18 European Power And Expansion 1500–1750

> How did European central governments consolidate and expand their power in the early modern period? Chapter 17 examines the European struggle for stability in the early modern period. This struggle originated with conflicts sparked by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in the early sixteenth century and continued with economic and social breakdown into the late seventeenth century. Between roughly 1589 and 1715 two basic patterns of government emerged from these conflicts: absolute monarchy and the constitutional state. Whether a government was constitutional or absolutist, an important foundation of state power was empire and colonialism. Jealous of Iberian overseas holdings, England, France, and the Netherlands vied for new acquisitions in Asia and the Americas, while Russia pushed its borders east to the Pacific.