1. Revolutionary Changes in the Atlantic World Prelude to Revolution:
1750–1850 The Eighteenth-Century Crisis
• Rivalry among the European powers intensified in • The costs of wars in the seventeenth and
the early 1600s. eighteenth centuries drove European governments
• The Dutch attacked Spanish and Portuguese to seek new sources of revenue.
possessions in the Americas and in Asia. • People questioned and protested the state’s
• In the 1600s and 1700s the British then checked attempts to introduce new ways of collecting
Dutch commercial and colonial ambitions. revenue.
• British went on to:
– Defeat France in the Seven Years War (1756–1763)
– Take over French colonial possessions in the Americas
and in Indi