Age of Enlightenment

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When you have tall ships like this you can reach across the world

The Age of Enlightenment (or often just The Enlightenment) is a period of history from about 1600-1650 to 1800 in which Europe rose in prominence, strength and especially in knowledge. Roughly speaking, it was when ideas and events that were forming in the Renaissance came into their own. Maritime trade really took off during the Enlightement thanks to steady improvements in the art of shipbuilding and navigation, and new ideas on how to get a voyage off the ground as joint stock companies started to appear, to the point the era is often known as/overlaps with the Age of Sail. Instead of a ship's captain financing a long voyage or having a patron who funded it, both of whom could be ruined by failure, hundreds of people could invest in a company with a fleet of ships, spreading the risk about and lessening the financial impact should a ship or two be lost. This coincided with an increase in the population due to the introduction of New World crops and other such improvements in agriculture. Both of these led to the further growth of cities and the rise of literacy and the mercantile classes. These were people to whom education was of paramount importance, both for practical reasons (writing contracts, keeping inventory, managing a business empire, keeping track of world events that they could capitalize on, having a career in law) and because it was a way of accessing the nobility through marriage. Being a commoner didn't matter so much when you had a pile of money and could charm the local baron's son or daughter by acting in accordance with their increasingly complex fashions and etiquette which often involved studying the Classical Period.

The result of all this was that there was a growing class of wealthy, politically marginalized people reading up on the latest developments in art, culture, science, and philosophy, then sharing their ideas through letters, meetings, and books and responding to others' ideas. Many of them began to question the established order of things and old dogmas such as the notion that the path to knowledge was through revealed truth and submission to religious and monarchical authority simply because they were the ones in power. From the classical age they drew upon ideals of reason, logic, and discussion, but rather than just blindly accepting the words of Aristotle or Plato or replicating the "pure discussion/rhetoric" form of philosophical discourse, they began backing up their claims with systematic observation and review by their peers. From their works and experiments gradually saw a new surge in natural philosophy which would gradually give rise to modern science and with it breakthroughs in in engineering.

Their efforts generated useful results in a variety of fields, which got them more patronage from the established powers. Science became popular with many monarchs of the time for practical and political gain, as who would not want to have an enlightened monarch with a keen eye for modernization? That said, the merchant class (or bourgeoisie) also extended its reach into the political sphere and promoted the idea that everyone (for a certain value of everyone) had legal rights. In England the House of Commons rose in prominence in the British government due to political dealings (including a coup by a pretender king that involved the British Army looking the other way) and dynastic squabbles. These ideas would be taken further a century later in England's colonies during the American Revolution and further still in the French Revolution.

This has been a rather rosy description of this period so far, though there is a fair deal that should not be overlooked. Spain and Portugal both ruled over huge chunks of South America, setting up garrisons, missions, mines, plantations, and ports to suck the regions dry of resources while the Dutch did similar horrible things to monopolize spice production. The notion of racial slavery arose as well as racial pseudosciences such as phrenology, all of which led to a formalization of prejudices that had gotten their start years earlier. The assholish "racism due to arbitrary differences" thing started here, rather than the entirely practical resource-related hatred in which you hated those dickheads in the next country over because they were sitting on a giant stockpile of wheat and iron ore and refusing to trade for your sheep and lumber. Nations got into wars specifically to impose bullshit tariffs so they could screw each other over. The dominant economic outlook was mercantilism, which basically said that trade was a zero-sum game in which someone always got screwed over, therefore a country should always seek to screw over everyone else.

One particularly low part of the period was scurvy. This disease killed millions of sailors in a prolonged and horrible fashion, and nobody could identify the cause. Today we know that scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C, but it took till 1753 for James Lind to publish a paper on how citrus fruit and acidic foods cured and prevented scurvy and even then he wasn't entirely sure why these things worked. It wouldn't be till the early Industrial Revolution that sauerkraut (which is preserved with salt and fermentation instead of heat) was issued to prevent scurvy. We now know that scurvy affected sailors because they ate entirely preserved food and, in addition to the general difficulty in preserving fruits and vegetables, heat destroyed the vitamin C. Further, vitamin C dissolves in water and is lost if the cooking water is discarded, which means that even if you did have preserved food with vitamin C, boiling vegetables (one of the most common preparation methods) outside of a stew/soup will kill the nutrition value. Still even if the exact reason why was unknown, citrus fruits and juices were eventually carried by ships to ward off scurvy. Lemons were generally the fruit of choice for this purpose, except for the British whose colonies instead grew limes, hence why the British to this day are known derogatorily or semi-derogatorily as "Limeys."

The Golden Age of Piracy

If you have ever seen a pirate movie, or read Treasure Island, or seen Muppet Treasure Island, then this is the period where it probably takes place. Between the 1650s and the 1730s, organized and legal privateering (authorized by a letter of marque and reprisal) became a very common weapon in the numerous wars between the colonial European powers in order to disrupt the movement of gold, spices, trade goods, and other stuff from the American colonies and Indian companies to the European mainland. This period was quite brutal for many colonies involved; for example, the settlement of Maracaibo (located in modern day Venezuela) alone was sacked 3 times in the span of just ten years.

This first golden age paled in comparison to the second, which lasted between 1707 and 1721. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the first major pan-European war of the century, left a lot of trained and press ganged seamen unemployed. In turn, these sailors used their newfound skills to take over several ships and plunder their way to endless riches. At least in theory. While being a pirate earned you a modicum of freedom when compared to your average European laborer at the time (or a lot in the case of blacks, a not insignificant number of pirates of that time were former slaves) life at sea was very harsh, and by the time the European powers started to crack down on piracy in earnest, the risks of piracy started to outweigh the benefits to many. It should be noted that your typical pirate crew was fairly democratic: when a pirate crew formed they laid out a charter with rules that were generally followed, pirate captains were elected by all crewmen and loot was split fairly evenly and there were even clauses for compensation for those guys who lost a hand or something in battle.

The end of the golden age is universally agreed to be around 1721, when the last former privateers that still operated from Madagascar were hunted down and mostly executed. The Barbary States of north Africa briefly attempted to revitalize piracy in the late 1700s to profit off the African slaves that were still in high demand in the US, where slavery was legal (even more so when the Great Powers of Europe one by one outlawed slavery in their colonies), but the Royal Navy and the newly formed US Navy stepped in pretty quickly to shut that down.

For more roleplaying and worldbuilding inspirations, consult this page.

American Revolution

"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."

– United States Constitution: Section 9, Article 8

From 1607 to 1776 England (both in terms of the English Crown and English people going to lands claimed by the Crown) had established a series of colonies on the eastern coast of North America which grew in population, wealth and general capacity. While the colonies were initially staunchly loyal to Britain, time and distance conspired to start driving a wedge between parent and child. The aftermath of the Seven Years' War threw the problem into sharp relief for a variety of reasons: new taxes were levied on the colonies that they had no say in to pay for said war; Parliament enacted mercantilist policies in which the colonists were forbidden from trading with anyone other than the British home islands and could not have any industry of their own and signed treaties with natives whose land the colonists wanted for themselves; the British Army was allowed to quarter its soldiers in people's homes; and the passing of laws which allowed Catholics to hold public offices in newly conquered Quebec. Unrest gradually built until it came to a head with the outbreak of war between the colonials and the English government and its loyalists. The colonials threw together a rag-tag government to train and mobilize and support a new army with support from the French and eventually managed to win out against the English forces and achieve independence. After a bit more political shuffling when it became obvious that a loose confederacy would not work the United States of America was born.

The important thing here was that the new United States was a nation fundamentally built on Enlightenment ideals. Socially speaking, not much changed in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. The Thirteen Colonies had been controlled by an elite group of wealthy, educated men who were subject to the crown but mostly handled local affairs on their own, and afterwards the early US was controlled by the same men alongside some representative government without having to deal with crown officials. However the system of government which was created was one which broke with the longstanding European tradition of hereditary monarchy backed by the church. The British had already started using some of these ideas in the Home Islands, and said ideas were transplanted to America along with the colonists, especially the Magna Carta. That said, America's Founding Fathers had no truck with kings or lords or the idea that the right to rule was bestowed on people chosen by God, which supposedly made them fundamentally better human beings. Instead, they believed that governments should be accountable to their people, and the Constitution and its appended Bill of Rights would be the ultimate law of the land that no ruler could overturn.

This is not to say that they got everything right the first go. The franchise was still limited to only white men of means and even then there would be some residual property requirements which would not fully fade away until about 1830. The issue of slavery in particular would fester until it came to a head in the American Civil War and was only abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. Even so, the US would be a prototype of democratic government which many people would seek to emulate elsewhere, to various degrees.

Situation in Europe

King Louis XIV, AKA the "Sun King" because he was the man around whom all the other kingdoms of Europe orbited and were bathed in his radiance. He and his court were not known for subtlety.

Europe experienced drastic changes in this period in both positive and negative ways. Christian world dominance and the rapid rise of European powers that began with the Age of Colonialism was practically cemented in this time-period. New colonial powers, such as England, France, and the Netherlands started to participate in colonial expansion along with the established colonizing powers of Spain, Portugal and the often overlooked Denmark, whose colonial history actually preceded those of the former. Society and state structures became much more centralized as monarchs started to crack down on the privileges of feudal lords, building the first modern centralized nation states. As a side effect, the petty and middle-class nobility saw their importance and influence dwindle rapidly as they were being demoted from local lords of their own fiefdoms to being figureheads in political plays, all instigated by their monarchs to keep them from thinking too hard about this "being forced to hand power to the king" business. While this was the typical development for most of the western hemisphere, there were a couple of nations where this development didn't take place in the archetypical French way, with the biggest outliers being England, where Parliament became an instrument of commoners and nobles to negotiate with the king and vice versa and most notably Poland-Lithuania, where the local nobility resisted the idea of handing over power to the monarch so fiercely that they turned the game on its head and effectively seized total control of the state from the king, building one of the first rudimentary, if dysfunctional and easily corrupted, modern-style democracies.

This was also the time when the Ottoman Empire started its long, steady decline after the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. The fact that they had a civil war due to a lack of succession protocols was a part of this, as was general conservatism, a bureaucracy which became increasingly prone to thinking exclusively in religious terms, a corrupt military and the rise of their European rivals. So naturally, everything changed when absolutism kicked in. This is also the period when Tsardom of Russia emerged with a claim to being the Third and Final Rome and began giving regular beatings to the Ottomans. In particular, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great oversaw considerable modernization and expansion of the country, leading Russia to Great Power status in fairly short order. Much of the crisis also had to do with mismanagement and general non-uniform administration and maltreatment of the empire's Christian population. Also, despite being called "Turkey" anachronistically and historically, the Ottomans were an extremely elitist state, where even the word "Turk" was associated with nomadic Turkoman or Anatolian peasants and was used like we use the word "retard" nowadays. Due to this, the court elite were alienated from the common population of the Empire and ended up having revolts every time they didn't win a war and had to raise taxes to pay for their fuckup.

Undoubtedly, the star of the Enlightenment was France, which emerged as a global power player and the place from where practically every relevant ideology of the time originated. First thing to note is the aforementioned absolutism. Under Louis XIV, the power of the aristocracy was sharply curtailed in favor of a stronger central government and expanded French influence throughout the world via wars and diplomatic pursuits. Over time, however, absolutism practically begat the ideas of the Enlightenment, conceptualized by the French philosophers that opposed the tyrannical rule of the monarchs and supported democratic and free states along the lines of the classical societies they'd grown up studying.

That is to say, not everything was all well and good at the time. The rise of mass armies and the evolution of firearms into relatively reliable and efficient killing tools made wars larger, costlier, and bloodier. Numerous countries such as England experienced civil turmoil. France, after enjoying nearly a century and a half of glory and stability under the reign of two kings (the aforementioned XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV The Well-Beloved), had become decadent, vain, and was beginning to have financial troubles that impacted the lives of the general populace (who increasingly resented the gross wealth of the aristocracy). The latter combined with Enlightenment ideals to lead to the events mentioned below.

French Revolution

The French Revolution came about for various reasons: the spreading of new ideas, natural disasters, the effects of the Little Ice Age that increased the price of grain. However, the lion's share of the fault lay with the generally decadent and increasingly useless aristocracy. In a financial report by Jacques Necker, minister of finance under Louis XVI, the largest part of the state expenses went to the pensions and salaries of useless nobles, financed by taxes and the labor of peasants and serfs that lived like shit. France faced a large financial crisis at the time, amplified by the country's participation in numerous wars.

To deal with the issue, Louis XVI invited the Estates General, the traditional representative body of all France, to assemble. However, there was a simple problem with the Estates: it was retarded. French society was divided into three estates: the nobles, the clergy, and everyone else, and each got one vote in the Estates General. The problem here was that the nobles and the clergy together represented maybe two or three percent of the entire population, but they still got equal voting rights in the Estates. So yes, 98% of the population could not overcome the rest by voting. With that being said, some of the nobles and priests were also discontent with this rigged and illogical system, so when the Estates General failed, some joined the Third Estate when it refused to disband. That and the dismissal of the lowborn Necker led to increasing anger and unrest, culminating in the storming of the Bastille, which sparked off the French Revolution.

The revolutionaries at first sought the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, and they even guaranteed the safety of the king. However, the strongly negative and outright threatening reaction to the whole thing from the neighboring monarchies, combined with the fact that Louis XVI was a fucking moron who tried to flee the country, led to complete abolition of the monarchy and Louis being placed on trial and executed, with one vote deciding everything. Numerous revolutionaries actually opposed the execution, mostly citing that this would lead to wars with neighboring countries.

However, a more serious concern was the fact that executing the king would set a VERY negative precedent in general and would mark the start of much, much, much more political executions and repressions. This fear turned out to be entirely and sadly justified, as after Louis XVI's execution, everything went downhill. Once the provisional government fell under the sway of the most radical revolutionary faction, numerous revolutionaries were sent to the guillotine on flimsy pretenses, peasants and workers lynched former nobles, militant anti-Christians desecrated churches and cathedrals and strove to remove all Christian influence, which only reinforced the hatred of the pious Christian population towards the revolution which deepened the chasm in society, and in general chaos took over the country. It became obvious that an iron-fisted ruler was needed to bring back stability and order and such a ruler appeared in the form of a certain Corsican manlet.

Napoleonic Wars

Napoleon Bonaparte came into power as a Consul after the coup d'etat, declaring "Gentlemen, Revolution is over". This marked the beginning of the Napoleonic era. Sadly, nowadays the much more noble deeds of Napoleon are ignored. He stabilized the country, created an effective administration, built up France's infrastructure and adopted and spread the metric system, much to the despair of later generations of freeaboos. His magnum opus was the Napoleonic Code that went on to become the legal basis for numerous modern day countries. On a personal level, he was known to be honorable and respectful even to his enemies. One example is his admiration of Pyotr Bagration, a Georgian general who served under the Russian Empire and engaged Napoleon at Borodino.

However, he is mostly remembered for his schemes and utterly devastating wars of conquest. He invented new doctrines of warfare that concentrated on extensive usage of artillery; he had been an artilleryman by trade prior to the Revolution and still regarded it as the pinnacle of warfighting technology. Later, he abolished the republic and proclaimed himself Emperor of France. Under his rule, France engaged in numerous wars against virtually everyone else in Europe. In short order he smashed the Austrian, Prussian, Spanish and Russian armies and saw most of the continent fall under his influence, with his brothers and other close relatives claiming half a dozen thrones across Europe. His families usurpation of the spanish throne an example of said expansion. He also blockaded Great Britain from continental trade and instigated the final collapse of the Unholy German Confederation (aka the Holy Roman Empire). For a while, it seemed like nothing and no one could stop Napoleon; the British were still fighting in Portugal and Spain, but nobody else in Europe thought that was going to end in anything other than another negotiated peace in France's favor. Then Napoleon fell victim to one of the classic blunders and decided it was time to invade the Russian Empire. While both sides engaged in battle at first, the Russians eventually realized that they couldn't beat Boney in a straight fight and turned to a scorched earth policy, burning their own farms and settlements to the ground as they retreated into the vast Russian interior. When Napoleon finally reached Moscow, he took an empty and burned city. Out of supplies, freezing, exhausted, and being raided by Russian Cossacks and guerrillas, Napoleon's Grande Armee was forced into a long, cold, and ugly retreat. Sources vary on exactly how big the Grande Armee was at the beginning and end of the invasion. The most famous number, given in an infographic by Charles Joseph Minaud, gives a total strength of 450,000 French troops going in and 10,000 coming out, while others give numbers as high as 650,000 initially and 70,000 survivors at the end of the campaign. Either way, Napoleon's magnificent army was in ruins, his reputation for invincibility had been permanently shattered, and France was drained of manpower. The French army was finally defeated by a coalition of forces at Leipzig despite the Emperor's determination.

Napoleon was forced to abdicate and was first exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, but after the whole Hundred Days incident where he came back to France and was instantly re-proclaimed Emperor before Wellington and Blucher slapped the bitch out of him at Waterloo, the British opted to ship him all the way to the island of Saint Helena, a tiny little speck in the middle of the far South Atlantic, where he spent the remainder of his life. Once the man that shook the very foundations of the continent, he now lived in exile and disgrace with his pride and confidence shattered. This marked the start of the Congress of Vienna, which acted as the foundation for European international politics until the outbreak of World War I a century later.

Europe After Napoleon

With the dawn of the Epoch, the Continent and the world was considerably changed. In this period, Europe became the dominant region of the world, but it was also wracked by constant turmoil. With the development of more efficient gunpowder and the adoption of Napoleonic tactics, warfare became even more deadly and unforgiving, with artillery being used more prominently. The new ideologies shook the old regimes and the French Revolution sparked later revolutionary and civil movements in other countries throughout the 19th century. The Congress of Vienna formalized the rule of five major powers throughout the world. After the Napoleonic Wars, although she retained her core territories, France became extremely weakened and was slowly overshadowed by the United Kingdom as it entered its Golden Age. But that story continues elsewhere.

Notes

• This period in military history has been called "the Age of Lace Trimmed Warfare". Between muskets and field cannons, armor was gradually abolished due to the immense cost of the new standing armies that gradually replaced the mercenary armies of former periods, while the idea of giving every soldier in your army clothes that are all the same gradually caught on. The fancier the better, since an army which still looked well dressed after a month on campaign was obviously disciplined and professional; iconic examples included the French musketeers and the English redcoats. Big blocky formations gave way to lines of soldiers two or three ranks deep at most which could bring as many muskets to bear as possible, supported by cavalry with sabers, lances, and pistols.
  • The way armies were fielded also changed dramatically. The Thirty Years War, while mostly fought on German soil, showed every participant how difficult it was to keep mercenaries in line, especially when the money dried up or there was nothing left to plunder. The big mercenary and levy armies of prior centuries gave way to the standing army, sworn to serve King and Country as a cadre of professionally trained and drilled soldiers and officers. Improvements in bureaucracy, more effective taxation and a population boom also made conscription a viable option, although it would be some time until that idea truly caught on. The military organization reforms introduced in these times also persist to this day, with terms like lieutenant, platoon, and division coming into common use for the first time.
• Newspapers! Technically they started up in the mid 1550s in Italy and there were periodical government publications for the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy before that, but from the late 17th century onward in Europe every major city had a print shop which regularly stamped out broadsheet newspapers for general consumption by those who had a few spare farthing, allowing them to keep track of events both at home and abroad. In particular, newspapers used the story of Black Hole of Calcutta to gather public support in England for the gradual conquest of India and later played a role in both the American and French revolutions.
• The Seven Years' War was fought during this period. This was the first truly global conflict in human history, as it saw fighting on every continent save Australia and Antarctica.
• Pretty much everywhere in the world would be affected in some way by the European powers by end of the Age of Enlightenment. India would fall under the control of the British East India Company, China's economy would become reliant on Western silver, Africa would be affected by the slave trade and the Americas and eventually Australia would be colonized and settled. Even the still-isolationist Japanese adopted a surprising amount of Western ideas through the Dutch, in what's known as Rangaku.
• Speaking of the British East India Company, corporate warfare and piracy were rife in this era, and the line between the two was vanishingly thin. The distinction between pirate and privateer was often a matter of one's point of view, and even the proper navies were down for a bit of prize-taking. The various trading companies were practically real-life Rogue Trader dynasties, with the power to raise armies and wage war in the name of profit. For example, in 621.M2 the VoC executed Exterminatus on the Banda Islands so they could import more cooperative slaves.
• In England and France at this time a few engineers were looking into more effective ways of producing thread, making cloth, casting iron for cannons and sowing seeds with various mechanical contrivances. One particular issue they had to deal with in England in particular was the matter of fuel. Wood was becoming scarce during the Enlightenment as more people were burning it and more ships were being built. To save on wood, people began burning coal in large quantities instead, but their mines had a nasty tendency to flood and kill everyone who was down the pit. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen invented a machine which burned coal to pump the water out, which James Watt would refine and improve on fifty years later. These were developments which were easily overlooked at this stage, but gradually the stage was set for revolutionary change.
  • Speaking of coal, the development of the process of turning coal into coke in 1714 was also a pretty big game-changer. Coke is coal that has been refined by heating it up to 1000°C and freeing it of sulphur, water and other substances that would contaminate raw iron. Coke quickly replaced charcoal as the primary fuel for furnaces (on the merit that it is far more efficient; you need a tenth of the amount of charcoal required to melt any given quantity of iron) which made the large-scale production of iron and later steel possible.
• Crops that originated in the New World included potatoes, tomatoes, corn, pineapple, pumpkins, peppers, tobacco, vanilla, and chocolate (among others). While not a crop, all but one species of cactus (which doesn't even look like a cactus) are native to the New World. If you see any of these in a European setting prior to this era or a cactus in a European/Asian/African desert, feel free to call whoever wrote/designed/programmed it a fucking hack.
• In this period you had the rise of our conception of an Artist. Beforehand you had artists who did what their clients/masters wanted and aristocrats which took up painting and writing to pass the time. By the 18th century, you had a few men and women which were not wealthy but reasonably well educated who had enough of a reputation that they could make their art their own way and sell it to a general audience.
• Our modern methods of Vaccination were invented in this era. Some enterprising English Doctors had noticed that dairy farmers that had contact with a form of cow pox seemed to be immune against the Smallpox pandemics of the early 1720s that were ravaging England and the Thirteen Colonies. Although they couldn't explain why, they advocated for people to rub some pus or necrotic tissue taken from the sick into small incisions on their body, with the result being that the people first got somewhat ill, but retained an immunity against Smallpox for the rest of their lifes. The methods of inoculation would be refined over the coming decades and significantly increased the life expectancy of large swathes of the world population.

The Appeal of the Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is the prelude to the modern world. Its basic ideas and features were taking shape and growing but were not quite there yet and are still largely overshadowed by the Ancient Regime (the old order of things with kings, nobles and the Church) and they were still constrained by many limitations which had been the case since the Bronze Age. Scientists (sometimes organized into bodies such as the Royal Society) were uncovering the world's secrets and making important discoveries in the areas of biology, astronomy and physics while kings set their sights on building empires on which the sun would never set and you had grand financial chicanery such as the South Seas Company, but people still relied on guys with ox carts to bring in their daily grain and take away their crap, law enforcement was handled by gangs of thugs hired out by rich people to keep the riffraff away from their properties, and in many places when people built buildings they still used literal rule of thumb. In spite of that there was a notion of historical transformation about. By the 18th century, an increasing number of people had become cognizant that they had in many ways surpassed their ancestors in numerous fields both practical and theoretical, and some of them foresaw that greater achievements were yet to come.

The Enlightenment was also the high point for the idea of absolute monarchy, realms where power had been consolidated in thrones to be distributed among nobles which had become less subordinate rulers and more components in the apparatus of government. With this came the idea of the enlightened monarch, an educated and cultured man or woman who'd be up to date on natural philosophy with the strength and power to rationalize his/her kingdom, do away with superstition and bring in a new age of elegant humane efficiency.

This is also the height of the Age of Sail: tall ships of the line bristling with cannons, fast frigates and pirate ships raiding merchantmen on the high seas with all the action and swashbuckling therein. It's also a time of global reach, where a poor farmer's son might travel to burgeoning colonies, the ports of rival nations and to distant foreign parts with strange ancient civilizations if he winds up on a ship. The battles of the day with their line infantry, cuirassiers with a brace of pistols and sabers and field artillery are distinctive. The epoch was known for its massive battles and the advancement of artillery as a component of infantry engagements.

The inspiration derived by Napoleon deserves a separate mention. His entire history, from humble beginnings to the expedition in Egypt to the coup d'etat to becoming the Emperor that trashed everyone and everything in his path to his final exile, despair and disgrace has served as a great, great inspiration for people ever since.

Enlightenment inspired Games, Factions and Settings

• While not set in our world but the Age of Sigmar, the lore of the Kharadron Overlords follows a certain pattern which caters to the Age of Enlightenment, with the coming of Chaos and the abandonment of their gods and allies being something akin to the religious wars, plagues and social strife which ravaged Europe during the late medieval ages, many duardin were forced to migrate to new territories, like the Europeans of the early modern age these refugees were forced to reevaluate their beliefs and culture, and, like them, they shifted from putting their faith no longer in traditional religious systems and absolute monarchs, but in technological development and plutocratic meritocracy. During the five centuries of the Age of Chaos the Kharadron Overlords not only survived the onslaught of the Dark Gods but thrived, building sky-cities and floating ports, developing scientific weaponry and tools based on the substance known as aether-gold and establishing tradelines among them, by the beginning of the Age of Sigmar they are arguably the most technologically advanced race of the setting, with energy-projected weaponry, armoured airships and a set of laws which allows them to pull back from doomed battles and democratically choose or demote, without shame or blood, their own leaders.
• As you might expect, there are plenty of tabletop games set during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of the bigger names are:
  • Sharp Practice (a company-level game published by TFL, who have also recreated the original Kriegsspiel used to train Prussian officers)
  • Black Powder (battalion-level game by Warlord Games that can be scaled up to army size if you're insane enough)
  • Black Seas (Napoleonic naval combat, also by Warlord)
  • Chosen Men (skirmish-level game by Osprey Games)
  • Bataille Empire (you know how those psychos that shat out FATAL claimed it was incredibly historically accurate and insanely detailed? This is what that actually looks like, but for the Napoleonic Wars. The book has rules to let you model every aspect of a Napoleonic engagement, down to tailored army lists for specific battles, and is designed to work with any collection of miniatures you might have.)

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War