on sources in six countries, this study provides the first survey of these crucial events.

The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740-1815 examines a key development in modern European history: the origins and emergence of a competitive state system.

H.M. Scott demonstrates how the well-known and dramatic events of these decades - the emergence of Russia and Prussia; the three partitions of Poland; the continuing retreat of the Ottoman Empire; the unprecedented territorial expansion of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, halted by the final defeat of Napoleon - were part of a wider process that created the modern great power system, dominated by Europe's five...

The heyday of the European states system was in the century before the First World War. How the system of five great powers in conscious equilibrium came into being is the central theme of this book.