Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1766 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph, 15 April 2007
Economics, social policy, medicine, culture, popular religion, the
position of women, the role of the Jesuits, the importance of hunting: it's
hard to think of a significant feature of human life that is not given
serious and well-informed treatment in this book. The result is one of the
most impressive general histories to have appeared for many decades.

Sunday Times 7 April 2007
Europe's early-modern history viewed from an Olympian height - a
grand, gripping and all-encompassing read.

John Adamson, Sunday Times, 29 April 2007
This work's most winning quality is the sense one has throughout
of being in the company of not only the most expert but also the most
congenial of historical guides, a man who is himself a perfect product of
the European Enlightenment: humane, rational, sceptical and with an
encyclopedic learning enlivened by a mordant Voltairian wit. Let the
nations rejoice: this history of Europe is a truly glorious book.

Customer Reviews

verweile doch, du bist so schön
The period from the peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna has the virtue for the high-end popular historian of being close enough in time and culture to be relevant, while also being distant enough to be contemplated more or less for pleasure. It also has the further advantage, for the commercially ambitious author, that the personal was very much the political - vast impersonal historical forces can't even begin to account for the likes of Catherine the Great, Louis XIV, or Frederick the Great.

The somewhat austere Prof. T.C.W. Blanning has revised himself as just plain Tim (registering this little bit of image modification, I could not help thinking of the Billy Connolly character from Monty Python's Holy Grail - sorry) to write this. And this is a very much a Tim, rather than a Prof. T.C.W. sort of book: it manages to be relaxed, entertaining and learned, and to cover a lot of ground without losing - or at least any more than necessary - focus. And yes, the first chapter, on travel and communications, is as good as everyone says it is.

I do wonder if Tim is aiming just a smidgen higher than he should have. Casual jokes about cultural theory which contrast Hegelian aircraft carriers with positivist fishing fleets, are very funny for a small audience (more Clarendon than Allen-Lane sized, I would have thought), but maybe a bit exclusionary - I wonder what people outside that audience think. Similarly, I was outrageously flattered at the large intersection between my library and his (said intersection being documented mostly as casual, and un-bibed, allusions in the text). Again, I'm not sure what the larger audience might make of this.

Anyway, an excellent, entertaining book, and I definitely agree with another reviewer who thought that Tim Blanning must be great at a dinner party (and also, maybe more importantly, as a thesis supervisor). In fact, given that he appears to have written his dissertation on Mainz, if he ever is back in town, and drops me a line, I would be delighted to offer a glass of riesling.

historian's ambivalence...mostly
The existing reviews give a good sense for what this book covers and I would like to try to add a bit beyond what has been said. I am not a historian, just a general reader. (But the book was pitched to general readers, so I think I can have a say).

First, Mr. Blanning has clearly "been there, done that, and got the t-shirt to prove it" when it comes to his subject matter. He is the master of the choice example, which could only be achieved through extensive travel, terrific language skills, and years of thinking and teaching. He is positively interesting, and pulls the reader in. Would love to have dinner with this guy, my treat.

Second, like many great historians, Blanning is attracted to ambivalence. In the concluding chapter he is quite explicit: there are two narratives that can be maintained about this period, a progressive one and a pessimistic one. Actually, one would be very hard pressed to purely progressive or purely pessimistic - it's up to each person to mix the two according to taste and all sorts of mixes are plausible given the evidence. Maybe a more interesting way to put it is that this period of history is not one of pure progress by any means. Strikes me as realistic.

One of his favorite sources of ambivalence is whether "x" is a revolution or an evolution. As in industrial, commercial, communications, and so on. He seems to fall in the evolutionary camp but I found him hazy in his commitment - he strikes me as more "evolution with punctuated equilibrium." Again, realistic. Bottom-line: his ambivalences make him an interesting thinker.

In truth, I came close to giving him 4 stars, however, for several reasons. First: the material at the end of the book - the concluding chapter--would have been more helpful at the beginning of the book. Not a big deal. Second, he should have defined some limits to his subject matter. This becomes very apparent in Section 4: War and Peace. At several points he acknowledges that he is attempting summaries in a few pages that would normally take several volumes. Not a good idea. Section 4 is for the reader with a hardcore interest in war and a solid knowledge base - not me, and I was always feeling lost.

Finally, I wonder if he did the Church right. He is not a fiery anti-cleric, but he seems to have little ambivalence about religion and churches (as seen most directly in chapter 7), and so tends to lose his effectiveness. Is the story of religion during this period just one of accumulation of wealth, misuse of power, and so on? At one point he writes that perhaps most bishops were well-educated, pious, diligent and effective administrators (p. 370), but the outburst goes nowhere.
If Blanning has an Achille's heel, I think it is that on the issue of religion--which was such a central force in the lives of people in this period--he cannot really sustain any ambivalence. We learn how long it took people to walk places but nothing of their interior lives as Christian people or the centrality of the local parish to community life. I am reminded of the old peasant lady who houses a communist official in the Georgian film "Repentance." As the official eats one her cakes--shaped like a church--and brags about a road that will be built, she snarls "What good is a road if it does not lead to a church?" I suspect most of the people who are Mr. Blanning's subject matter would agree with that sentiment, but in this book we learn mostly about the road.

Highly readable introduction to a vast and complex subject
Hugely ambitious in scope and, from the point of view an innocent who has never really got to grips before with central European history, on the whole this struck me as a very satisfactory introduction to the complex web of the Habsburgs, Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire etc. The various aspects of the social history of the era covered were particularly illuminating.

I trust that Professor Blanning does know what he's writing about when it comes to all the various Kings Frederick, Leopold, Louis etc... but it did worry me to read the reference to the "Stockport (sic) and Darlington Railway" (page 129).

Editing / proof reading also failed to pick up the superfluous repetition of Frederick the Great's swingeing dismissal of Christianity, quoted in full on page 292 and again on page 569. But these are minor gripes in relation to what appears to be a very valuable and highly readable overview of an exciting and fascinating period in European history. It will be for Professor Blanning's fellow academics to tell us whether it is to be relied upon factually!