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Competitive State System In Europe During The 17th And 18th Century

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In Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, monarchs and rulers sought to increase their power both domestically within their own states and internationally by adding to their territories and populations. Both in merging their power internally and expanding their power externally, they employed three features of state-building: control, extraction, and integration. In the late 1700s, both the Industrial revolution and French revolution of 1789 strengthened the awareness in European minds not just that Europeans were different from the rest of the world, but also that Europeans were “progressing” promptly while the rest of the world seemed to be deteriorating, that Europeans were somehow exceptional—better, even—than the rest. Nineteenth century …show more content…
Many factors contributed but I personally think European’s competitive state system (early modern Europe) and Industrialization (long 19th century) were the main ones. Europe’s rise to dominance did not become manifest until the mid-eighteenth century when the era of industrialization began. However, many factors made Europe’s dominance to end in the nineteenth century but it would be hard to argue that industrialization and state system contributed equally. Both of them contributed but in my opinion, the competitive state system turned out to be more of a problem than Industrialization.
Empire state building is an old theme in world history. The Thirty Years’ War, fought throughout central Europe from 1618–1648 between Protestants and Catholics, laid the legal foundation for the nation-state. The war involved many nations of Europe, including many small German states, the Austrian Empire, Sweden, France, and Spain. Despite a brutal war, the Catholics were unable to overturn Protestantism. The treaty that ended the war, called the Peace of Westphalia, decreed that the sovereign ruler of a state had power over all elements of both the nation and the state, including religion. Thus, the modern idea of a

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