Turkey, he joined a coalition against Sweden, the objective of which was to end Sweden’s longstanding domination of the Baltic. This led to the Great Northern War, which lasted more than 20 years. Following initial setbacks, Peter reorganized his armed forces, founded a fortress at St. Petersburg on the Baltic, and ultimately defeated the Swedish king. In 1713, in conjunction with his efforts to reform Russia, he made St. Petersburg his country’s capital. It became Russia’s long-sought port and a window to the West.
1761–1763 Britain Achieves Supremacy in India and Canada
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries Britain and France competed against each other, and with other countries like Portugal and Holland, in establishing colonies abroad and taking control of far-flung territories. This was the case not only in sparsely inhabited regions like North America but also in densely populated places like India and the East Indies. The object was to find and seize wealth directly, as Spain had done in Mexico and Peru, and to create and profit from trade in marketable items. Britain, despite having a smaller population than France, was more successful in competing due to a more efficient economy and more balanced form of government. After a long series of colonial conflicts, the British took Canada from France at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Two years earlier a British army crushed French forces in India, leaving the British East India Company in control of that country’s increasingly profitable textile and opium trades. 1776 Franciscans Found Mission San Juan Capistrano Spain had sought to convert Native Americans to Christianity from the time of its earliest explorations, but it was not until 1741, when Russian territorial ambitions in North America became known, that King Philip V decided that religious missions were necessary in Upper California. Almost three decades later, after the Jesuits, founders of 18 missions in Baja California, had been suppressed in Spain, the Spanish viceroy entrusted the Baja missions to the Dominican order so that priests of the Franciscan order could establish new missions farther north. An expedition under Father Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portola founded the first of these in 1769 in San Diego, and additional missions were quickly established in Carmel, San Gabriel, San Luis Obispo, and San
Figure 15. Mission San Juan Capistrano is California’s oldest building still in use. Image courtesy of Henry F. Withey and Historic American Buildings Survey.
Francisco. The mission in San Juan Capistrano dates from November 1, 1776, and has the distinction of possessing the oldest building in California still in use, the only extant structure where Father Serra celebrated mass. Records indicate that almost 5,000 Native Americans were baptized at San Juan between 1776 and 1847. SEE FIGURE 15
1776 Adam Smith Champions Free Market Economics
The father of liberal economics (in the classic sense of the term), Adam Smith first established himself as a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, where he became known for his conviction that moral sentiments arise from human empathy. In the 1760s his interests shifted to jurisprudence and economics, and in 1776 he published what was to become a classic of political economy, The Wealth of Nations . With this study Smith launched a vigorous attack on Mercantilism, the dominant economic theory of the previous two centuries, the doctrine that government control of the economy was necessary to ensure security of the state. Mercantilism taught that a positive balance of trade was essential and that this should be achieved by such means as subsidizing manufactures, placing tariffs on imports, and prohibiting a nation’s colonies from trading with other countries. Smith maintained that wealth, not security, should be a nation’s paramount objective and that self-interested individuals competing in a free market would, like an “invisible hand,” enrich society as a whole.
15
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator