European history before the late eighteenth century is the history of dynasties more than of nations. From the fall of Rome through the Middle Ages, power belonged to ruling houses whose territories grew by inheritance, marriage, and war, and whose subjects shared a sovereign rather than a language. There were exceptions — the Swiss cantons, the Italian and Dutch republics, the English constitutional settlement of 1688 — and the vocabulary of patriotism and popular sovereignty existed long before anyone tried to govern by it. But the working assumption of the European order was dynastic. The Reformation split Latin Christendom in the sixteenth century and produced more than a century of religious wars, ending at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which gave each ruler authority over religion and internal affairs within his own state. That settlement became the basic constitution of Europe and held in its essentials until 1789.

By the eighteenth century the system had organized itself into five recognized great powers. France, with roughly 28 million people, was the largest and richest, and its monarchy under Louis XIV had been the model every other court imitated — its etiquette copied at Vienna, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg, its language the working tongue of diplomacy and of educated society from Lisbon to Moscow. Britain, having beaten France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), was the dominant naval and commercial power, with a parliamentary monarchy, a global empire, and a system of public credit anchored by the Bank of England that let it borrow at rates no continental rival could match.

The Habsburgs ruled from Vienna over a multiethnic agglomeration — the Archduchy, Hungary, Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands, parts of northern Italy, Galicia — held together by dynasty rather than by any common language or institution. The Habsburg ruler also held a second and older title: Holy Roman Emperor, elected head of a thousand-year-old confederation of roughly three hundred German principalities, free cities, and ecclesiastical territories that covered most of central Europe. The Empire was archaic and unreformable, mocked by Voltaire as neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, but it was still the framework in which Germans lived. Austria was thus simultaneously a great power in its own right and the presiding authority over a larger German world. Prussia was the upstart inside that world — a kingdom ruled by the Hohenzollerns from Berlin, formally a junior prince of the Empire under the Habsburg emperor, but in practice the Habsburgs’ rival for primacy in Germany after Frederick the Great seized Silesia in 1740 and survived the Seven Years’ War against a coalition that should have destroyed him. That Austro-Prussian rivalry, which historians call dualism, would shape German politics for the next century and a quarter. Russia, the fifth power, had been great since Peter’s defeat of Sweden at Poltava in 1709, and Catherine extended it south to the Black Sea and west through the three partitions of Poland, which erased an independent Polish state from the map. To the south lay the Ottoman Empire, still in possession of the Balkans, Greece, and the Black Sea littoral, and beginning the slow contraction that would furnish Europe with its Eastern Question for the next century and a half.

Beneath the dynasties ran a social order treated as natural and divinely sanctioned. Society was divided into estates — clergy, nobility, and everyone else — each with distinct legal rights. Nobles were exempt from most direct taxation, owned a disproportionate share of the land, and monopolized the senior officer corps and higher church appointments. Serfdom had vanished in England and was weakening in France, but in Prussia, Austria, Poland, and above all Russia it was the basis of rural life: a Russian noble’s wealth was counted in souls, not acres. The Catholic Church held perhaps a tenth of the land in France and more elsewhere, ran most of the schools and hospitals, and collected its own tithes. Mid-century brought a reforming impulse from above — Frederick II, Catherine II, Joseph II — which rationalized administration, codified laws, and asserted state authority over the church while leaving the underlying order intact. None of these monarchs imagined that the Enlightenment vocabulary they patronized could be turned against the principle of monarchy itself.

The French Revolution did exactly that. Bankrupted by supporting the American war against Britain and unable to tax the privileged orders, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in 1789 for the first time since 1614, intending a fiscal expedient and producing instead a transfer of sovereignty. Within months the Bastille had fallen and the National Assembly had abolished feudalism in a single August night and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which announced that men were born free and equal in rights, that sovereignty resided in the nation, and that law was the expression of the general will. These were not new ideas — they had been argued for a generation in coffeehouses and books — but no European government had ever been built on them, and the claim that legitimacy flowed upward from the governed rather than downward from God and dynasty was, taken seriously, a declaration of war on every throne in Europe. The thrones understood this, and in 1792 the war began.

The republic executed Louis XVI in January 1793, found itself at war with Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, and most of the lesser powers, and responded with the levée en masse, conscripting in principle the entire male population and producing armies on a scale Europe had not seen since antiquity — by 1794 France had three quarters of a million men under arms. The Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre held the country together by terror, defeated the invasion, then in July 1794 turned on itself and sent Robespierre to the guillotine he had been feeding. The Directory that followed for five years won battlefield victories under a new generation of young commanders, lost domestic legitimacy through corruption and recurrent coups, and survived chiefly because no faction wished to restore the Bourbons and none could agree on anything else. On 18 Brumaire 1799 a twenty-nine-year-old Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, freshly returned from a failed campaign in Egypt and the most successful general of the Directory’s wars, overthrew it in a coup whose technical bungling was redeemed only by the fact that no one was prepared to defend the regime being overthrown.

Napoleon, as First Consul and from 1804 as Emperor, carried out the most thorough restructuring of Europe between the Reformation and the World Wars. At home he kept the Revolution’s social settlement — the end of feudalism, equality before the law, careers open to talent, the secularization of church property — and discarded its political instability, concluding a Concordat with the Pope in 1801, founding the Bank of France and the lycées, and promulgating in 1804 a Civil Code that protected property and contract on Roman foundations. Abroad he reorganized the map. The Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806 when its last emperor resigned the title rather than have Napoleon claim it, and in its place came the Confederation of the Rhine, a French-aligned grouping in which Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden were elevated to kingdoms and absorbed dozens of smaller territories, leaving Germany with roughly forty units in place of three hundred. Italy was consolidated into a handful of larger units. Spain was occupied in 1808 and given to his brother, triggering a six-year insurgency supported by Wellington that bled the French army continuously. Wherever French rule reached it brought the Code, conscription, the metric system, civil registries, the abolition of internal tolls and guilds, and the dismantling of seigneurial privilege — and behind these, the implicit demonstration that the old order was a human arrangement and could be replaced.

He defeated Austria at Austerlitz (1805), Prussia at Jena (1806), and Russia at Friedland (1807), which left him master of the continent. He could not defeat Britain. Trafalgar in 1805 destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet and ended any prospect of invasion, and his answer — the Continental System, closing European ports to British goods — required occupying every coastline in Europe, which drew him into Spain, into a quarrel with the Pope, and finally in 1812 into the invasion of Russia with more than half a million men. He reached Moscow; the city burned; the Tsar refused to negotiate; the retreat through the winter destroyed the army. A coalition of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, and Britain defeated him at Leipzig in 1813, invaded France, and forced his abdication. He escaped from Elba, ruled France for a hundred days, and was finally beaten at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. He died on Saint Helena in 1821.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Alexander I restored legitimate dynasties where they could, redrew borders to produce a balance no single power could overturn, and left intact most of Napoleon’s consolidations in Germany and Italy because the larger units were more useful than the patchwork they replaced. The Concert of Europe that followed managed the continent through congresses for a generation and suppressed liberalism and nationalism wherever they appeared. It held until the revolutions of 1848, which toppled governments from Paris to Vienna to Berlin on the promise of constitutions and national unification, and were crushed almost everywhere by the following year. It broke down definitively during the Crimean War of 1853–56. Britain and France fought Russia over the weakening Ottoman Empire, while Austria refused to support Russia despite having relied on Russian help to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1849. That refusal destroyed the conservative alignment among the eastern courts that had helped police Europe since 1815.

In the gap that opened, the map was remade. Italy was unified under Piedmont between 1859 and 1870. Germany was unified under Prussia between 1864 and 1871, through three short wars engineered by Bismarck against Denmark, Austria, and France, culminating in the proclamation of a German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — a coronation staged in the palace of the defeated, on the soil of the country whose revolution had set the whole sequence in motion. The Habsburgs reorganized themselves in 1867 as Austria-Hungary and turned south into the Balkans, where their ambitions ran directly into Russia’s and into the nationalisms of the peoples the Ottomans were slowly losing.

The diplomats who drew these borders only partly understood the forces remaking the society beneath them. Britain had been the world’s first industrial economy since before Waterloo — the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the coke-fired blast furnace were all in commercial use by 1815 — and the long peace and the security of the Royal Navy let her extend that lead into a global system of trade and finance. The continent followed, unevenly and on Britain’s terms. Between 1830 and 1900 the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the chemical and electrical industries remade European society more profoundly than any treaty: populations roughly doubled, cities outgrew the countryside for the first time in European history, literacy became general, and conscript armies of millions replaced the professional forces of the eighteenth century. The next war, when it came, would be fought by entire nations rather than by their kings’ regiments. The same industrial capacity fed a renewed scramble for empire that by 1900 had placed most of Africa and much of Asia under European flags. Mass politics arrived with the suffrage, and the old elites learned, slowly and unevenly, that the nationalism they had feared as the solvent of 1848 could be enlisted on the side of order — that a peasant who would not die for his king might die for his nation.