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.

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

    “The places we have known do not only belong to the world of space in which we situate them for the sake of simplicity. They were but a thin slice between contiguous impression which formed our lives back then; the memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads, the avenues are fleeting, alas! as the years.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

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    “The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)