The Political Integration of the European States

In this chapter we examine the political integration of the modern European nation states, and we relate the process of their political integration to their economic status in 1850. Our story begins in the fifteenth century, in fact, when the Portuguese launched the Age of Discovery in their quest for a sea route to the Far East. At almost the same time, and not entirely coincidentally, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople. Half a century later, the Protestant Reformation began. More than any other, these three events mark the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era — the first because it shifted European economic focus away from the overland trade with the East; the second because effectively it destroyed the last political vestiges of the Roman Empire, the decline of which in the West had marked the beginning of the Middle Ages; and the third because it shattered the Roman Catholic Church’s control over much of the political, economic and social life of Europe. In terms of economic history, this new era was dominated by an expansion of trade that created a golden age for the merchant capitalist, a development that can be related directly to the above events.