The impact of international developments on the Reich is also examined.Volume II begins with the Peace of Westphalia and concludes with the dissolution of the Reich. Whaley analyses the
remarkable resurgence of the Reich after the Thirty Years War, which saw the Habsburg emperors achieve a new position of power and influence and which enabled the Reich to withstand the military threats posed by France and the Turks in the later seventeenth century. He gives a rich account of topics such as Pietism and baroque Catholicism, the German enlightenment, and the impact on the Empire and its territories of the French Revolution and Napolean. Whaley emphasizes the continuing viability
of the Reich's institutions to the end, and the vitality of a political culture of freedom that has been routinely underestimated by historians of modern Germany.
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