Pugachev's Rebellion happened in Russia during the reign of the so-called "enlightened despot" Catherine the Great. It began as a rebellion of the Cossacks and some of the Russian nobility and spread rapidly through the peasantry until it was quashed violently by the forces of Tsarist Russia.

The kulturkampf was a series of laws passed during the 1870s designed to oppress and reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The liberal and Protestant majority of Germany, under Bismarck, turned against the substantial Catholic minority with legislation that closed parishes and monasteries, forced priests into exile, and denied the church a political voice. The legal campaign was brought to a halt as Bismarck came to realize the political utility of an anti-Socialist alliance with the Catholics. While it is true that classical liberals would oppose the interference of the state in the economy, that Bismarck co-opted socialists, and that student activists were influential in the 1848 revolutions, they were not the object of the kulturkampf.

Hobbes' idea of the Social Contract stems from humans' desire for safety by giving up some of their individual rights. The main example of the social contract is the implicit agreement that people make to give power to social institutions to imprison or confine some people in society under the assumption that, overall, if the freedom of some violent people is compromised the overall safety of most people will be preserved. While everyone forfeits their absolute freedom in this case, the social contract holds that this loss of absolute freedom is accompanied by the freedom gained through societal protection.

The English Bill of Rights outlined the rights of English Citizens, as well as the structure of the government going forward. Among the structures put forth were the preclusion of a Catholic from the throne, the superiority of Parliament over the monarch, and the power of parliament to control the finances of the realm.

The Huguenots were French Protestants dominated for a time by the majority Catholic population of France. Conflict between Catholics and Huguenots led to the 16th century Wars of Religions in France, settled by the Edict of Nantes. Huguenots, however, would later be forced to flee and resettle in other countries.

It is widely accepted that Poland has been partitioned three times (in 1772, 1793, and 1795). Although Nazi Germany and the USSR would divide up Poland in the Molotov-Ribbontrop Agreement, this agreement was never stabilized and never acknowledged by the USSR following the war and is therefore not considered to be a "partition" as commonly defined.

The Chios Massacre took place in 1822 when troops from the Ottoman Empire massacred much of the civilian population of the Greek island of Chios during the Greek War of Independence. The territory that comprises modern-day Greece had been under Ottoman control for several centuries when Greek nationalism flared up in the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, this nationalism manifested itself in open revolt. The revolution was initially quelled by the Ottoman Empire, but the violent means that the Ottoman Empire employed enflamed the Greek people and was widely condemned by the international community. The major powers of Western Europe soon intervened, and in 1832, the Greek nation declared independence.

The German policy of Kulturkampf was undertaken during the reign of Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s. Its primary purpose was to dramatically weaken the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany and to secularize German society. At the time, roughly two-thirds of Germany was Protestant, but a powerful minority, particularly in formally Polish territory, still followed Catholicism. Bismarck’s primary goal was to strengthen the German government and unify German national identity at the expense of the Catholic faith.

Before 1848, the Kingdom of Hungary had long been a territory of the Holy Roman Empire, and then later the Austrian Empire, but was nominally governed independently of both. Following the failed Hungarian rebellion of 1848, the Kingdom of Hungary was suppressed by the Austrian Empire, but nationalist desires were difficult to eradicate. Following the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War, the Austrian Empire lost much of its influence in Europe and in a desperate attempt to redefine itself in the wake of rising nationalism agreed to the Compromise of 1867, which created a dual monarchy in Austria-Hungary.

The term “Westphalian sovereignty” refers to the idea that each independent state has sovereignty and control over all the territory within its border, exclusive of any external powers. This idea underpins the nature of modern statehood and first emerged, or rather was first codified, in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the devastating Thirty Years’ War. Due to European expansion around the world in the centuries following, the Peace of Westphalia's “Westphalian sovereignty” is generally universal in its application.