Monarchies. In 1750 all the major states of Europe except Great Britain were headed by monarchies in which one man theoretically held absolute authority. Over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries all of these...

Between Two Wars. Two world wars serve to frame the historical era between 1750 and 1914: the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), whose American component was the French and Indian War (1754-1763), and the "Great War," now known as World War I (1914-1918). In...

New Era. In 1750 the British Isles and the European continent were on the verge of enormous change. Innovations in farming would increase the food supply; more children would survive childhood; the population would grow dramatically; machines would...

Two Revolutions. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution had major repercussions in the modern era, not only on political and economic history but also on European family and social life. The French Revolution popularized ideas of...

European Religious Prospects. By the eighteenth century, European Christianity in general, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, had largely recovered from the political and moral difficulties that had confronted it during the turbulent...

The Enlightenment. The cultural movement known as the Enlightenment emerged in the late seventeenth century as a reaction against two dominant institutions: the Roman Catholic Church and the absolutist French monarchy of Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715)....

Growing Interdependence. During the nineteenth century a series of technological innovations and political transformations dramatically reshaped communications at a global level. As a result of industrialization and imperialism, fundamentally entwined...

Time of Change. The period from 1750 to 1914 was truly revolutionary for Europe. First, the economic base was transformed by industrialism, which caused state societies to become predominantly urban for the first time in world history. Second, state...

The Akan tribe breaks away from the large and powerful Asante Empire and founds a new state, the Baoule kingdom, on the Ivory Coast in western...

Europe 1865 The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late 1700s, spread eastward across the European continent and into Russia by the late 1800s. Throughout the nineteenth century, almost every European country industrialized to some...

Era of Australopithecus, the first...

The History of Europe describes the passage of time from humans inhabiting the European continent to the present day. The first evidence of people living in Europe dates back to 35,000 BC. Europe's ancient classical antiquity dates from Homer's Iliad in...