World War - World Wars Before The 20th Century

World Wars Before The 20th Century

Before the 20th century, there were a number of wars spanning multiple continents, including:

  • the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648)
  • the Dutch-Portuguese War (1602-1663)
  • the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), also called the "War of the Grand Alliance" or "War of the Palatine Succession"
  • the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)
  • the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748)
  • the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), which Winston Churchill called "the first world war" in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
  • the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
  • the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and
  • the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815)

Before the late 19th century, the concept of a world war would be the result of military action caused by quarrels between European powers which took place in fairly limited, though sometimes far-flung, theaters of conflict.

Read more about this topic:  World War

Famous quotes containing the words world, wars and/or century:

    “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
    —John Hersey (b. 1914)

    “The soger frae the wars returns,
    The sailor frae the main,
    But I hae parted frae my Love,
    Never to meet again, my dear,
    Never to meet again.”
    —Robert Burns (1759–1796)

    “The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”
    —Norman Mailer (b. 1923)