The Elsevierian World

Abstract

Thus far this halting narrative has been burdened with exactions of chronology, but having spun out the tale of Elsevierian years and laid the last printers to rest, there is opportunity to view them in perspective, to identify conditions permitting them to develop and flourish as they did. An important fact in Elsevierian history is that the family lived in a century when governments, to a remarkable extent, sought to order the lives of their peoples. It was the time of emergence of strong states under autocratic rulers. In Prussia the great elector easily reduced the Prussian Diet to impotence, suppressed the Estates of the Mark, Cleves, and Ravensberg with hardly less difficulty, and set up a centralized administration in which he was the absolute authority. In France, although there had been set-backs, despotism gained steadily from the reign of Henry IV through the regimes of Richelieu and Mazarin until the time when Louis XIV might logically sum up the situation by saying, ‘L’état c’est moi.’