Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/521

CHAPTER XXXI HOW ENGLAND BECAME QUEEN OF THE OCEAN I. How EUROPE BEGAN TO EXTEND ITS COMMERCE OVER THE WHOLE WORLD 669. England establishes her Supremacy on the Sea. In the last chapter we reviewed the progress of affairs in eastern Europe and noted the development of two new European powers, Prussia and Russia, which have for the past two centuries played a great part in the affairs of the world. In the West, England was rapidly becoming the most important state. While she did not greatly influence the course of the wars on the Continent, she was already beginning to make herself mistress of the seas a position which she still holds, owing to her colonies and her unrivaled fleet. At the close of the War of the Spanish Succession ( 641, 642) her navy was superior to that of any other power, for both France and Spain had been greatly weakened by the long conflict. Fifty years after the Treaty of Utrecht, England had succeeded in driving out the French both from North America and from India and in laying the foundations of her vast empire beyond the seas, which secured for her in the nineteenth century the commercial supremacy of the world. 670. Vast Extent of the European Colonial Dominion. The long and disastrous wars of the eighteenth century were much more than merely quarrels of monarchs. They were caused also by commercial and colonial rivalries, and they extended to the most distant parts of the world. From the seventeenth century on, the internal affairs of each country have been constantly in- fluenced by the demands of its merchants and the achievements of its sailors and soldiers, fighting rival nations or alien peoples 389