updated: 05/10/2007
For Spain, the century began with the War of the Spanish Succession over the ascension of a relation of Louis XIV of France to the throne of Spain, and ended with the Napoleonic Wars in which Spain would become a bloody battleground.
After nearly a century of decay under the Habsburgs, the Bourbons brought the Enlightenment to Spain, and in the mid-eighteenth-century, under Charles III, inaugurated a period of ‘enlightened despotism’, reforming the Spanish government, infrastructure, and institutions. But Spain continued to lag behind political, intellectual and industrial developments elsewhere in Europe.