Product Description

Reaching from the Atlantic to Ukraine, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the revolutions of 1848 brought millions of people across the European continent into political life. Nationalist aspirations, social issues and feminist demands coming to the fore in the mid-century revolutions would reverberate in continental Europe until 1914 and beyond. Yet the new regimes established then proved ephemeral, succumbing to counter-revolution. In this second edition, Jonathan Sperber has updated and expanded his study of the European Revolutions between 1848–1851. Emphasizing the socioeconomic background to the revolutions, and the diversity of political opinions and experiences of participants, the book offers an inclusive narrative of the revolutionary events and a structural analysis of the reasons for the revolutions’ ultimate failure. A wide-reaching conclusion and a detailed bibliography make the book ideal both for classroom use and for a general reader wishing a better knowledge of this major historical event.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #542894 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 334 pages

Review
‘… the annotated bibliography, excellent chronology and neat biographies … add to a highly readable volume.’ Teaching History

About the Author
Jonathan Sperber is Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His previous publications include award-winning books such as Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848/1849 (1991) and The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (1997).

Customer Reviews

Time for a change of orthodoxy?
Sperber's book is impeccable as a bird's eye view of the 1848 revolutions. It is probably the most up-to-date general work on the subject. The book has considerable background on the restoration or `pre-March' period, without which the events of 1848 are meaningless. And it marries social and economic with political history, providing a coherent narrative (or narratives) alongside anecdotes of revolutionary experience and a description of the revolutions at ground level. Finally, Sperber provides a chronology, something which, useful in most history books, is essential to follow the tumultuous flow of 1848-49.

That said, I was mildly disappointed that this remains a recycling of the same used, mainstream views (after all, the book belongs to the New Approaches to European History collection). Because the revolutions were seen as a major missed opportunity by guilt-ridden German historians, and because of the weight of Marxist writing (the Communist Manifesto was issued in 1848 - you may know that already) portraying the radicals as the only `true' revolutionaries, 1848 has long been the subject of a dominantly leftist reading. This reading contains limited consideration of the revolutions as an originally liberal movement, or of the socially conservative dimension of the nationalist programs, and it attributes a debatable continuity between these and the second-round, radical uprisings.

Apologies if this is long-winded. I know of no general work that takes a less pro-radical angle. For Prussia and Austria-Hungary, Christopher Clark (The Iron Kingdom 1600-1947) and C.A. Macartney (The Habsburg Empire 1790-1918) respectively have good chapters on the subject, and Ginsborg is worth reading on Manin and the Venetian exotica.