ABSTRACT
The world crisis outside Europe was brought about by changes working within these societies and economies, as much as by the export of European conflict. The British and Dutch East India Companies and the remnants of royalist French government in the colonial world had moved along the same road as the European nobilities and the last pre-revolutionary governments in the last quarter of the eighteenth century by mounting a fiscal attack on peasant farmers. The consequences of the decline of the old hegemonies of the Islamic world also reached their climacteric between 1780 and 1820. In many other parts of the world, clandestine church activity and Christian messianism provided a groundwork for popular resistances against states in crisis: in Calabria and the Iberian Peninsula, Catholic pietism was an influential strand in the fight against Napoleon's republican despotism. The effects were most striking on the outer fringes of the world civilisations.
