By the mid-sevententh century several European monarchies were collapsing. Focusing on a key elite bonding strategy, this new survey shows how monarchs resolved to work with, rather than against, their elites. Nicholas Henshall's synthesis offers an argument for the coherence of the period - as the height of European monarchy and its elites.

Conventionally, absolutism'' in early-modern Europe has suggested unfettered autocracy and despotism -- the erosion of rights, the centralisation of decision-making, the loss of liberty. Everything, in a word, that was un-British but characteristic of ancien-regime France. Recently historians have questioned such comfortably simplistic views. This lively investigation of absolutism'' in action -- continent-wide but centred on a detailed comparison of France and England -- dissolves the traditional picture to reveal a much more complex reality; and in so doing illuminates the varied ways in...