ABSTRACT
‘Europe’ is an awkward word. No-one looking at the earth from outside it would see this messily shaped western part of the greatest land-area as a separate unit; and it has never had a natural or political eastern boundary of any significance. The convention that its limit runs across the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Steppes to the rough south-to-north line of the Urals was not established until the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth the Volga or the Ob seemed more relevant. ‘Christendom’ was still a commoner term than ‘Europe.’ During the century several slow developments made Europe a better-defined unit, politically and even emotionally. Russia, which had seemed almost as remote as China from the diplomatic and economic affairs of the west, was by the time of Peter the Great’s death in 1725 committed to the conflicts and many of the ways of life of the continent as a whole. (Siberia as a colonial area gave it few close links with Asia.) While Russia was drawn further into the European system, the Ottoman Empire made what proved to be its last serious attempt at westward expansion. It still held in some form of subjection much the same European territory at the end of the century as at the beginning; but the sultan was now of less concern to any but the masses he exploited. In place of the occasional calls for Christendom to unite against the Turk, the enemies of Louis XIV were speaking of the interest of Europe in curtailing the excessive power of one of its own states. It was already apparent that the virtues of a balanced and stable system were most readily upheld by those governments that felt threatened by any move to change it.
