The Greatest Story in the World, Period 3

The Greatest Story in the World, Period 3

Horace G. Hutchinson's third volume of "The Greatest Story in the World" traces the interlocking history of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas from roughly 1492 to the mid-eighteenth century, framing the era as the moment the world became one continuous story. It opens with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, correcting the popular record: Columbus reached only the West Indies while believing he had found Asia, whereas da Gama's rounding of Africa to reach India's Malabar coast was the greater feat of navigation, opening a direct sea route that let Portugal seize the Indian Ocean spice trade from Arab and Venetian middlemen. Prince Henry the Navigator's earlier sponsorship of African exploration, driven by gold, slaves, and missionary zeal, is presented as the seedbed of this expansion. Spain and Portugal partitioned the non-Christian world by papal Bull, while Cortez's conquest of Mexico and Pizarro's of Peru poured treasure into Spain, and Magellan's expedition completed the first circumnavigation. The book then surveys the "old" civilizations the new sea routes connected: China's ancient, remarkably stable empire under Confucian ethics, repeatedly conquered yet culturally absorbing its conquerors, including the Mongol dynasty of Kublai Khan and the Ming and Manchu successions; Japan's late-blooming, warrior-honoring culture shaped by Buddhism and civil war; India's caste-structured Hindu society, Buddha's teaching, and the successive Islamic invasions culminating in the Mogul Empire; and the Ottoman Turks' expanding "fighting religion" pressing into Europe. The narrative's center of gravity then shifts to the Reformation and the collision of Renaissance Italy's cultural flowering with dynastic warfare. Charles V's vast, scattered Habsburg inheritance, Francis I of France's Italian ambitions, and Henry VIII's break from Rome (driven by his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, engineered through Wolsey and Cromwell) are treated as reshaping Europe alongside Luther's doctrinal revolt, the burning of the papal Bull, and the spread of Protestantism northward through Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. Philip II's Spain, wielding the Inquisition, provokes the Dutch revolt led by William the Silent, a war of religion and independence that drags in England, France's Huguenot conflicts (culminating in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and Henry of Navarre's Edict of Nantes), and Elizabethan England's naval defiance of Spain, climaxing in the defeat of the Armada. Religious and dynastic strife continues into the Thirty Years' War, ignited by Bohemian Protestant resistance and carried by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, ending with the Peace of Westphalia, which secures Dutch and Swiss independence and diminishes imperial authority. In England, the Stuart kings' attempts at Tudor-style absolutism without Parliament provoke civil war between Cavaliers and Puritans; Charles I is executed, and Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth briefly makes England a feared naval and military power, clashing with Holland over trade (the Navigation Act) before the monarchy's Restoration. Louis XIV's France then rises to European dominance, its glittering, despotic court resting on a crushed and impoverished peasantry, while his aggressions provoke coalitions leading to the War of the Spanish Succession, fought largely by Marlborough, and settled by the Peace of Utrecht, which curbs French ambition and enshrines the principle of the "balance of power." Parallel to this, the book tracks colonial expansion: English, French, Dutch, and Spanish settlement of North America (Virginia, New England, Quebec, Louisiana, the Pilgrim and Puritan migrations driven by religious persecution), the East India Company's footholds in India, and Dutch dominance in the Malay Archipelago. Wars of succession continue—over Poland and Austria—with Frederick the Great's Prussia emerging as a formidable new power by seizing Silesia, while Jacobite risings ("the Fifteen" and "the Forty-five") fail to restore the Stuarts, cementing the Hanoverian dynasty. The narrative closes with the Seven Years' War, presented as a hinge event: though it left Europe's map largely unchanged, it entrenched Prussia as the nucleus of future German unity, and—far more consequentially for the "world story"—it decided the Anglo-French contest overseas. Robert Clive's victory at Plassey and the British triumph at Wandewash established Britain as the dominant European power in India, while Wolfe's capture of Quebec ended French ambitions in North America, opening the western continent to British expansion and setting the stage, the author notes, for the coming separation of the American colonies from Britain. Throughout, Hutchinson emphasizes recurring patterns: religious persecution driving migrations that enriched host nations (Huguenots, Puritans, expelled Spanish Jews and Moors), the gradual transfer of European supremacy from Spain to France to a Franco-British-Prussian contest, and the slow, largely invisible way European powers were only beginning to grasp the true scale and future importance of the Americas and Asia they had connected.

By Horace G. Hutchinson · First published 1926 · Genre: World History, European History, Colonial History · 18 chapters · 94,796 words

First lines

Suddenly, at the end of the fifteenth century, the persons of our / story found the picture of the world which they carried in their / minds wonderfully expanded, rather as if it were a closed fist widely / opening. Columbus in 1492 "discovered America": Vasco da Gama, in / 1487, "rounded the Cape of Good Hope."

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fiction · British literature · early twentieth century · historical fiction · adventure · romance · humor · social commentary · English society · sporting culture · leisure · outdoor life

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