ABSTRACT
This volume will deal with the economic and social changes which took place in Europe between the second half of the fifteenth century and the last quarter of the eighteenth. This long period was an age of growth and expansion, and of every kind of material progress. After the Turkish attack, which submerged Constantinople, the Balkans and Greece, and even for an instant washed the walls of Vienna, this continent was never again the victim of foreign invasion. Henceforth it was Europe which, like an inexhaustible reservoir of men and of vigour, overflowed the rest of the globe, whose peoples became the conquerors and colonisers of the world, supreme on land and sea, carrying their civilisation to every corner of the earth.
