The Relations Between England and the Northern Powers, 1689–1697.: Part I.—Denmark

1911 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 157-191
Author(s):  
M. Lane

A notable feature of Baltic politics at the close of the seventeenth century was the rivalry of Sweden and Denmark, which had fought with each other during several centuries for supremacy, or even for existence. To the permanence and strength of this feeling, and its importance in the politics of the North, contemporary and modern authorities, the correspondence of Louis XIV and William III and their ministers, with Ranke, Bain, and the ‘Cambridge Modern History,’ equally bear witness. At this period, however, Denmark hankered after an alliance with Sweden, of course on her own terms. The explanation is that Denmark was a more purely Baltic Power than Sweden; If there had been peace in the Baltic, Denmark could have become powerful and wealthy; but her ministers, themselves wretchedly poor, were actuated by mercenary motives. Hence the dangerous policy of fleecing the merchants who passed the Oresund. Unfortunately, the refusal of Sweden to come to terms with her rival made it possible for the English and Dutch, especially the latter, to maintain a balance of power in the Baltic, and thus diminish Denmark's gains. Griffenfeld, who has been regarded as Denmark's greatest statesman, had seen how beneficial an alliance with Sweden, with the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp (whose efforts against Danish absorption were vigorously supported by Sweden) and France, the rival of the Sea Powers, would be to Denmark, provided she, and not Sweden, manipulated the policy of the league for her own benefit.

1962 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 123-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Ryan

The French victories over Prussia and Russia in 1806–07 enabled Napoleon to impose upon the continent a peace diametrically opposed to the interests of Britain. An essential condition of it, as was made clear in the Berlin Decree and the Franco-Russian treaty of Tilsit, was that Britain should be banished from Europe. Within a few months of the Tilsit agreement in July 1807 all the northern powers, except Sweden which kept out of the French alliance until 1810, were formally at war with Britain and were pledged to break their commercial connexions with her. It appeared that Napoleon, with the aid of Russia, Prussia and Denmark–Norway, had finally shut the Baltic to British trade and had thus made the commercial exclusion of Britain from the continent a reality. As things turned out, trade between Britain and the north of Europe, though harassed by enemy commerce raiders and impeded by French agents, was not destroyed. The Scandinavian and Baltic ports, the last in Europe to come under French influence, were never firmly closed even when Napoleon''s continental system was most effectively enforced in 1811


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-592
Author(s):  
Daniel Riches

Thediplomatic and religious climate in Protestant Northern Europe during the era of Louis XIV was filled with competing and at times contradictory impulses, and the repercussions of Louis's expansionist and anti-Protestant policies on the relations between the Protestant states were varied and complex. Taken in conjunction with the ascension of Catholic James II in Britain in February 1685 and the succession of the Catholic House of Neuburg in the Palatinate following the death of the last Calvinist elector in May of that year, Louis's reintroduction of the mass ins the “reunited” territories and his increasing persecution of the Huguenots in France added to an acute sense among European Protestants that the survival of their religion was threatened. It is a well-established theme in the standard literature on seventeenth-century Europe that the culmination of Louis's attack on the Huguenots in his revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 galvanized the continents Protestant powers in a common sense of outrage and united them in a spirit of political cooperation against France. Indeed, such an astute contemporary observer as Leibniz was to write in the early 1690s that it appeared now “as if all of the north is opposed to the south of Europe; the great majority of the Germanic peoples are opposed to the Latins.” Even Bossuet had to declare that “your so-called Reformation … was never more powerful nor more united. All of the Protestants have joined forces. From the outside, the Reformation is very cohesive, more haughty and more menacing than ever.”


Author(s):  
J. T. Cunningham

IN my report, in the preceding number of this Journal, on my observations in the North Sea, I referred briefly to the problem of the relation between the physical and biological conditions. This problem will afford scope for investigation for some time to come, and the purpose of the present article is to discuss and compare some of the most recent additions to our knowledge of the matter. The paper by Mr. H. N. Dickson, to which I referred in my previous report, was published in the Geographical Journal last March, under the title of “The Movements of the Surface Waters of the North Sea,” and in the Scottish Geographical Journal, in 1894, was published a series of papers by Professor Pettersson on “Swedish Hydrographic Research in the Baltic and the North Seas.” Professor Heincke has discussed the fish fauna of Heligoland, its composition and sources, in an interesting paper in the series issued under the title of “Wissenschaftliche Meeresuntersuchungen,” by the staff of the Biological Station at Heligoland, in association with the Commission for the Investigation of the German Seas, at Kiel. Professor Heincke's paper is contained in Bnd. I., Hft. 1 of this series (1894), and in the same volume are a number of papers dealing on similar lines with other divisions of the marine fauna of the Heligoland Bight.It will be most convenient and logical to start the present discussion with a consideration of the results of Professor Pettersson's work. He found that the Skagerack and Cattegat were filled with layers of water distinguished from one another by differences of salinity, and that the lower layers entered the channel as under–currents, and could be recognised at the surface somewhere in the North Sea.


1964 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Beare

One of the most primitive and genuine elements of Roman religion was the feeling that some mysterious power haunted the dark wood. Germany was pre-eminently the land of dark woods in which the practical-minded Roman faltered and lost his way. There were the woods along the banks of the Rhine, in which we sometimes walked in our student days at the University of Bonn. There was the wooded Taunus range, where we visited the reconstructed Saalburg, a fort belonging to the limes or line of entrenchments constructed to protect the Roman territory in south-west Germany. There was Abnoba, the Black Forest; there was the Hercynian Forest; a vague term applied to the vast range of wooded hills stretching a thousand miles from the Rhine along the Danube and around Bohemia to the Carpathians; there was the Saltus Teutoburgiensis, where in A.d. 9 Quintilius Varus and his three legions had been wiped out by the Cherusci under their leader Arminius in a battle which had turned the tide of history; there was the unknown island wood where our grim ancestors, the Anglii and the Saxones, performed the gloomy rites of the goddess Nerthus from which none of the slave ministrants was allowed to come away alive. Beyond lay even wilder regions and more savage peoples: the Aestii or Esthonians, who wore boars' heads and lived on the Baltic shore, from which they gathered amber and were astonished to receive a price for it from the traders; the nomadic Sarmatae of central and southern Russia, who lived in wagons and ate horse-flesh; the ferocious Fenni, or Finns, who had no home at all, but slept on the ground and lived on herbs and any animals they could shoot with their bone-tipped arrows, hunting with the bow being the life of both the man and the woman, while the babies were left with no protection against weather and wild creatures except a sort of hovel made out of interlaced branches; and further still the Hellusii and the Oxiones, who had the faces of men and the bodies of animals; to the north the dead seas of the midnight sun, the frozen Arctic Ocean, where every morning could be heard the noise of the sun rising from the waters, and the horses drawing his chariot could be seen.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 199-218
Author(s):  
Blythe Alice Raviola

Although the court of Turin’s role in the new balance of power in Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession is well known, far less is known about the strategic function of its collateral courts, such as the court of the princes of Savoy-Carignano. Based on the correspondence of the Savoy ambassador to Madrid, Costanzo Operti (1690–95), this article focuses on these courts to demonstrate the formal and informal diplomatic interplay among male and female aristocrats from 1640 to the end of the seventeenth century. One such noblewoman, Olimpia Mancini of Carignano-Soissons, was an Italian who grew up in the French court and maintained a close relationship with Louis XIV. As the wife of a prince of the Savoy-Carignano branch, she held important positions in Turin, Paris, and Madrid. Mother to the famous prince and military warrior Eugene of Savoy, after she lost her powerful status in France, she sought to find a place in the Madrid court as lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Louise de Orléans. Her mother-in-law, Marie de Bourbon-Soissons, played an outstanding role in maintaining the honour and prestige of the court of Carignano.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott

This chapter focuses upon developments within what may be retrospectively designated an Anglo-Dutch-American archipelago. This was a geographical constellation, incorporating the Northern Netherlands, the British Isles and Atlantic North America, connected by people, their culture, and ships. In more modern metaphorical terms it scrutinizes the Anglo-Dutch subsection of the runway, and the aviation fuel in question, which was importantly North American. The chapter describes a series of economic, cultural, political, and military changes which began in the region between the Baltic and North Sea before crossing the North Sea, and then the Atlantic. The result was the process here called Anglo-Dutch-American early modernity. This world-changing current of invention (oceanic to begin with, electric eventually) achieved a breakthrough in the Low Countries, gathered heft and momentum in seventeenth-century England, and by connection with North America made something new.


1966 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 92-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Jenks

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.


Author(s):  
J. Anthony VanDuzer

SummaryRecently, there has been a proliferation of international agreements imposing minimum standards on states in respect of their treatment of foreign investors and allowing investors to initiate dispute settlement proceedings where a state violates these standards. Of greatest significance to Canada is Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which provides both standards for state behaviour and the right to initiate binding arbitration. Since 1996, four cases have been brought under Chapter 11. This note describes the Chapter 11 process and suggests some of the issues that may arise as it is increasingly resorted to by investors.


2003 ◽  
pp. 136-146
Author(s):  
K. Liuhto

Statistical data on reserves, production and exports of Russian oil are provided in the article. The author pays special attention to the expansion of opportunities of sea oil transportation by construction of new oil terminals in the North-West of the country and first of all the largest terminal in Murmansk. In his opinion, one of the main problems in this sphere is prevention of ecological accidents in the process of oil transportation through the Baltic sea ports.


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