This book presents a narrative history of Europe, including Britain and Ireland, from the end of the sixteenth century to the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721.

David J. Sturdy is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Ulster in Coleraine. His previous publications include The d'Aligres de la Rivière: Servants of the Bourbon State in the Seventeenth Century (1986), Science and Social Status in Early Modern France: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (1995) and Louis XIV (1998).