Europe

February 4, 2013
Bloody European statecraft and the interminable battle over Germany make the world go round in this magisterial history of modern international relations. Cambridge historian Simms (Unfinest Hour) surveys five centuries of European—and occasionally American—diplomacy, alliance-building, and warfare, from the 16th-century clashes between Spanish-Austrian Habsburgs and their French and Dutch rivals to today’s wrangles over E.U. budgets and overseas military deployments. At the center of his account is Germany, the sleeping giant whose fragmentation under the Holy Roman Empire, he argues, tempted foreign hegemons into endless military adventures—and whose unification under the Kaisers and Hitler sparked world wars. Simms chronicles this kaleidoscope of conflicts and coalitions with a graceful briskness that teases larger themes out of the welter of detail. His perspective is the antithesis of Annales-style, bottom-up social history: here it is the lofty power plays of kings and diplomats, egged on by hawkish publics, that create modernity by driving transformations in politics, religion, finance, and ideology. It sometimes overreaches—was the Russian Revolution really “a protest... against the failure of the Tsar to prosecute the conflict against Germany more vigorously”?—but Simms’s vision of great-power rivalry as the motor of history offers compelling insights amid a grand narrative sweep. 20 b&w photos, 8 maps. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management.

March 1, 2013
A smartly encapsulated 550 years of European history by a Cambridge historian reveals patterns and perils that continue to play out today. Divided and competing or cohesive and cooperative? The history of Europe since 1450 reveals states struggling for imperial title, space and security, with Germany as strategic central leading the charge. Simms (Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 2008, etc.) takes a conceptual approach to the forging of modern European geopolitics, from the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire at the heart of the European balance of power to the turbulent revolutions and ideological clashes of Central Europe that gave rise to Nazism and the definitive Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. Within each of the large-frame chapters, Simms manages to be both specific and big-picture, dense and wonderfully digestible within one hefty volume. He consistently pursues the notion that whoever held the imperial title--Charles V, Louis XIV, Frederick II of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Austria, the Hanoverians of Britain, etc.--held the balance of power in Europe. From the Seven Years' War, the decay of the ancient regime was hastened by the revolutionary convulsions within the American colonies and France, giving rise to crises across Europe in the state system and debates over which form of government should prevail--autocratic or democratic? From the struggles for emancipation in all forms during the 19th century to the bitter disputes over partitions in the 20th, questions of Europe's embrace of cohesion or retreat into sectarianism continue to command a sense of urgency. Simms handles them adeptly. An astute, comprehensive one-volume history of the "European project."

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