ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the path of diplomatic history to see how Europe expanded to include the world and countries became Great Powers and it examines the intellectual history to see the pursuit of truth and certainty in philosophy, science and in political theory. Most have argued that the modern world began around 1800, the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, when mass politics and rapid economic change became widespread. The first part of the early modern era falls fairly easily under the labels Renaissance and Reformation. These were the two great cultural and social movements that dissolved the medieval worldview. The chapter also explores the creation of public sphere, the relegation of women to the merely private, and women's struggle against it by the rise of commercial culture and the economic expansion that made it possible. Finally, it examines the calls for reform and revolution in the late eighteenth century and their culmination in the French Revolution and Napoleon.
