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:
“Some smart man once said that on the most exalted throne in the world we are seated on nothing but our own arse.”
—Wendell Mayes, U.S. screenwriter. Otto Preminger. CINCPAC II (Henry Fonda)
“I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)