(^148) Chapter Five
European balance of power. States located towards the margins of the
European world—Great Britain and Russia in particular—were able to
increase their control of resources more rapidly than was possible in
the more crowded center. The rise of such march states to dominance
over older and smaller polities located near a center where important
innovation first concentrated is one of the oldest and best-attested
patterns of civilized history.^3 What happened among the great powers
of Europe in the eighteenth century, therefore, ought to be under
stood as no more than a recent example of a very old process, a
process which, of course, continued into the nineteenth century and
has by no means come to any final equilibrium point in the twentieth.
European expansion in the eighteenth century, however, occurred
so symmetrically that no one state achieved an overwhelming prepon
derance over all others. Until the 1780s, France and Britain rivaled
and roughly counterbalanced each other in sharing enhanced re
sources from overseas expansion, while in the east Austria and Prussia
disputed with Russia (though with less and less success as the century
advanced) the advantages of a position on Europe’s landward frontier.
European political pluralism therefore survived, despite some rather
sharp perturbations. The survival of a plurality of competing states, in
turn, maintained Europe’s uniqueness compared to the major civiliza
tions of Asia, where gunpowder empires created in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries continued to prevail, sometimes, as in China, in
a flourishing condition, and sometimes, as in India, in increasing
disarray.
The multiplicity of European states produced an enormous political
confusion. Diplomatic and military alignments shifted from time to
time in kaleidoscopic fashion. All the same, it seems worth suggesting
that a noticeable change came to the system after 1714, when the War
of the Spanish Succession ended. By that date, the coalition of states
that had formed to check the preponderance of Louis XIV’s armies on
- March states conquered older, smaller polities at least three times in the ancient
Near East: Akkad (ca. 2350 B.C.); Assyria (ca. 1000–612 B.C.); and Persia (550–331
B.C. ). Mediterranean history offers a similar array of instances: the rise of Macedon (338
B.C.) and then of Rome (168 B.C.) in classical times followed in modern times by the
Spanish domination over Italy (by 1557) which we looked at briefly in the preceding
chapter. Ancient China (rise of Ch’in, 221 B.C.) and ancient India (rise of Magadha, ca.
321 B.C.) as well as Amerindian Mexico (Aztecs) and Peru (Incas) all seem to exhibit a
parallel pattern. This is not surprising. A given level of organization and technique, if
applied to a larger territorial base, can be expected to yield greater results. This was
often possible on the margins of specially skilled centers of civilization; and whenever a
ruler managed to confirm his power over a comparatively vast, marginal territory, the
possibility of conquering older centers of wealth and skill with a semibarbarian force
organized along civilized lines regularly arose and was often acted on.