Lords spiritual and temporal, who had ruled Europe for centuries, were joined by lords commercial, enriched by the growth of trade, transport and developing industry.

Generations passed into centuries—­the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth.  From small local beginnings the nations of western Europe emerged:  Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Italy, Austria and eventually Russia.  Each was a consolidation of local principalities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms.  Each was passing through the rural-urban transformation.  Each was outgrowing feudalism and producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals, tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle class and a proletariat.  After the fifteenth century each state was spilling over its own frontiers, annexing or losing neighboring territory, spreading beyond the boundaries of Europe into the teeming markets of Asia and the newly discovered treasure-house of the Americas.

A score of European peoples were engaged in the give-and-take of this struggle for wealth and power—­for land and its resources in Europe, North Africa and the Near East; for booty, trade and overseas colonies.  As the struggle grew more intense smaller and weaker nations dropped out of the contest or were partitioned and gobbled up piecemeal.

Such was the condition of Europe’s free-for-all in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century, while three developing forces pushed into the forefront of European life:  the enlightenment and science, representative government, and the industrial revolution.

Enlightenment broadened the social basis of knowledge and learning.  During the Dark Ages, knowledge and learning were a monopoly of a tiny privileged minority composed of priests, scholars and a segment of the aristocracy.  Monasteries, great houses and trading cities sheltered this monopoly.  The countryside was a sea of ignorance, superstition, oppression and exploitation.  With the printing press came books.  Books promoted literacy and curiosity.  Literacy and curiosity led to speculation, experiment, discovery and the formulation and spread of ideas.  The product of these forces was science, which had had a long period of gestation in North Africa and Asia.

Dark Ages of localism, with landlords, priests and soldiers directing public affairs led to the concentration of wealth and power in the landed aristocracy and the church.  But traders in the countryside and merchants in the centers of commerce held a talisman that opened before them ever increasing sources of wealth.  Country dwellers harvested one crop a year.  When crops were poor they starved.  At best the margin of profit was thin.  Traders and merchants made a profit every time they found a customer.  The countryside lived on a use economy supplemented by barter.  As money increased in quantity it was loaned at rates of interest by merchants and bankers who owned it and used it for their purposes.  Accumulating wealth and money enabled the traders, merchants, bankers and manufacturers to out-buy and out-point landlords and churchmen.  Politically, these changes reduced the authority of absolute monarchies.  In their places representative governments made their appearance.