Undeniably the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe (or for that matter in China and to a lesser extent India) was an eventful period, full of conflicts. In China a dynasty collapsed amidst peasant revolts and for the last time nomadic invaders conquered the settled lands. In Europe there were more widespread and prolonged wars than ever before, the assassination of one king and the execution of another, while revolts of whole kingdoms and provinces against their rulers took place from Ireland to the Ukraine, from Muscovy, to Naples and from Portugal to Anatolia. But has this period in Europe any distinctive character or significance for those who feel a need to find such things in history? Recent fashions would cause many historians to answer No for a variety of reasons. The most general one would be that to make Europe the centre of a general history is at once anachronistic and parochial, a quaint attempt to prolong nostalgic memories of the domination of the world by western European culture and power, which ended in 1942, if not before. As Europe's place in the world has changed, so has our perspective of history. Still obsessed by the view which tacitly dominated so many earlier European historians that power is the essential subject of history and that only success and never failure deserve study, some historians were so disorientated by Europe's loss of power and so beguiled by the rhetoric of the new leaders of Afro-Asian states and by counting the heads of the big battalions that they became prophets, unmaking the past in order to gratify an imaginary present and an improbable future.