Note 34 — PART II. THE EASTERN QUESTION.

“There was between England and France during the Seven Years’ War the most disastrous struggle in which France was ever engaged. For all the wars in Europe, from the Peace of Utrecht to the outbreak of the great Continental War, were waged on behalf of monopolies of commerce, or, to be more accurate, monopolies of market, for success meant the exclusion of the beaten nation from the markets now secured by the victorious rival. At the end of the Seven Years’ War France was stripped of nearly every colony she possessed. At the beginning of it she was the rival of England in North America and in India. At the end of it she had scarce a foothold in either” (J. E. Thorold Rogers, “The Economic Interpretation of History,” p. 110).