History of Europe

This made difficult a relationship of equals between European countries and the United States. But, short of that, the Marshall Plan did lead to much closer transatlantic ties. Under W. Averell Harriman, its Paris-based chief representative, U.S. experts worked throughout Europe. “They swooped down here,” said one German businessman, “like birds on a field.” By 1952 the U.S. embassy in Paris was responsible for 2,500 U.S. officials, plus 5,000 family members. Within a decade, 40,000 private American businessmen had settled in Europe, working for 3,000 American companies, whose European investments had quadrupled in that time.

War and peace had brought Europeans and Americans closer together than at any time since the mass migrations from the Old World to the New. Their mutual relations were complex and ambivalent: a blend of European gratitude, envy, and slight resentment combined with American impatience, fascination, and missionary zeal. As time went on, some Europeans complained of “Americanization”; what this often meant was merely that innovations had reached the United States first. But, for all their differences, Americans and western Europeans had one great common commitment—to a free and democratic way of life, which in eastern Europe had been progressively suppressed. A climate of fear

By the time that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had held their Yalta Conference in February 1945, Europe was already divided between East and West; Yalta, therefore, was not to blame for the division. On the contrary, it could in theory have reunited Europe, since all three powers had pledged themselves to help any liberated or former Axis satellite state form an interim government broadly representing all democratic elements, followed as soon as possible by free elections. The Western Allies kept their Yalta promise; Stalin did not.

One after another, Stalin subjected all but two of the eastern European countries to a similar takeover process. It was described frankly, in retrospect, in a textbook published between 1948 and 1950 by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and the Role of the Popular Masses. First, communist ministers were imposed upon the existing coalition government, if possible in key posts such as the Ministry of the Interior. Then, the party gradually established or infiltrated power centres outside parliament; for instance, by arming the proletariat, setting up action committees, or expanding the secret police. This would create “a pincer movement operating from above and below.” The end product was an antidemocratic coup; even if the bourgeoisie still retained some support in the country, a short period of “people’s democratic government” would soon achieve “the disintegration of the political army upon which the bourgeoisie could formerly count.”

The exceptions to this routine were Finland and Yugoslavia, each favoured by geography and supported by a powerful patriotic army. While both, in 1945, acquired left-wing, Marxist governments, both felt strong enough to resist domination by the U.S.S.R. This was not the case in Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—all of which succumbed to the “pincer movement” or “salami tactics” of the Czechoslovak textbook.

In Albania there was not even a preliminary coalition. At the first postwar elections in December 1945, voters faced a single list of candidates without opposition. Not surprisingly, it won an 86 percent majority. Subsequent referenda, designed to sidestep the high rate of illiteracy, gave voters a ball to drop into a “Yes” or a “No” slot. Through the former, it fell silently into a sack; through the latter, it rattled into a can.

In Poland the postwar coalition included a minority of members returned from wartime exile in London, but a majority were their rivals, backed by the U.S.S.R., who held such key positions as the Ministry of Public Security and resorted to censorship, threats, and murder against the bourgeois parties and the press. The eventual election, held under a reign of terror in January 1947, gave a landslide victory to left-wing socialists and communists. Already in the previous September they had agreed with Stalin and Molotov on the composition of the future government.

In Bulgaria’s coalition government, formed in 1944, communists held the Ministries of Interior and Justice. Purges, intimidation, and the imprisonment of opposition leaders made the eventual election a mockery. When Georgi Dimitrov (who had been one of the defendants in the German Reichstag fire trial) became prime minister of a fresh coalition in 1946, his Cabinet included nine communist ministers, making the coalition a mere façade.

In Romania in 1945, the U.S.S.R. insisted that King Michael, who had set up a coalition government, should accept in it communist ministers of the interior and of justice. In the subsequent 1946 election campaign, the communists broke up rival meetings, persuaded printers to boycott opposition literature, and imprisoned or killed political opponents.

In Hungary the 1944 coalition included only two communist ministers, and in the 1945 election the moderate-liberal Smallholders’ Party led the poll. The communists threatened to quit the government, leaving it as a minority, unless they were given the Ministry of the Interior. They organized demonstrations and insisted on the dismissal of 22 Smallholders’ representatives. In December 1946 the communist ministers of defense and of the interior made widespread arrests. In August 1947, 35 percent of the electorate still voted for the opposition, closely linked with the Roman Catholic church. However, in 1949, after the arrest and imprisonment of József Cardinal Mindszenty, the government staged a single-list election and claimed 90 percent of the votes.

In Czechoslovakia the 1945 coalition provisional government had communists at the Ministries of the Interior, Education, Agriculture, and Information. In the 1946 election of a Constituent Assembly the communists and their Social Democratic allies held a slender majority, and for two years the country prospered. But, as the 1948 election approached, the communists prepared for a takeover. The minister of the interior dismissed eight noncommunist police commanders in Prague, replacing them with party men. In the ensuing protest in the Cabinet, the non-Marxist ministers resigned, but the Social Democrats unexpectedly remained and kept the government in place. When the ex-ministers tried to return, they were ejected. The communists, assured of backing by the U.S.S.R., staged strikes, armed workers’ rallies, and a violent putsch. Their most illustrious victim was Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister, son of the republic’s founder, who died on the night of March 9, 1948. Czechoslovak democracy died with him—and would not be resurrected for 40 years.

With communist ministers in the postwar governments of Belgium, France, and Italy, and with communists fomenting political strikes, some feared similar takeovers in the West. Germany, however, was the scene of the sharpest clash. For several years, by a leapfrog process of move and countermove, the eastern and western occupation zones of Germany had gradually been solidifying into separate entities. When in June 1948 the Western authorities issued a new western deutsche mark, the U.S.S.R. retaliated by imposing a land blockade on Berlin, which was jointly administered by the four occupation powers but was physically an enclave within the Soviet zone. The West responded with a massive 11-month airlift of food, goods, and raw materials. Meanwhile, 12 Western countries—Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States—negotiated and signed on April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty, agreeing “that an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all.” Almost immediately, the U.S.S.R. called off the Berlin blockade.

Within a few weeks, Germany was formally divided into two rival republics. The Cold War had reached a climax. Western Europe had drawn even closer to the United States. Affluence and its underside

The West German currency reform that produced the western deutsche mark was a courageous act. It exchanged one deutsche mark for 10 obsolete reichsmarks; later the rate was slightly reduced. In one respect, the result was similar to that of Weimar’s hyperinflation; paper savings were suddenly devalued. This time, however, there was a limit to any losses. What was more, quite small quantities of the new currency would actually buy goods. When Ludwig Erhard, the economic director who had undertaken the reform, also dismantled price and other controls, the scene was set for the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, the German “economic miracle,” fueled by freedom and competition and the energy they released.

By 1950 West Germany’s gross national product had caught up with the 1936 figure. Between 1950 and 1955 the national income rose by 12 percent a year, while exports grew even faster. From a small deficit in 1950, gold and foreign currency reserves increased to nearly 13 billion deutsche marks by 1955, while unemployment fell from 2.5 million to 900,000. Per capita income nearly doubled. New homes were built at the rate of 500,000 a year. By 1955 West Germany had more than 100,000 television sets. Bombed cities had been rebuilt. Every other family seemed to possess a Volkswagen “beetle” car.

West Germany’s was not the only economic miracle. France, spurred by the bright young graduates of grandes écoles like the Polytechnique, was modernizing rapidly—electrifying railways, launching new power projects, discovering natural gas, building nuclear reactors, mechanizing coal mines, and designing the Caravelle jet airplane. In 1948 France’s total output had been only just above the 1936 level. By 1955 it was half again as high. Between 1955 and 1958 French productivity increased by 8 percent a year, faster than anywhere else in Europe.

Italy, however, was not to be left behind. With a comparatively low starting point, plentiful labour, and new discoveries of oil and, especially, natural gas, it was able to increase the gross national product by 32.9 percent between 1950 and 1954. In Italian industry between 1950 and 1958, the average annual growth rate was 9 percent. As in West Germany, the transformation was visible: better clothes; smarter shop fronts; higher meat consumption; bicycles replaced by motor scooters and later by small cars.

In Britain, although there was no economic miracle, there were industrial success stories in chemicals, quality cars, nuclear energy, and aviation. It was a British airline that in 1952 inaugurated the world’s first purely jet airline service. By the end of the decade, Heathrow in London was the busiest airport in the world.

By 1955 all western European countries were producing more than in the 1930s. Abroad, from 1952 onward, western Europe was earning more than it spent. Between 1950 and 1955, average productivity in Europe increased by 26 percent. Although British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was both misunderstood and mocked when he made the remark, he had some justification for telling an audience on July 20, 1957: “Most of our people have never had it so good.”

The benefits, for ordinary Europeans, took many forms. There was easier access to higher education and cheaper mass travel. There was more varied food; there was better health, preserved by better medicine. There were new synthetic materials, more plentiful housing, and wider automobile ownership. There were stereophonic recordings, colour television, high-fidelity audio equipment, and cheap paperback editions of serious books. There were new, more classless eating-houses, pedestrian precincts, supermarkets, and shopping malls. What its critics called “Americanization” had arrived.

But affluence had a downside, in Europe as elsewhere. It often harmed the environment: more cars meant more roads, and more yachts meant more marinas. It multiplied the production of waste, not all of it biodegradable. It sometimes seemed to glorify greed and snobbery, especially when it passed some people by. It troubled the young and the thoughtful: their material needs sated, they might be left asking, “So what?” With money more plentiful, it was easier to be spendthrift. With greater prosperity, drug abuse and alcoholism became more common; so, paradoxically, did hooliganism and casual crime. One of the by-products of the affluent society was self-doubt and self-questioning—the kind of critique of “consumer values” that was voiced by student rebels in and around 1968. It left many Europeans unsure of their deeper objectives and, still more, of their role in a bewildering world. The reflux of empire

One major change in the world during the decades that followed World War II was the emergence of more than 50 new sovereign states. Essentially, this was the result of decolonization.

Before World War II the countries of western Europe had ruled, controlled, or powerfully influenced vast tracts of territory overseas. The main exceptions were Spain, which had long since lost its empire, and Germany, whose colonies had been confiscated after World War I. Otherwise, Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal remained imperial powers, holding direct or indirect sway over most of Southeast Asia, parts of the West Indies, nearly all of Africa, and much of the Middle East.

Gradually, what had once been colonies, protectorates, or client states won their independence. Some 800 million people were now responsible for their own affairs. Few were richer or more secure. Many retained links with Europe—linguistic, cultural, economic or commercial; many depended on European investment and aid. But they were free of their colonial masters. Painfully, and sometimes violently, the old order had been superseded, and new relationships had to be built.

The Italian colonies in North and East Africa, like the Japanese empire in East Asia, were dismantled fairly quickly. Independence likewise came early to various Middle Eastern countries, although for many years European influence there continued. Egypt had become formally independent in 1922, Iraq in 1932, and Lebanon and Syria in 1941. Iran’s independence was guaranteed by Britain and the U.S.S.R. in 1942. The year 1946 saw Jordan’s independence, and 1948 the proclamation of Israel. Historical ties (including the memory of Hitler’s Holocaust), strategic pressures, and the need for Middle Eastern oil kept Europe deeply involved in the area long after most of its countries’ formal independence had become much more real. The Suez expedition of 1956 actually brought down a British government; oil price rises in the 1970s caused a European recession; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 for a time seemed to threaten the risk of world war.

British and Dutch decolonization in East Asia began in 1947 with the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948, and the Dutch East Indies in 1949. Malaya’s independence was delayed until 1957 by a communist campaign of terror, quelled by both a sophisticated antiguerrilla campaign and a serious effort to win what the British General Sir Gerald Templer called “the hearts and minds of the Malayan people.”

French decolonization proved more troublesome. France had given the name “Indo-China” to a million square miles in Southeast Asia, an area nearly 10 times the size of the mother country, which it had colonized in the 19th century—a union of settlements and dependencies in Tonkin, Annam, Laos, Cambodia, and Cochinchina around Saigon. As early as 1925, the Vietnam Revolutionary Party had been founded to fight for the unity and independence of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. In 1945 it proclaimed a democratic republic and fought the French for eight years. Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam became independent and was partitioned between Hanoi and Saigon. When communist North Vietnam began threatening and attacking the South, the United States was drawn into 10 years of unsuccessful and divisive hostilities, at a heavy cost in human life and political credibility.

France faced similar problems in North Africa. Morocco and Tunisia obtained independence in 1956, but Algeria, legally part of the French republic, aroused far fiercer passions and led to another eight-year war, from 1954 to 1962. Whereas Dien Bien Phu had brought down a French government, the Algerian War caused the downfall of the French Fourth Republic and the accession to power of de Gaulle, who had been in retirement (his second) since 1951. French settlers in Algeria cheered him when he told them: “I have understood you.” Only later did they realize that his understanding embraced the need to grant Algeria independence and to crush attempted coups on the part of the settlers’ right wing.

In sub-Saharan Africa, what Harold Macmillan called “the wind of change” blew less stormily. There were violent incidents and atrocities, as in the former Belgian Congo; and there were tribal and civil wars. Some white settlers hotly resisted decolonization, as in Rhodesia and South Africa. But by the 1990s only South Africa maintained white supremacy, and even there the apartheid system was dismantled by 1994. Europeans were aghast at Africa’s recurrent famines and concerned at the persistence of apartheid. Yet no aspect of Africa’s development seemed likely to affect Europe as deeply as Indochina and Algeria had affected France.

One feature of the postcolonial period, however, was the reflux into Europe of emigrants from the former colonies. Some, civil servants and business people, had little difficulty in settling themselves. Others faced latent racism. In Britain the first such immigrant groups, from the West Indies, were broadly welcomed. But between 1950 and 1957 Britain’s immigrant population doubled, to 200,000; and the busy diligence of Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers, though welcomed by many, also aroused envy and hostility, as it had in Uganda, whence some of them had fled. In France, too, there was racial hostility, directed more often against North Africans than against black immigrants. Neither France nor Britain seemed to have studied the careful preparations that the Netherlands had made to meet similar problems with immigrants from East Asia.

In eastern Europe there was also pressure for independence from quasi-colonial rule. Signs of unrest had begun in Poland, where in June and July 1956 strikes and riots in Poznań had ended with the deaths of 53 workers. In October of that year in Hungary, there was a full-scale revolt, finally quelled on November 4 by Soviet tanks. A similar fate ended the “Prague Spring” of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. For a long time, it seemed as if eastern Europe would never be free.

Yet there too the winds of change were blowing. The accession to power of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 marked a real turning point in the U.S.S.R.: glasnost (“openness”) replaced compulsive secrecy, and attempts at perestroika (“restructuring”) sought to replace with efficiency the dead hand of state control. Already in Poland the workers’ leader Lech Wałęsa had rallied supporters round the union banner of Solidarity; in Poland and elsewhere, as the 1980s ended, a new era began. Victims were rehabilitated; oppressive regimes were overthrown; dictators were executed; and free elections were held. For many, the most moving moment was on the night of Nov. 9–10, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached. Erected by the East German authorities in 1961 to prevent their citizens from fleeing to the West, the Wall was a concrete symbol of the division of Berlin, of Germany, and of Europe. Less than a year later, on Oct. 3, 1990, Germany and Berlin were both formally reunited. How long would it be before Europe was reunited too? Ever closer union?

Discussed by philosophers for centuries, actively promoted from the 1920s onward by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Movement, and officially proposed in 1929 by Aristide Briand on behalf of France, the idea of uniting Europe was revived again as World War II approached. In Britain a small private group that called itself Federal Union—in close touch with others at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)—began to campaign for unity in Europe as a last frail hope of preventing war. Some of the papers produced by its distinguished supporters, including work by Lord Lothian and Lionel Robbins, found their way to another group of activists in the Italian Resistance, led by, among others, Altiero Spinelli. One of the most stubborn of Mussolini’s political prisoners, he was freed in 1943 from confinement on an island off the coast between Rome and Naples. Admiring what he called “the clean, precise thinking of the English federalists,” he echoed it in the declaration he drafted for a secret grouping of Resistance leaders from eight other countries, including Germany. Britain thus contributed to Continental developments that British governments shunned for many years.

Support for European unity came from the right as well as the left, from liberals as well as dirigistes, from clerics as well as anticlericals, from “Atlanticists” as well as those who saw Europe as a “Third Force” between East and West. It even received official support, overt as well as implicit.

In 1939 the British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee declared: “Europe must federate or perish.” In 1940, prompted by Jean Monnet, Churchill’s government, in agreement with General de Gaulle, proposed a political union between Britain and France. In 1943 Churchill called for a Council of Europe after the war, and de Gaulle’s colleague René Mayer suggested an economic federation. In 1944 the exiled governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Benelux Convention for a future customs union. Pope Pius XII, meanwhile, had envisaged a close union of European states.

Individual supporters of European unity included not only statesmen such as Paul-Henri Spaak from Belgium, Alcide De Gasperi from Italy, Robert Schuman from France, Johan Willem Beyen from the Netherlands, Konrad Adenauer from Germany, and Joseph Bech from Luxembourg but also such well-known writers as Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, George Orwell, Denis de Rougemont, and Ignazio Silone. All urged, and many helped to organize, what Winston Churchill called in 1946 “a kind of United States of Europe.”

In 1948 a number of activist organizations, coordinated by Joseph Retinger, former assistant to the late General Władysław Sikorski, head of the wartime Polish government-in-exile in London, staged a full-scale Congress of Europe in The Hague. Attended by 750 statesmen from throughout western Europe, including Spaak, De Gasperi, Churchill, Schuman, Adenauer, and a young French Resistance worker named François Mitterrand, it called for political and economic union, a European Assembly, and a European Court of Human Rights.

Some governments responded sympathetically. The postwar constitutions of France, West Germany, and Italy all envisaged limiting national sovereignty: the German text specifically looked forward to a united Europe. The British, however, were skeptical; and when in response to proposals by the French foreign minister Georges Bidault (who had attended The Hague Congress) the governments took action, it was of limited scope. In May 1949 they set up the Council of Europe, consisting of a Committee of Ministers and a Consultative Assembly.

To the activists, it was something; but it was not enough. The Council of Europe’s main achievement, apart from useful studies and discussions, was to produce the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950), effectively backed by a court and a commission. But the Consultative Assembly was just that: it had no power, and the Committee of Ministers had a veto.

The initiative to go further came from Monnet. His opportunity came when France was at loggerheads with Britain and the United States, both of which sought to remove the postwar restraints preventing German heavy industry from making its full contribution to the prosperity of the West. Monnet proposed to sidestep the dilemma by pooling coal and steel production in western Europe, including West Germany’s, under common institutions to replace with a light and shared rein the heavy control that the International Ruhr Authority had imposed on West Germany alone.

This was the essence of what became the Schuman Plan in 1950 when Robert Schuman, by then the French foreign minister, accepted it after Georges Bidault, the prime minister, had neglected to take it up. Its end product, initially embracing only six nations, was the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which began work in 1952.

Monnet and Schuman saw this as only a first step on the way to a European federation. Monnet followed it by proposing to René Pleven a similar solution to the problem of German rearmament: a European Defense Community. When that eventually failed, he proposed to Spaak and Beyen what became by 1957–58 the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), a similar organization for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The three institutions were ultimately merged to become the European Communities (EC) in 1967. With a Council of Ministers to make essential decisions (if need be by majority vote), a Commission to propose policy, and a European Parliament and Court of Justice to exert, respectively, legislative and judicial control, the EC had the embryo of a federal constitution, limited to economic and social affairs.

It also had the potential for crises, growth, and enlargement. Its first major crisis, indeed, concerned enlargement, when President de Gaulle vetoed the first British application to join, in 1963. The second crisis, two years later, was also provoked by de Gaulle, who objected to the extension of majority voting. Richard J. Mayne

Weathering both crises, the EC proceeded to broaden its scope and to expand beyond the organization’s original six members—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. First came Britain, Ireland, and Denmark (1973), followed by Greece (1981) and then Spain and Portugal (1986). The Single European Act, promulgated July 1, 1987, built upon ongoing efforts at further social and economic cohesion and established a timetable for the completion of a common market. The Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union), signed on Feb. 7, 1992, created the European Union (EU), comprising three main components: a common foreign and security policy, an enhanced cooperation in domestic affairs, and the EC, renamed the European Community, which became the anchor of the EU with broader authority. Moreover, the treaty established EU citizenship, which allowed citizens, regardless of nationality, to vote and run for office in elections in the country of their residence both for local office and for the organization’s increasingly important legislative body, the European Parliament. Enthusiasm for the EU in the member countries was not universal (it took two referendums for Danish voters to approve their country’s involvement, and the referendum on membership was barely approved by the French electorate), but the treaty officially took effect on Nov. 1, 1993. ‘‘Convergence criteria’’ (relating to levels of government spending, inflation, public debt, and exchange-rate stability) were established for participation in a common European currency. Although some countries failed to qualify (Greece) or chose to remain outside the system (Britain, Denmark, and Sweden, the last having joined the EU in 1995 along with Austria and Finland), 11 countries on Jan. 1, 1999, relinquished control over their exchange rates and began a transition to the replacement of their national currencies with a single monetary unit, the euro.

Meanwhile, members of the EU began acting collectively in foreign policy, notably attempting to bring peace to the countries of the former federation of Yugoslavia, which splintered violently, beginning with the secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and that of Macedonia (later called North Macedonia) in 1992. Ethnic civil war was more protracted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (sparking UN intervention), and EU members helped halt the fighting there through participation in the brokering of the Dayton Accords. Acting under the aegis of NATO, a number of EU countries intervened militarily in the conflict in Kosovo (1998–99), between that region’s ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority and the government of the rump Yugoslavian state (comprising Serbia and Montenegro), and again in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime had provided a home for the radical Islamists responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Terrorist bombings by Islamist radicals also struck Europe, in Madrid in March 2004 and in London in July 2005.

In 2004 the EU admitted 10 more countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia (independent states formed by the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992), as well as Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. Other than Cyprus and Malta, the 21st-century additions were all former members of the communist bloc. To the consternation of Russia, many of them also joined NATO. In 2008 Russia showed its support for Serbia (a solitary country after the split in 2006 of Serbia and Montenegro, the renamed loose successor state to Yugoslavia), when Kosovo declared its independence despite Serbian opposition. Russia’s relations with the EU and NATO, particularly those organizations’ former communist members, were sometimes tense, as when Russia objected strenuously to U.S. plans to deploy a missile-defense radar system in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Efforts begun in 2002 to draft a constitution for the enlarged EU led to the signing of a document in 2004 that failed to be ratified by French and Dutch voters in 2005. A reform version of the failed constitution, stewarded by Germany, resulted in the Lisbon Treaty of December 2007; however, it too was scuttled, at least temporarily, when Irish voters rejected it in 2008. In October 2009 Ireland approved the treaty in a second referendum, and Poland completed its ratification process as well. That November the Czech Republic became the final country to ratify the treaty, which entered into force on Dec. 1, 2009.

The EC was founded in response to a checkered half-century of European history, when some of the world’s most civilized countries had plumbed depths of savagery, folly, tyranny, and genocide that in a work of science fiction would be hard to believe. The EC’s most obvious purpose had been to reconcile former enemies and prevent war. Its second aim was to avoid the economic errors Europeans had made in the 1930s, when, instead of collaborating on a global recovery policy in response to the Great Depression, they worsened the crisis through economic nationalism that was the breeding ground for dictatorship. Moreover, Europe’s individual countries, once great powers, were dwarfed numerically, politically, and militarily by the United States and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991–92) and economically by the United States and Japan. By the early 21st century the gigantic countries of India and China had also become economic rivals for the European Union and for a Europe that increasingly saw greater cohesiveness as the path not only to holding its own vis-à-vis political and economic superpowers but also to maximizing its power to meet its wider responsibilities in the world. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Citation Information

Article Title: History of Europe

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 19 July 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe

Access Date: August 16, 2019

Additional Reading Prehistory

A comprehensive introduction to European prehistory is offered in Timothy Champion et al., Prehistoric Europe (1984). Specific periods are covered in Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (1986); Clive Bonsall (ed.), The Mesolithic in Europe (1989); and Alasdair Whittle, Neolithic Europe: A Survey (1985). Among studies of economy and subsistence, Robin Dennell, European Economic Prehistory: A New Approach (1983), deals particularly with hunter-gatherers; Marek Zvelebil (ed.), Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their Transition to Farming (1986), includes regional studies of postglacial hunter-gatherers and the beginnings of agriculture; and Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (1985), is a detailed study of early agriculture. John M. Coles and Andrew J. Lawson (eds.), European Wetlands in Prehistory (1987), contains information on the unusually well-preserved archaeological finds in various European countries. N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 2nd ed. (1985), is a well-illustrated introductory survey; other useful studies of prehistoric art are Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld, Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967); and André Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting (1982; originally published in Italian, 1981). For the Indo-European question, the best account of the theory of invasions is J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (1989). Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987), considers the issues and argues for the spread of the language with early agriculture. Timothy C. Champion The Metal Ages

General surveys include Patricia Phillips, The Prehistory of Europe (1980); Herbert Schutz, The Prehistory of Germanic Europe (1983); and A.F. Harding (ed.), Climatic Change in Later Prehistory (1982). Jacques Briard, The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe: From the Megaliths to the Celts (1979; originally published in French, 1976), describes the main discoveries; J.M. Coles and A.F. Harding, The Bronze Age in Europe: An Introduction to the Prehistory of Europe, c. 2000–700 BC (1979), offers a comprehensive account for different parts of Europe and an extensive bibliography; and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Roger Thomas (eds.), The Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition in Europe: Aspects of Continuity and Change in European Societies, c. 1200 to 500 B.C., 2 vol. (1989), is a collection of scholarly articles.

John Collis, The European Iron Age (1984), focuses on the links between the Mediterranean and the Iron Age culture of central Europe, and his Oppida: Earliest Towns North of the Alps (1984), discusses early urban settlements. Barry Cunliffe, Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction (1988), explores the influence of Classical civilization and commerce on the cultures of central and western Europe. Harold Haefner (ed.), Frühes Eisen in Europa (1981), is a collection of papers on the origin of iron technology in Europe. A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC (1971), examines the changes characterizing early Iron Age Greece.

Social, economic, and cultural developments are studied in Richard Bradley, The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain: Themes and Variations in the Archaeology of Power (1984); Robert Chapman, Emerging Complexity: The Later Prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia, and the West Mediterranean (1990), an analysis of the cultural sequence focusing on social complexity; Peter S. Wells, Farms, Villages, and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe (1984), a survey of the settlement structure of the Iron Age; J.V.S. Megaw, Art of the European Iron Age: A Study of the Elusive Image (1970), an illustrated interpretive survey of motifs and imagery; and Peter S. Wells, Culture Contact and Culture Change: Early Iron Age Central Europe and the Mediterranean World (1980), analyzing the cultural relationship between central Europe and the Mediterranean. Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen Greeks, Romans, and barbarians

Appropriate volumes of the multivolume series Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ) survey the development and interaction of the civilizations. Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reprinted 1972), is a standard work on Aegean civilization. Other detailed treatments include Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization, 1100–650 B.C. (1961); N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 3rd ed. (1986); J.B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 4th ed. (1975); and Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (1980). John Boardman, The Greek Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, new ed. (1980), provides an overview of commercial expansion; and Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vol. (1984), is a history of the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic states.

H.H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World: 753–146 BC, 4th ed. (1980), is a standard comprehensive survey. Other relevant histories are Jacques Heurgon, The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (1973; originally published in French, 1969); Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders (1986), focusing on the social life, customs, and class structure of republican Rome; William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (1979, reprinted 1985), on Roman expansion; Joseph Vogt, The Decline of Rome: The Metamorphosis of Ancient Civilization (1967; originally published in German, 1965); and A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vol. (1964, reprinted 1986). Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), is a comprehensive collection of essays on cultural, economic, and social life in the Classical world.

Brief illustrated surveys of 600 years of post-Classical history are presented in Gerald Simons, Barbarian Europe (1968); and Philip Dixon, Barbarian Europe (1976). Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973), offers a scholarly examination of the development of early Europe. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica The Middle Ages

Useful reference works are The New Cambridge Medieval History, 7 vol. (1995–2005); Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vol. (1982–89); and Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2 vol. (2000). A good outline of events in the Middle Ages is R.L. Storey, Chronology of the Medieval World, 800–1491 (1973). Biographies of some important historians can be found in Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (eds.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies in the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vol. (1995–99). Two important volumes that represent scholarly perspectives of the late 20th and early 21st century are Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001); and Lester K. Little and Barbara Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (1998).

Terminology and periodization are discussed in Fred C. Robinson, “Medieval, the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 59(4):745–756 (October 1984); William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” Journal of World History, 3(1):13–53 (Spring 1992); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1970); Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1968); Jacques Le Goff, “The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet,” in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980), pp. 3–28; Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture (1992); Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?,” The Medieval History Journal, 1(1):25–45 (1998), and other articles in the same number. Stuart Airlie, “Strange Eventful Histories: The Middle Ages in the Cinema,” chapter 10 in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001), pp. 163–183, provides an introduction to depictions of the Middle Ages in film.

A discussion of late antiquity is G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999). Discussions of the “long Middle Ages” include Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (1981); Jacques Le Goff, “For an Extended Middle Ages,” in his The Medieval Imagination (1988; originally published in French), pp. 18–23; Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History, 4(1):85–125 (November 2000); Elizabeth R. Brown, “On 1500,” chapter 29 in Linehan and Nelson’s The Medieval World (above), pp. 691–710.

Surveys (cited here in reverse chronological sequence) include Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (2006); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000, 2nd ed. (2003); Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Early Middle Ages: Europe, 400–1000 (2001); R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (2000); David Nicholas, The Transformation of Europe 1300–1600 (1999); Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (1998, reprinted 2002); R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (1995); Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vol. (1994–95); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993); Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church (1992); Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (1988); J.H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (1988; reissued 1997); Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (1982); Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979, reissued 1987); and R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953, reissued 1998).

The classic work describing the older idea of decay is that of Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996). A useful counterpoint is Kaminsky’s “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis” (above). Edward Peters The Renaissance Historiographical problems

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1890; originally published in German, 1860), is a classic work, elegant and stimulating, available in many later editions, but its thesis, that 14th-century Italians broke sharply with their medieval past to create modern states and a highly individualistic secular society and culture, has been heavily modified by most modern specialists. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948, reprinted 1981), offers an excellent introduction, but recent scholarship has expanded the range and depth of knowledge and dissolved such interpretive consensus as still existed when Ferguson wrote. E.F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (1960); Tinsley Helton (ed.), The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age (1961, reprinted 1980); and Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background, 2nd ed. (1977), characterize the interpretations of the 1960s. At present most Renaissance historians do not make the sweeping characterizations of the “spirit of an age” that once came so easily. An excellent historiographical and bibliographical guide to works about Europe outside Italy is Steven Ozment (ed.), Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (1982), not really limited to the Reformation. The Italian Renaissance

Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (1979, reissued 1988), provides an informative survey. Florentine history is authoritatively surveyed in Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (1969, reissued 1983). Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (1973), ventures beyond the fall of the Florentine republic. Venetian history is ably treated in D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580 (1970); William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (1974, reprinted 1986); and Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (1980). Social and cultural conditions and religious life are approached in Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (1971); Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980); David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1985; originally published in French, 1978); Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (1982); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981); and Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality Versus Myth (1986). Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in her Women, History & Theory (1984), challenged Burckhardt’s thesis that women achieved equality with men in Renaissance Italy. Other good studies on women in the Renaissance include Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (1980); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. from French (1985); and Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (1980), is a controversial groundbreaking study.

A good starting point for the study of Renaissance intellectual history is Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains, rev. ed. (1961), and Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (1965, reissued 1980). Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. from Italian (1965, reprinted 1975); and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (1966), treat humanism as a civic ethos as well as a scholarly and educational movement; while Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vol. (1970), disproves the notion of humanism as primarily secular. Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (1961), provides information on the acknowledged founder of Renaissance humanism. Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (1983), is an excellent study of a figure second only to Petrarch in importance. George Holmes, Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance (1986), revives an old thesis attributing the origins of the Renaissance to the age of Dante. Studies of humanist culture outside Florence include J.K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (1966); John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (1983); Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (1985); Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (1987); and Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986). A lively revisionist view that challenges basic assumptions about the history of Renaissance humanism is presented in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1986). Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vol. (1988); Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (1988); and Donald Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (1991), discuss the current state of studies on humanism.

The classic account of the development of diplomacy is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955, reprinted 1988); the subject is also discussed in Joycelyne G. Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance (1986). Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (1974), is a study of war in the Renaissance. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965, reprinted 1984), provides the political and cultural context of the thought of two leading Renaissance political scholars. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), traces the Renaissance heritage to modern times. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), is a fresh, lively intellectual biography of the great Florentine. Science and technology

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vol. (1979), and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), make a strong case for the revolutionary impact of Renaissance print technology upon culture. The concept of a “scientific revolution” is upheld in such standard works as Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800, rev. ed. (1957, reprinted 1982); I. Bernard Cohen, From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (1980); and A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750, 3rd ed. (1983); while the continuities with medieval science are stressed in A.C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2nd rev. ed. (1959, reissued 1967). Feminist theorists have made some influential contributions to revisionist perspectives deploring the “triumphalism” with which scientific advance has been treated: for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985); Margaret Jacobs and James Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988); and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989). The Renaissance outside Italy

New areas of investigation in social history, including the history of the lower classes, women, the family, and popular religion, are exemplified in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (1974; originally published in French, 1966); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored, 3rd. ed. (1984); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975, reissued 1987); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978, reprinted 1988); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (1976); Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (1983); Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (1985); and Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987).

In religious history there has been a tendency to reconstruct the bridges between the late medieval and Reformation piety and thought. Among the most influential examples of this effort are Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (1963, reissued 1983); and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (ed.), Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (1966, reissued 1981). Other important studies include Steven E. Ozment (ed.), The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (1971); and Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (1977). Another, not necessarily contradictory, tendency has been that of seeing the history of late medieval and Renaissance religion on its own terms, rather than as the prelude to the Reformation; this approach is taken by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (eds.), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (1974); and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (1984). An original and valuable, if sometimes debatable, overview is John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (1985). Donald Weinstein The emergence of modern Europe

The economic backgound is discussed in a variety of studies. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 2nd ed. (1980; originally published in Italian, 1974), offers a treatment of the economy focusing not so much on history as on social structures. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vol. (1974–89), covers the period from the 16th to the mid-19th century, emphasizing spatial division of the early capitalistic world among core areas, semiperipheries, and peripheries. Another broad, rich, and learned reconstruction of the world of early capitalism is offered in Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vol. (1982–84; originally published in French, 1979).

Comprehensive works include Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present (1989); Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–1600 (1977), stressing concepts of law as a critical factor in economic development; E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (eds.), The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1967); Jan De Vries, Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (1976), exploring the 17th-century unraveling of the 16th-century world, and European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (1984), a broader survey; Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy, 1500–1800, new ed. (1976, reissued 1987; originally published in Polish, 1962), an analysis of a particular 16th-century economy; and Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (1989; originally published in Italian, 1980), an exploration of malnutrition with an impressive picture of some unpalatable food and the symbolism of its consumption.

Important demographic studies are Josiah Cox Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (1985), a historical study of European communities; and E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (1981), utilizing new techniques of reconstruction and backward projection of census data.

Studies of protoindustrialization include Peter Kriedte et al., Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (1981; originally published in German, 1977), in a German context; John U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (1940, reprinted 1968), still informative and focusing on the interaction of power; and Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976), a collection of Marxist debates as to what capitalism really was and when it began.

Matters concerning finance are studied in Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (1934, reprinted 1977), a classic that launched a continuing debate. Political and cultural influences are the subject of Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), a Marxist view of the role of the state in the birth of modern capitalism; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987), a lengthy and entertaining exploration; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), on the impact of the culture of Reformation; and R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926, reissued 1984), a classic study of Calvinism and the capitalistic ethos.

A broader approach to early modern society is offered summarily in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (1987), focusing on detail rather than central movements of early modern culture; Roger Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance (1989; originally published in French, 1986), a volume of essays dealing with the period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, from the series A History of Private Life; Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–1670 (1983), an often poignant examination of ethnic relations; and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980; originally published in Italian, 1976), an excellent social history based on the story of an eccentric miller and his cosmological views.

Politics and diplomacy are dealt with in many general histories of the period. Narrative and analytical accounts, with detailed bibliographies, are offered in J.R. Hale, Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 (1971, reprinted 1985); G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517–1559 (1963); J.H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598 (1968, reprinted 1985); and Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648 (1979), all four in the Fontana History of Europe series. G.R. Potter (ed.), The Renaissance, 1493–1520 (1957); G.R. Elton (ed.), The Reformation, 1520–1559, 2nd ed. (1990); R.B. Wernham (ed.), The Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559–1610 (1968); and J.P. Cooper (ed.), The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609–48/59 (1970), the first four volumes in The New Cambridge Modern History series, offer a sequence of chapters by various authors, thematically organized. H.G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse, and G.Q. Bowler, Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1989), treats the earlier part of the period. The last 50 years of the period, dominated by the genesis and course of continental war, are best approached through Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Thirty Years’ War, rev. ed. (1987). David Herlihy N. Geoffrey Parker The age of absolutism, 1648–1789

Gordon East, An Historical Geography of Europe, 5th ed. (1966), provides an informative introduction to geographic features influencing the history of the period. H.D. Schmidt, “The Establishment of ‘Europe’ as a Political Expression,” The Historical Journal, 9(2):172–178 (1966), discusses the question of definition. Main themes are covered in the essays of G.N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (1947, reprinted 1981); and the appropriate volumes of The New Cambridge Modern History series (1957– ). General surveys include E.N. Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States, 1648–1789 (1970); D.H. Pennington, Seventeenth-Century Europe (1970); Geoffrey Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe, 1648–1780 (1985); M.S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783, 3rd ed. (1987); and William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800 (1978, reprinted 1984). Specific social and demographic questions are explored in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (1971, reissued 1988; originally published in French, 1967); Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (1981); Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. from French, ed. by Peter Burke (1973); Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology (1975; originally published in French, 1961); Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962, reissued 1979; originally published in French, 1960); John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1981); James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (1987); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (1983; also published as Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, 1983). Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (1974), a study of poverty with much about women; Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (1979); and E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (1981), provide important insights into early modern social history.

Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1966, reprinted 1978; originally published in French, 1931); Jack M. Potter, May N. Diaz, and George M. Foster (eds.), Peasant Society (1967); Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986; originally published in French, 1982); and Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (1961, reprinted 1971), are important studies of peasant life. The economic and social conditions in the urban areas are the subject of Gaston Roupnel, La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (1955); Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (1968, reprinted 1979); and Gerald L. Burke, The Making of Dutch Towns: A Study in Urban Development from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (1956). The early modern aristocracy is studied in A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Studies of the Nobilities of the Major European States in the Pre-Reform Era, 2nd ed. (1967); and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (1985; originally published in French, 1976). Economic questions are examined in the appropriate volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe series (1966– ); Peter Earle (ed.), Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (1974); and B.H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (1963). G.N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton, 2nd ed. (1949, reissued 1970), looks at the connections between science and technology. Commerce and trade and their significance as characteristics of the home countries are discussed in D.C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (1969); Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (1973); J.H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century (1971); and C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (1965, reprinted 1977).

Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (1960, reprinted 1985), provides a concise overview of the subject; a comprehensive treatment is offered in E. Préclin and E. Jarry, Les Luttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vol. (1955–56). Specific significant topics in church history are surveyed in A.G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (1968, reissued 1979); Jean Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (1977, originally published in French, 1971); Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism: The Reformation (1965; originally published in French, 1961); Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers & the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community & the Russian State, 1694–1855 (1970); Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants: la cabale des accommodeurs de religion, la caisse des conversions, la révocation de l’Édit de Nantes (1951); Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion (1993); Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (1991); James Brodrick, The Progress of the Jesuits, 1556–79 (1947, reprinted 1986); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (1965, reissued 1976); Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1997); and John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society Under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (1960).

Political questions are discussed in Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975); J.H. Shennan, The Origins of the Modern European State, 1450–1725 (1974); and A.R. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (1975). Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Absolutism (1976), is a collection of articles, mostly translated from French. William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (1973), is another study of absolutism. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vol. (1978), is a political history. Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (1965, reissued 1975); Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1978); Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660, 2 vol. (1982); and Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China (1971; originally published in French, 1967), are studies of resistance and revolts.

Diplomacy tends to be subsumed into general histories. Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution: The Political Traditions of the Old Régime (1969; originally published in French, 1885); Jill Lisk, The Struggle for Supremacy in the Baltic, 1600–1725 (1967); Derek McKay and H.M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (1983); Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Europe (1976); J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (1968); and Mark A. Thomson et al., William III and Louis XIV: Essays 1680–1720 (1968), examine the main outlines of early modern diplomacy. A starting point for the study of war is Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560–1660 (1956). A later contribution to the ensuing debate is Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659, rev. ed. (1990). The effects of war are treated in G.N. Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (1958, reprinted 1985); André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789 (1979; originally published in French, 1976); H.W. Koch, The Rise of Modern Warfare, 1618–1815 (1981); John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (1982); Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (1974); and Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (1994), and A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (1991). The Enlightenment

The vast literature on the Enlightenment encompasses a variety of historiographical approaches. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, 2 vol. (1966–69, reprinted 1996), is a magisterial work that has long served as one of the pillars of the study of the subject. Among the most-rewarding considerations of the Enlightenment that are grounded in social history is J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vol. (1999–2015), a multivolume study of historian Edward Gibbon, whom Pocock uses as a foundation upon which to construct wider discussions of the nature of the Enlightenment that are contextualized in a careful characterization of the law, religion, and society of the period. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. from Italian by R. Burr Litchfield (1989), and Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. from Italian by Susan Corsi (1972), take a similar social historical approach.

A number of historians have argued that, rather than a single Enlightenment, there were many separate national enlightenments, including John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (2005), which focuses on the development of the discipline of political economy in Scotland and southern Italy. Surveying popular discourse ranging from journalism to rumour mongering, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), and George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003), investigate the “low” Enlightenment, partly shaped by ideas that filtered down from the philosophes. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (2001), also studies Enlightenment manifestations in the broader society.

Returning to a focus on intellectual history, Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2001), Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity. and the Emancipation of Man (2006), and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), differentiate between “Counter-Enlightenment,” the “moderate mainstream” Enlightenment of Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Voltaire—which was willing to compromise with the church and the monarchial power structure—and the atheist, democratic, “radical” Enlightenment of Benedict de Spinoza and his intellectual disciples. Likewise, Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013), concentrates on high intellectual history as it finds cosmopolitanism to be the defining contribution of the Enlightenment

Other useful works include Edward Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (2006); Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (2012); A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton, 1630–1720 (1963, reprinted 1981); Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (1968, reprinted 2009), Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957, reissued 1985); Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968, reprinted 1990); Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680–1715 (1953, reissued 2013; originally published in French, 1935); Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (1987); and Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (1971, reissued 2015).

Compressed summaries are given in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (2005); Margaret C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (2001); Paul Hyland, Olga Gomez, and Francesca Greensides (eds), The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (2003); Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, new ed. (1990); and Robert Anchor, The Enlightenment Tradition (1967, reissued 1979). A broader picture is presented in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951, reissued 2009; originally published in German, 1932), considers the metaphysical basis of 18th-century thought. Important studies of individual thinkers include Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (1963–64, reissued 1985); Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (1961, reprinted 1970); Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (1969); Ronald Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (1973); Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History (1988); and S.C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (1979). Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964, reissued 1971), is a good introduction to the philosophes.

Intellectual life in its broader aspects is explored in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (2000); Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, new ed. (2009); and Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (1960). The production and distribution of the Encyclopédie is examined in J.L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952, reprinted 1985), which sees the Enlightenment as hostile to the idea of freedom; also iconoclastic is Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (1959). George Boas, “In Search of the Age of Reason,” pp. 1–19 in Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (1965, reprinted 1967), discusses difficulties in interpreting words such as “reason” and “nature.” R.R. Palmer, Catholics & Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939, reissued 1970), describes the religious counterattack against the Enlightenment. Other views are expressed in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The French Revolution in Culture (1989); and Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994).

Good general accounts of the experience of other countries include Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (1983, reissued 1985); Walter H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century (1935, reissued 1971); Henri Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (1974; originally published in French, 1947); Stuart J. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (1979, reprinted 1986); Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (1958, reprinted 1973); and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976). Interaction of thinkers and “enlightened” absolutism is explored in C.B.A. Behrens, Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (1985); Leonard Krieger, Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789 (1970); and H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (1990). Geoffrey Russell Richards Treasure Revolution and the growth of industrial society, 1789–1914

Robin W. Winks and Thomas Kaiser, Europe, 1648–1815: From the Old Regime to the Age of Revolution (2004); T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: Europe, 1789–1914 (2000); and Theodore S. Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (1983), provide excellent introductions to the period. Comprehensive coverage is offered in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975, reissued 1984), and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987). Treatments of the Industrial Revolution and related social developments include Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.), The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1992); Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed. (1979), an economic history; David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969), more comprehensive and less quantitative, on society; Peter N. Stearns, European Society in Upheaval: Social History Since 1750, 2nd ed. (1975); Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (1981); and William L. Blackwell, The Industrialization of Russia: An Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (1982).

Women’s history is reviewed in Susan G. Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds.), Women, the Family, and Freedom, 2 vol. (1983); Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (1978, reissued 1987); Bonnie G. Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History since 1700 (1989); and Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australasia, 1840–1920 (1977), an overview of feminism. Important special topics in family history are covered in Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1975); John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (1981); Peter N. Stearns, Old Age in European Society: The Case of France (1976); and Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (1992), and Sexuality and Social Order (1983); and Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris (1992). Analysis of major social classes is provided in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976); and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, new ed. (1968, reissued 1980). Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (1986), studies popular protest patterns. Other important studies include Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution: c. 1780–c. 1880 (1980); and Harvey J. Graff (ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West (1981).

Patterns of revolution are the subject of R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vol. (1959–64, reprinted 1974); Owen Connelly, French Revolution, Napoleonic Era (1979); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984). Developments at mid-century are studied in Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (1974); and Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger, Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815–1914 (2005). Political trends can be followed in several excellent national histories, including Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 4th ed. (1987); Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (1978); and Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, 1783–1867 (1965). Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (1983), examines the vital political trend. Overviews of imperialism can be found in Toni Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industrializing World Since 1815 (1981); and Winfried Baumgart, Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914, rev. ed. (1982; originally published in German, 1975). A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954, reprinted 1971); and Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), interpret internal European diplomatic patterns. Readable accounts of the origins of the First World War include Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, 2nd ed. (1971); Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (1966); and James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (1984). The studies by Fritz Fischer are crucial: Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1967; originally published in German, 1961), and The War of Illusions (1975; originally published in German, 1969). Peter N. Stearns

The historical role of Romanticism and Realism in philosophical, cultural, social, and political thought and the development of the modern culture of which they were the precursors is the focus of Eugen Weber, Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism (1960); Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (1937, reprinted 1965); Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1962); Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (1975); and Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). Frederic Ewen, Heroic Imagination: The Creative Genius of Europe from Waterloo (1815) to the Revolution of 1848 (1984), gives a broad summary with interpretive detail. Ernst Behler (ed.), Philosophy of German Idealism (1987), supplies both a review of common traits and comparative evaluations. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (eds.), The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition (1987), offers contrasting views on Romantic literature to 1850. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism: 1852–1871 (1935, reprinted 1963); and Carlton J.H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900 (1941, reprinted 1983), add to the understanding of political and economic characteristics of the period and interpret its culture. William W. Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (1983), considers the development of the genre from its inception to its modern transformations.

Bruce Bernard (ed.), The Impressionist Revolution (1986), interprets the broadest aspects of artistic innovation. Maly Gerhardus and Dietfried Gerhardus, Symbolism and Art Nouveau: Sense of Impending Crisis, Refinement of Sensibility, and Life Reborn in Beauty (1979; originally published in German, 1977), covers the last two decades of the 19th century in this excellently illustrated volume. Yvonne Brunhammer, The Art Deco Style (1983), examines the radical change in design characteristic of the new century. Lewis Mumford et al., The Arts in Renewal (1951, reprinted 1969), is a collection of interpretive studies on the historical establishment of modernism in various artistic genres. Henry R. Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929, reprinted 1972), offers a prospect and retrospect after a generation of the “International Style.” Jacques Barzun European society since 1914

The scope and volume of literature on the period is so vast that no comprehensive bibliography can be suggested here. Most of the following works, however, contain significant bibliographies of their own. General historical surveys include Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964); Michael D. Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe Since 1870 (1977); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of Its People (1990; originally published in French, 1990); H. Stuart Hughes and James Wilkinson, Contemporary Europe: A History, 7th ed. (1991); James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, 3rd ed. (1983); and David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, 2nd ed. (1962, reprinted 1981). World War I is examined in Spencer Tucker, The Great War, 1914–1918 (1998); C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (1936, reissued 1982); J.E. Edmonds, A Short History of World War I (1951, reprinted 1968); Cyril B. Falls, The First World War (1960); and Bernadotte Schmitt and Harold Vedeler, The World in the Crucible, 1914–1939 (1984). Accounts of the Treaty of Versailles are found in H.W.V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vol. (1920–24, reissued 1969); Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919: Being Reminiscences of the Paris Peace Conference (1933, reissued 1984); John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, reissued 1988); Étienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (1946, reprinted 1978); Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967); and Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics (1980).

David Clay Large, Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (1990), provides a general overview of the interwar period. Special studies include Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975); Benjamin Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 (1999); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years (1994); Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968, reprinted 1981); H.W. Hodson, Slump and Recovery, 1929–1937: A Survey of World Economic Affairs (1938, reprinted 1983), on the Great Depression; Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (1962); Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (1981), on dictatorial leadership; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd rev. ed. (1986); and F.P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 2 vol. (1952, reprinted in 1 vol., 1986), on the political realities confronted by this organization.

The approach and developments of World War II are summarized in A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961, reissued 1983); Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (1989); Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard, Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War, 2nd rev. ed. (1989); Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (1989); Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (1968); Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (1987); and Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).

The postwar situation is examined in Richard Mayne, The Recovery of Europe: From Devastation to Unity (1970), and Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe (1983); Roger Morgan, West European Politics Since 1945: The Shaping of the European Community (1972); Derek W. Urwin, Western Europe Since 1945: A Political History, 4th ed. (1989); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994); and Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 (1993). Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969, reprinted 1987), discusses, among other things, the Marshall Plan. Henry L. Roberts, Eastern Europe: Politics, Revolution & Diplomacy (1970); and W.W. Rostow, The Division of Europe After World War II, 1946 (1981), focus on the forces that developed the Cold War. Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, 3rd ed. (1956), and From Lenin to Khrushchev: The History of World Communism, new ed. (1985), examine developments in eastern Europe and the communist world. V.G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815–1960 (1982), examines the dynamics of colonialism. T. Iván Berend, An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe: Economic Regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization (2006), offers an economic perspective.

The development of European unity is discussed in Sidney Pollard, European Economic Integration, 1815–1970 (1974); Walter Lipgens, A History of European Integration: 1945–1947, trans. from German (1982); Jean Monnet, Memoirs (1978; originally published in French, 1976); R.C. Mowat, Creating the European Community (1973); Miriam Camps, Britain and the European Community, 1955–1963 (1964); and Richard Mayne and John Pinder, Federal Union: The Pioneers (1990). Further insights into the European Union are provided by Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to European Integration, 3rd ed. (2005); and John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies, 4th ed. (2008). Richard J. Mayne