IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 238

The treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück on 24 October 1648 ended a war that had lasted thirty years. It had drawn in most of the states of western and central Europe. What began in 1618 as a revolt by Protestant nobles in Bohemia against their Habsburg king became a European struggle. Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark and the Dutch Republic all fought for territory, religion and advantage. The destruction was severe, above all in the German lands, where armies lived off the countryside and disease followed them. Later historians long repeated that a third or more of the population had died; more recent work suggests that the losses were smaller overall, though enormous in particular regions.

The war's first phase went the emperor's way. The Bohemian revolt was crushed in 1620 at the battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, and rebel estates were confiscated and handed to Catholic loyalists. Danish intervention followed in 1625 and failed. In 1629 the emperor issued the Edict of Restitution, which reclaimed lands that had passed to Protestant control since the middle of the previous century. This alarmed even those princes who had stayed loyal to him. Sweden entered the war in 1630 under Gustavus Adolphus, whose victories briefly turned the tide before he was killed at Lützen in 1632. France, though Catholic, had been subsidising Sweden, and in 1635 it entered the war openly against the Habsburgs. The fighting continued for more than a decade without a decisive result.

Peace talks began in 1643, and their unusual form shaped the settlement. Because the envoys could not agree on precedence — who should walk first, who should sit where — the congress was divided between two cities about fifty kilometres apart. The Catholic powers and France negotiated at Münster; Sweden and the Protestant princes met at Osnabrück, and couriers carried drafts between the two. Some delegations spent five years in Westphalia, their work interrupted by battles, by the deaths of rulers and by arguments about ceremony.

The religious terms were built around a date. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had recognised Lutheran princes but not Calvinists, and much of the quarrel that followed turned on that omission. The settlement of 1648 admitted the Reformed, or Calvinist, confession as well. It fixed the ownership of church lands and revenues according to who held them on 1 January 1624, a compromise that satisfied neither side completely. Subjects whose ruler followed a different religion were allowed to worship privately at home and to leave without losing their property, but public worship was restricted to the ruler's church.

Territorially, the treaties rewarded the victors and compensated the disappointed. France was confirmed in its long-held possession of Metz, Toul and Verdun and acquired Habsburg rights in Alsace, in terms ambiguous enough to cause disputes for a century. Sweden received western Pomerania, the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden and the port of Wismar, together with a vote in the imperial diet. Brandenburg, which had wanted all of Pomerania, had to accept the eastern part and was given several bishoprics, including Magdeburg, in compensation. Bavaria kept the Upper Palatinate and its electoral title, while a new eighth electorate was created for Charles Louis, whose father had lost the Bohemian crown and who now recovered part of his inheritance. A separate treaty signed at Münster in January 1648 had already ended the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic and recognised the United Provinces as independent.

Signing the treaties did not by itself end the fighting. They set a timetable for the withdrawal of garrisons and provided for an amnesty and the restoration of confiscated property, but carrying out these terms took years and required further congresses. Disputes over the meaning of the Alsace clauses continued into the next century. France and Spain, moreover, remained at war until 1659. Pope Innocent X issued a declaration condemning parts of the settlement, and although his protest was ignored, it showed that the peace rested on agreement between the powers rather than on any higher authority.

The treaties are often said to have created the modern system of sovereign states. They did use the language of sovereignty, and they confirmed the German princes in rights that allowed them to keep armies and make alliances. Yet the settlement did not abolish the empire, and it announced no general principle that states should never interfere in one another's internal affairs; intervention, religious or dynastic, continued. Several historians have therefore argued that the idea of a 'Westphalian system' was largely assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by lawyers and students of international relations who wanted a founding moment. On this view, the treaties were concerned with the practical business of ending a war.

In one respect, though, the settlement was genuinely new. It was the first great peace congress at which dozens of delegations worked out a general settlement in writing, and its terms were guaranteed by Sweden and France. That guarantee gave the empire a body of constitutional law which survived, in modified form, until its dissolution in 1806.

The 350th anniversary in 1998 produced conferences, exhibitions and a good deal of commentary, most of it asking what a seventeenth-century peace could teach the twentieth century. The answer, if there is one, may lie less in the idea of sovereignty than in the mechanics: two hostile alliances negotiating at a distance, each knowing that no single side could win.

Rome under the emperors was a city of perhaps a million people, the largest in the Mediterranean world. Feeding it required enormous quantities of grain, wine and olive oil, and of the three it was oil that travelled furthest and most regularly. It was poured on bread and vegetables, burned in lamps, used to clean the skin before bathing and applied to the body before exercise, where it was scraped off with a strigil. Demand was continuous and could not be met from the countryside around the city. By the first century AD much of the oil came from the far west, from the province of Baetica in what is now southern Spain, carried across a thousand kilometres of sea and river.

Baetica was well suited to olives. The Guadalquivir, the river the Romans called the Baetis, ran through a wide, hot valley, and olive groves spread along it. Estates produced the oil, which was pressed on site, and the liquid was then poured into sturdy clay containers known to archaeologists as Dressel 20 amphorae, after the nineteenth-century scholar who first catalogued them. These jars held roughly seventy litres each and were made in workshops along the river, close enough to the water for the finished containers to be loaded onto boats.

Transport was cheap only by water. Cargoes went downriver to ports near the river mouth, were transferred to sea-going ships and sailed for Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, from where smaller vessels carried them upriver to Rome. The trade was organised by merchants and shippers whose names appear in inscriptions and in the mosaics of Ostia's Piazzale delle Corporazioni, a square behind the theatre where the agents of firms from many ports advertised their business. The square shows that supply was a complex business, involving agents in many harbours rather than one official channel.

The best evidence for the scale of the trade is a hill in Rome itself. Monte Testaccio, on the bank of the Tiber, is not a natural hill but an artificial mound about thirty-five metres high made almost entirely of broken amphorae, most of them Dressel 20s from Baetica. Roughly 53 million containers are thought to have been dumped there between the first and the third centuries AD. The jars were broken up and stacked in terraces rather than left whole, and lime was scattered over the debris, apparently to control the smell of the residue. Because the site has never been built over, its layers preserve something close to an unbroken record of the trade across nearly three centuries.

Each container could carry information. Painted inscriptions in black or red ink, known as tituli picti, were added to the shoulder of the jar, and they record the weight of oil inside, the name of the merchant responsible and, occasionally, marks from a check at the point of arrival. Stamps on the handles give the workshop where the jar was made. Heinrich Dressel, the scholar who published these texts in the nineteenth century, used them to reconstruct the trade long before any excavation was attempted, and his numbering of the shapes is still in use.

The evidence has limits. Monte Testaccio records only the jars that reached Rome and were thrown away there, and only those made of clay that survived. Wooden containers, skins and reused jars leave little trace, and oil consumed on a Spanish estate is invisible to us. Nor do the inscriptions say who ate or drank the oil. They tell us about merchants and cargoes, not about how much of the city's supply ended up on a poor family's table, and they say nothing at all about the oil that never left the province.

Other sources fill some of the gaps. In the second and third centuries, as Baetican production levelled off, amphorae from Tripolitania on the North African coast became common at Rome, and fragments of Baetican jars found as far away as the province of Britain show how far the trade reached. Shipwrecks add another dimension: several cargo vessels carrying oil jars have been found in the western Mediterranean, and their position indicates the routes involved. Analysis of residues left inside containers can now test what the inscriptions claim, and a number of jars once thought to have held oil turn out to have carried fish sauce or wine.

The debate about what all this means is older than the archaeology. One view holds that the oil trade demonstrates a sophisticated market economy of private firms, standard containers, credit and long-distance distribution. Another holds that supply on this scale depended on state demands and taxation, with the free market playing a smaller part than the model implies. No single hill, however carefully excavated, will settle that argument, but Monte Testaccio has made it far more precise than it once was.

The hill also records an ancient city's waste problem. Once the oil had been used, most jars could not be reused, and their disposal had to be managed, much as the disposal of plastic is managed today.

The trade did not last forever. In the third century the production of Dressel 20 amphorae declined, and by the middle of that century the dump on the Tiber bank had largely stopped growing. The reasons are disputed, and candidates include political instability in the peninsula, competition from North African oil and a change in the way the city was supplied. Whatever the cause, the hill records one particular system of supply, not Roman oil consumption in general.

The quarrel between political and economic history is as old as history as a university subject. In school curricula, however, the question has usually been decided in one direction: history means governments, elections, wars and the deeds of leading figures. Economic history — harvests, wages, prices, migration, the slow accumulation of capital — occupies a modest place, if it appears at all. That is not because one branch is intellectually superior to the other. It is partly because a political narrative is easier to follow, and partly because an audience is more easily moved by decisions than by statistics.

The case for political history rests on the obvious fact that decisions change lives. A declaration of war, a tax, a law on property, a decision to abolish slavery or to build a railway: these are acts of governments, and their consequences can be traced for decades afterwards. The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke is often credited with making this kind of history the professional standard. He insisted that historians should work from the archives of states, from diplomatic correspondence and official papers, and he trained generations of students to do so. In that tradition, the dealings of governments were the serious subject, and everything else was background.

A more extreme version of the same preference was offered by Thomas Carlyle, who argued in the 1840s that history is at bottom the biography of great individuals and that universal history is the record of what they have done. Few academic historians would defend that position in Carlyle's terms today. Yet the appetite for biographies of prime ministers and generals, and for television series built around a single decisive figure, suggests that the underlying instinct has never quite disappeared from public taste.

Against this stands the argument that politics is a surface. The French historian Fernand Braudel, writing about the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II, divided the past into layers of time. Beneath the rapid events of diplomacy and battle lay the slower rhythms of climate, routes, harvests and trade, and beneath those the almost motionless history of geography. Braudel treated the noise of events as a disturbance on the surface of much deeper currents, and his influence persuaded a generation that the study of prices and shipping was more fundamental than the study of courts.

Social history pushed the argument further. In 1963 E. P. Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class, a book that treated class not as a thing but as a relationship that people made for themselves through experience and struggle. His subjects were artisans, weavers and labourers rather than ministers, and the book became one of the most influential works of history written in English in the twentieth century. Thompson's insistence that ordinary people were agents rather than passive victims of economic change is now taken for granted; it was not taken for granted when he wrote.

Other scholars attacked the categories of political history itself. The historian of women Joan Kelly asked whether women had experienced a Renaissance, and concluded that for women the period may have meant a loss of status rather than an advance. Work of this kind showed that the conventional labels of political history describe the experience of a minority and then present it as the experience of an age.

The difficulty with the whole debate is that the two subjects cannot be separated as neatly as the question assumes. British industrialisation required coal, capital and a supply of cheap food; it also required laws of enclosure, a legal system that protected contracts and a state that could borrow on a large scale. The financial revolution that followed 1688 made it possible for governments to fund wars, and those wars in turn shaped the economy. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was at once a moral campaign, a parliamentary manoeuvre and an economic event.

My own view is that the question, as it is usually posed, is badly framed, and that the framing has consequences. When schools teach only the deeds of rulers, they give pupils no way of understanding why some societies grew richer than others, and they make the past look like a series of accidents produced by individuals. When they teach only economic forces, they leave pupils unable to explain why the same pressures produced different results in different countries. History is not a single subject with a hierarchy of importance inside it.

If I am forced to choose, however, I would not give economic history the priority that its advocates claim. Economic conditions set out the range of possibilities; political decisions determine which of those possibilities is taken, and when. Scarcity and inequality are constraints, not scripts, and the same constraint has been met with revolution in one country and with accommodation in another. The study of how power is held, resisted and transferred therefore remains the heart of the discipline, provided it is understood widely enough to include taxes and trade as well as treaties.

What is needed is not a new hierarchy but a habit of moving between the two. A course that ignores wages is a kind of propaganda; a course that ignores parliaments is a different kind. Both, in the end, are accounts of what people have done to one another.