18.2 Wars And Diplomacy (Ryan Ch)

Chapter 18 Assignment #3 18.2 Wars and Diplomacy (Ryan Cho)
What is ‘balance of power’?
-The philosophes condemned war as a foolish waste of life and resources in stupid quarrels of no value to humankind. Rulers, however, paid little attention to these comments and continued their costly struggles. By the eighteenth century, the European system of self-governing, individual states was grounded largely in the principle of self-interest. Because international solutions and relations were based on considerations of power, the eighteenth-century concept of balance of power was predicated on how to counterbalance the power of one state by another to prevent any one state from dominating the other(s). This balance of power, however, did not imply

After Charles Vi’s death, however, the Pragmatic Sanction was pushed aside, especially by Frederick II, who had recently succeeded to the throne of Prussia. The new Prussian ruler took advantage of the new empress to invade Austrian Silesia. The vulnerability of Maria Theresa encouraged France to enter the war against its traditional enemy Austria. Thus, Maria made an alliance with Great Britain, which feared French hegemony over Continental affairs. Thus, (and all too quickly), the Austrian succession had set off a worldwide conflagration. The war was fought not only in Europe, where Prussia seized Silesia and France occupied the Austrian Netherlands, but in the east, where France took Madras in India from the British, and in North America, where the British captured the French fortress of Louisburg at the entrance to the St. Lawrence River. This all ended in 1748, when all parties in the war were exhausted and then agreed to stop. A peace treaty returned all taken land from Silesia back to their original