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In Europe, prizewinning historian Brendan Simms presents an authoritative account of the past half-millennium of European history, demonstrating how the battle for mastery there has shaped the modern world. Beginning in 1453, when the collapse of the Byzantine Empire laid Europe open to Ottoman incursion and prompted the dramatic expansion of the Holy Roman Empire, Simms leads readers through the epic struggle for the heart of Europe. Stretching from the Low Countries through Germany and into the North Italian plain, this relatively compact zone has historically been the richest and most productive on earth. For hundreds of years, its crucial strategic importance stoked a seemingly unending series of conflicts, from the English Civil War to the French Revolution to the appalling world wars of the 20th century. But when Europe is in harmony, Simms shows, the entire world benefits—a lesson that current leaders would do well to remember.
A bold and compelling work by a renowned scholar, Europe integrates religion, politics, military strategy, and international relations to show how history—and Western civilization itself—was forged in the crucible of Europe.
Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands
“World history is German history, and German history is world history.
This is the powerful case made by this gifted historian of Europe, whose expansive erudition revives the proud tradition of the history of geopolitics, and whose immanent moral sensibility reminds us that human choices made in Berlin (and London) today about the future of Europe might be decisive for the future of the world.”
Norman Davies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford and Jagiellonian University, Krakow
“European history comes in many guises, but Brendan Simms’s strategic and geopolitical approach provides a strong and lucid framework within which everything else fits into place. His emphasis on the centrality of Germany offsets more western-orientated accounts while also giving due prominence to Eastern Europe. Covering the whole of the modern period, this book is more than an excellent introduction; it’s a major interpretational achievement.”
William Shawcross
“This is a brilliant and beautifully written history. From the Holy Roman Empire to the Euro, Brendan Simms shows that one of the constant preoccupations of Europeans has always been the geography, the power and the needs of Germany. Europe is a work of extraordinary scholarship delivered with the lightest of touches. It will be essential, absorbing reading for anyone trying to understand both the past and the present of one of the most productive and most dangerous continents on earth.”
Publishers Weekly
“Bloody European statecraft and the interminable battle over Germany make the world go round in this magisterial history of modern international relations
. Simms chronicles this kaleidoscope of conflicts and coalitions with a graceful briskness that teases larger themes out of the welter of detail
. Simms’s vision of great-power rivalry as the motor of history offers compelling insights amid a grand narrative sweep.”
Kirkus
A smartly encapsulated 550 years of European history by a Cambridge historian reveals patterns and perils that continue to play out today
. Simms manages to be both specific and big-picture, dense and wonderfully digestible within one hefty volume
. An astute, comprehensive one-volume history of the “European project.”
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