Early Solutions to the 2026 AP European History FRQs | Step by Step

Before Peter the Great, Russia was a vast Eurasian monarchy whose political culture, military organization, and elite customs differed sharply from the increasingly bureaucratic and commercially connected states of western Europe. Russia lacked secure access to the Baltic, and the tsar governed through the Orthodox Church and hereditary service elites. European rulers, meanwhile, were developing standing armies, navies, fiscal institutions, and mercantilist economies. Both Peter and Catherine responded to this competitive environment, but Peter transformed Russia more fundamentally. He redirected the state toward European military and commercial power, remade central institutions and noble service, and forcibly westernized elite culture. Catherine expanded territory, infrastructure, public programs, and provincial administration, yet many of her reforms extended Petrine foundations and remained constrained by noble privilege and serfdom.

Peter’s greatest transformation was the reorientation of the Russian state toward European military power and Baltic commerce. Alexander Gordon describes Peter seizing the site of St. Petersburg and constructing a fortified harbor despite the deaths of thousands of workers and horses (Document 1). The enormous cost reveals the coercive nature of Petrine reform, but the result was a new capital and strategic “window to the West” that redirected the court, navy, and trade toward the Baltic. This change was reinforced by Peter’s decree inviting foreign officers, artisans, and merchants to improve the army, administration, and commerce (Document 2). Because the decree was printed for circulation across Europe, its language about prosperity and religious freedom was designed to persuade skilled foreigners and therefore presents Peter in an unusually benevolent light. Nevertheless, that foreign audience is itself evidence of his deliberate effort to import western expertise. Outside the documents, Peter’s victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War and his construction of a navy made Russia a major European great power, while the Table of Ranks tied noble advancement to state service. These measures altered both Russia’s international position and the machinery of government.

Peter also transformed the behavior and identity of the ruling elite. Prince Shcherbatov reports that Peter required social gatherings at which noble women mixed with men, promoted western clothing and shaved beards, and weakened the older practice of marriages arranged without prior acquaintance (Document 6). Shcherbatov wrote as a conservative critic who believed that western luxury corrupted Russian morals. His hostility makes the document especially useful: changes that alarmed a defender of traditional noble culture must have been visible and disruptive. Peter’s beard tax and compulsory assemblies similarly used autocratic force to remake elite appearance and sociability. He also replaced the patriarchate with the Holy Synod, bringing the Orthodox Church more directly under state supervision. These reforms did not liberate most Russians—serfdom and autocracy continued—but they changed the service, culture, and institutions of the groups through which the empire was governed.

Catherine nevertheless carried out substantial reforms and in some areas extended state power more deeply into the provinces. A French allegory presents her as an enlightened lawgiver directing attention to the Nakaz on crime and punishment (Document 3). The image demonstrates her desire to be recognized by European intellectuals as an enlightened monarch, although its propagandistic purpose means it proves intention and reputation more clearly than successful legal change. Other documents show more concrete achievements. Catherine repaired and expanded canal systems that connected the Volga, St. Petersburg, the Caspian, and the Black Sea (Document 4), sponsored free inoculation facilities and schools for soldiers’ children (Document 5), and reorganized provincial maps, roads, courts, and police (Document 7). Dashkova, the author of Document 7, was appointed by Catherine and had reason to praise her patron, but the administrative details still indicate a broader governmental presence in the empire. Catherine also annexed Crimea in 1783 and participated in the partitions of Poland, greatly expanding Russia’s strategic reach.

These achievements create a serious counterargument: Catherine arguably transformed the territorial scale and provincial reach of the empire more than Peter. Yet the evidence also reveals that her changes were usually extensions or refinements of the state Peter had redirected. The canal account explicitly states that Peter planned and began the works that Catherine completed (Document 4). Her Nakaz did not become a comprehensive new legal code, and after the Pugachev Rebellion she relied more heavily on the nobility. The Charter to the Nobility of 1785 confirmed elite privileges, while serfdom expanded into newly acquired regions. Thus Catherine’s enlightened programs coexisted with stronger noble domination over peasants. Peter’s reforms were also limited and brutally imposed, but they changed the capital, armed forces, church-state relationship, noble service system, and elite culture all at once.

Therefore, Catherine transformed the breadth, administration, and international reach of an already westernizing empire, while Peter transformed the fundamental direction and institutional foundations of the Russian state. Catherine was a major consolidator and extender of change; Peter was the more decisive transformer.

In the late Middle Ages, European society was commonly imagined as a hierarchy of clergy, nobles, and laboring people, with political and social status tied largely to land, inherited privilege, and corporate membership. Yet the Black Death had already weakened serfdom in parts of western Europe, while Italian cities and northern trading centers demonstrated the growing power of commerce. From 1450 to 1600, the expansion of commercial capitalism and urban markets was the most significant cause of changes in traditional social hierarchies because banking, Atlantic trade, and royal finance elevated merchants and officeholders and made rulers less dependent on feudal nobles. Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation also challenged clerical authority and redistributed church property, but their effects were uneven and frequently reinforced rather than destroyed existing elite and patriarchal structures.

Commercial expansion created forms of wealth that did not depend primarily on hereditary landholding. The Fugger family of Augsburg, for example, used mining, banking, and loans to the Habsburgs to exercise influence at the highest level of European politics. Similar merchant communities prospered in Antwerp, Lisbon, Seville, and Italian cities as long-distance trade expanded. The voyages of exploration and the flow of American silver increased the importance of ports, financiers, and commercial intermediaries. Wealthy merchants could purchase land, marry into noble families, sponsor art and education, and imitate aristocratic lifestyles. The result was not the disappearance of nobility, but a greater permeability between economic wealth and social status.

Commercialization also changed the relationship between monarchs and traditional elites. Centralizing rulers needed cash to maintain courts, diplomats, firearms, and standing forces. They therefore relied on merchant credit, customs duties, and the sale of administrative or judicial offices. In France, the growth of officeholding created a “nobility of the robe” whose position rested on education, purchase, and royal service rather than only on medieval warrior lineage. In Spain and England, rulers similarly drew trained lawyers and administrators into state service. This strengthened monarchies at the expense of some independent feudal nobles and made bureaucratic skill and money increasingly important sources of advancement.

The Renaissance and Reformation were also important causes of hierarchical change, especially in the status of the clergy. Humanists criticized scholastic traditions and promoted education in classical languages, helping educated laypeople claim cultural authority. Protestant reformers rejected papal supremacy, clerical celibacy, and monasticism. In England, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries transferred enormous amounts of church property to the Crown and then to members of the gentry and nobility, reducing the independent economic position of the clergy. Yet this example also shows why religious change was not the most consistently transformative cause. Much monastic land passed to existing or aspiring elites, and Protestant communities usually preserved patriarchal household authority. The defeat of the German Peasants’ War demonstrated that reformers and princes would suppress popular attempts to use religious ideas for radical social equality.

Moreover, social hierarchy changed differently across Europe. In western cities and Atlantic regions, merchants and professionals gained influence, while in eastern Europe landlords tightened control over peasants in a “second serfdom” tied to grain exports. Old aristocracies often adapted by entering royal service, investing in commerce, or purchasing offices for relatives. Thus the period produced a reorganization of hierarchy rather than a democratic leveling of society.

Overall, the growth of markets, finance, and centralized fiscal states was the most significant cause because it altered the material basis of status and power across both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Religious and intellectual movements changed the legitimacy and property of the clergy, but commercial wealth and royal service most consistently opened new routes into elite society while forcing older elites to adapt.

Early industrialization transformed European production and population patterns faster than existing institutions could respond. Factories concentrated workers under dangerous conditions, cities expanded without adequate water or sewers, and child labor and long hours became symbols of the new economy. Liberal governments initially favored property rights and limited intervention, while socialists and labor movements increasingly demanded reform. The most significant effect of governmental responses to industrialization in the nineteenth century was the expansion of state responsibility for social and economic life. Factory regulation, public-health administration, education, and social insurance improved some working-class conditions and incorporated workers more fully into national political systems, helping reduce the appeal of revolutionary socialism. Nevertheless, these measures were uneven and often combined reform with repression, so they managed rather than eliminated class conflict.

In Britain, industrial problems led the state to regulate workplaces that had previously been treated largely as private property. The Factory Act of 1833 restricted the labor of children in textile mills and established inspectors, creating a permanent administrative mechanism to enforce social legislation. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 further limited the workday of women and young persons in textile factories. These laws did not end exploitation, and they initially covered only certain industries, but their importance lay in the principle that government could set minimum standards inside the workplace. Industrial society therefore expanded the meaning of legitimate state action.

Urbanization produced a similar growth of public administration. Repeated cholera outbreaks and reports on urban poverty helped produce Britain’s Public Health Act of 1848, which created a central health authority and a framework for local boards concerned with drainage, water, refuse, and sanitation. Later public-health legislation strengthened these powers. Comparable projects across Europe, including sewer construction and urban redesign, made municipal and national governments responsible for infrastructure that private charity could not provide at sufficient scale. The modern state became more bureaucratic, technical, and involved in everyday life.

The incorporation of workers into national institutions was even more politically significant. Britain gradually legalized trade-union activity and expanded the male electorate through the Reform Acts, while compulsory schooling and civic administration connected families more closely to the state. In Germany, Bismarck introduced health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and old-age and disability insurance in 1889. These programs offered workers limited material security and created precedents for the welfare state. Bismarck’s purpose was not purely humanitarian: he hoped to weaken the Social Democratic movement and strengthen loyalty to the empire. The reforms therefore show how industrial policy could turn workers from potential revolutionary outsiders into partial stakeholders in the nation.

Governmental responses did not eliminate class hierarchy or radical politics. Bismarck enacted the Anti-Socialist Laws while creating insurance programs, demonstrating that welfare and coercion could be used together. Factory laws were often weakly enforced, many workers remained poorly housed, and women were frequently protected in ways that also reinforced assumptions about dependence and domesticity. Socialist parties and unions continued to expand because the distribution of property and power changed less than the administrative role of the state.

Even with those limits, the lasting effect was a transformation in the relationship between citizens, workers, and government. By the end of the nineteenth century, European states were increasingly expected to inspect factories, protect public health, educate children, regulate labor, and provide forms of social insurance. Industrialization therefore helped create the interventionist social state that would expand further in the twentieth century.

Before 1914, European international relations were shaped by a balance-of-power system, colonial rivalry, and two armed alliance blocs. The First World War converted those tensions into total war, destroyed dynasties, and exhausted the major powers. The most significant effect of the war was the creation of an unstable Versailles order that replaced the prewar balance of power with new states, punitive obligations, and competing revisionist claims. Although the League of Nations introduced the ideal of collective security, the exclusion or withdrawal of major powers and unresolved national minorities made cooperation weak. German resentment and Soviet isolation therefore encouraged new alignments that undermined the settlement and helped prepare the way for another general European war.

The war first transformed the political map. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires collapsed or lost vast territories. Poland reappeared, while Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created from former imperial lands. These changes advanced the principle of national self-determination, but they could not produce ethnically uniform states. Germans lived in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hungarians lived outside the reduced Hungarian state, and rival national claims remained in the Balkans and eastern Europe. As a result, the new borders created states that needed protection from revisionist neighbors and often relied on France or the League of Nations for security.

The Treaty of Versailles made the German question the center of interwar diplomacy. Germany lost territory and colonies, accepted severe military restrictions, and faced reparations under a treaty that assigned responsibility for war damage. France regarded these provisions as necessary protection after invasion and destruction, while many Germans treated them as an unjust dictated peace. The transfer of Alsace-Lorraine to France and the creation of the Polish Corridor intensified revisionist nationalism. France built alliances with eastern European states and sought enforcement of the treaty, while German governments pursued revision. International relations therefore became organized around the conflict between maintaining and revising the peace settlement.

The League of Nations represented a genuine innovation. Instead of relying only on secret alliances and unilateral force, member states pledged to resolve disputes through international discussion and collective security. Yet the institution lacked dependable military power. The United States never joined, Soviet Russia was initially excluded, and Germany did not enter until 1926. The absence of major powers weakened both legitimacy and enforcement. Germany and Soviet Russia demonstrated their shared isolation through the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, cooperating outside the Versailles system and alarming western governments.

The interwar order was not doomed to immediate failure. The Locarno Treaties of 1925 eased western tensions, Germany joined the League, and the later 1920s saw greater diplomatic cooperation. This temporary stabilization shows that the most significant effect of the war was not simply an automatic march to a second conflict. Nevertheless, Locarno guaranteed Germany’s western borders more clearly than its eastern borders, and the League still depended on the willingness of individual states to act. Once the Great Depression strengthened extremist and revisionist movements, the system could not reliably deter aggression.

Thus the First World War changed international relations most profoundly by replacing the old imperial and alliance order with a contested peace settlement. New states and collective-security institutions offered possibilities for cooperation, but punitive terms, minority disputes, and the exclusion of key powers made the Versailles order unstable. The unresolved struggle between defenders and revisionists of that settlement shaped European diplomacy throughout the interwar period.