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.
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“The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
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There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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