The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International ChangeScholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. |
Contents
Preface | xi |
Introduction | 1 |
Theorizing International Change | 20 |
The DynasticImperial Pathway | 67 |
Religious Contention and the Dynamics of Composite States | 99 |
The Rise and Decline of Charles of Habsburg | 135 |
The Dynamics of Spanish Hegemony in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries | 185 |
The French Wars of Religion | 235 |
Westphalia Refrained | 265 |
Looking Forward Looking Back | 289 |