This volume surveys the political, military and diplomatic history of a period of changing alliances and limited and gentlemanly but frequent wars. It gives particular weight to the emergence of Prussia and Russia as European Powers and to the rivalry of France and England in America, in India and on the high seas. The economic background to these national fortunes is of increasing international trade, technological progress and colonialisation. Socially, European society slowly evolved from the domination of the aristocracy to that of urban populations and bourgeois administrators. Intellectually, the culture of Europe took on what are recognized as specifically eighteenth-century forms and ideals. From the point of view of world history this period saw the confirmation of European pre-eminence and dominion.

This volume of The New Cambridge Modern History examines the period 1793-1830.

The rise of Great Britain and Russia is the focus of this particular volume of The New Cambridge Modern History.

The fourth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which comprised perhaps the most dynamic period in the European middle ages. This is a history of Europe, but the continent is interpreted widely to include the Near East and North Africa. The volume is divided into two parts of which this, the second, deals with the course of events - ecclesiastical and secular - and major developments in an age marked by the transformation of the position of the papacy in a process fuelled by a radical reformation of the church, the decline of the western and eastern empires, the rise of western kingdoms and Italian elites, and the development of governmental structures, the beginnings of the recovery of Spain from the Moors and the establishment of western settlements in the eastern Mediterranean region in the wake of the crusades.

This volume examines the ascendancy of France during the period 1648-1688.