The Final Frontier

By the middle of the 18th century, all of the earth’s surface had been explored, charted, and in some cases colonized by Europeans.

In the 18th century the Pacific became the final frontier.

In 1771, Bougainville published an account of his voyage, the Voyage auteur de monde.

The Pacific islands were not merely the rococo pleasure grounds that Bougainville's and Commerson’s descriptions had made them.

They were also revictualing places for European merchant ships and potential stages on the route to the fabled southern continent.

Empire, Race, and Nation

Cook’s triumph, as panegyrists made plain, had not only been the triumph of science, but also the triumph of the British nation.

For Herder the concept of a people, a Volk, and the concept of an empire were simply incompatible.

European empires provided to be far more adaptable than Herder had allowed for.

The Greek Amphictyonic Council had been a loose federation of city-states dedicated to the protection of the temple of Demeter at Anthelia near Thermopylae.

By 1814, Napoleon himself was in exile on the island of Elba.

Despite obvious problems of coherence, a belief in common racial ancestry played a crucial role in the British attemps to rule India.

Ending

In the end of the 18th century Europeans were now well on their war to establishing the hegemony that would survive until the middle of the 20th century.

The Ottoman Sultanate resisted European incursions by playing off one power against another in what came to be called the “Great Game”

Macartney is best remembered today for his celebrated refusal to perform the traditional kowtow before the emperor.

The fall of the modern European empires was rapid as their rise had been, and in most places their reasons were the same.

EPILOGUE

The modern world can not survive for long with the kind of murderous hostility that long historical memories invariably create.

The Crusades were religious conflicts, and they took place at a time when the Muslim world was as powerful as Christianity.

Christianity and Islam are both heresies of Judaism, and therefore have much in common, but in one crucial respect they are very different faiths.