Secularism, as described in the previous chapter, emerged as an integral component to the course and effects of modern European historical development: secularism understood as the centrality of non-religious elements in the intellectual equipment of the age, its normative regulation, and its symbolic apparatus. European, or more precisely, Western European, history was not confined to Europe, but transported its economic, political, intellectual, organisational, and imaginative wherewithal wherever it expanded after the first period of financial and commercial expansion based on sheer plunder, one that involved principally Spain and her colonies, later Holland and England. This continued as Europe settled into a phase of long-term, organised exploitation of the world. Northwest Europe's eruption of energy and its spread set up a global system driven initially by early forms of capitalism, mercantilism, and international trade from the sixteenth century onwards. This system was based on satisfying the developing economic interests of Europe by subordinating the rest of the world and yoking its economies to Europe. There followed pressure by military might and colonial expansion, direct and indirect, aimed at transforming the societies and political systems of the non-European world in ways that conformed to the subaltern condition to which their economies were now reduced.

The expansion of Europe led to the eventual collapse of many political structures across the world. However, large states – such as the Ottoman Empire and the Alaoui sultanate in Morocco – were able to withstand European pressure in various ways that preserved their integrity to the degree possible. Initially, such states had been compelled to respond to monetary inflation in the sixteenth century and the steady expansion of commercial concessions (the so-called “Capitulations”) that had spread around the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages onwards.

But these responses, such as they were initially, tended to lack overall coherence, taking the limited form of piecemeal administrative and military arrangements. They did not involve an overall strategy of systemic transformation in the face of an expanding global economy seeking hegemony, and European military and diplomatic pressures were ultimately to prevail.