Ten Cities That Made an Empire

Two important consequences flowed from the limited degree of political integration that the main ancien régime states had achieved. Firstly, they usually lacked the means to exert real control over the activities of their subjects and citizens in the extra-European world. Their colonial policies were a battleground where mercantile lobbies, aristoc

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.