ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century, from the Utrecht settlement to the French Revolution, was a
period of order and progress in Europe. An international society of states, or princes,
functioned well, with rules and institutions and underlying assumptions which its
members accepted. Wars, in the sense of conflicts between states involving military
operations, there certainly were. But they were not wars for great religious causes, or
about how hegemonial the states system should be. They were minor wars of adjustment:
the final means, after other pressures and inducements had not succeeded, of compelling
those modifications of the balance between the states of the system which the logic of
changing power dictated. In this chapter we will look at the main formative elements of
eighteenth-century European international society, and the premisses on which it rested.
