Europe: A History

"For me, this book was an eye-opener. We’re normally told the history of Europe from a nationalist perspective or from the perspective of the various kings or monarchs. It’s all an inevitable progression to the countries we have now. This tells a completely different history. It’s about a rich tapestry of peoples and regions and different forces which are much more messy and certainly don’t inevitably lead to where we are now. For example, it corrects the misperception that the Hundred Years’ War was a war between England and France because those nations didn’t exist at the time, and so on. So it’s a helpful corrective in terms of understanding our history and therefore understanding Europe today. The insight it gives is that the nations that exist today are not some kind of enduring reality. They are partly the product of chance and they are ever-changing. One of the conclusions one can draw from that is that one shouldn’t assume that 50 or 100 years now, it will just be a linear progression of the nations that happen to exist today. There’s likely to be more mixing, and more changing, then we like to think. Yes – there’s that and the backlash. There are some people who are more and more international and there are other people who are intensely local. And the people who are intensely local sometimes feel threatened by that change. The other thing about this book is that Norman Davies started off as a historian of Poland. Again, our sense of Europe tends to be very much western European focused, especially in Britain. We tend to think of Europe as Western Europe and that was exacerbated by the Cold War. This again reframes us, and makes us realize how Central and Eastern Europe are just as important and influence the continent’s direction too. It’s 1365 pages, so it’s longer even than Piketty! But you can dip in and out of it, you don’t have to read it sequentially. Also it’s got all these boxes on a variety of topics that don’t fit into the main narrative. It’s fascinating. If you haven’t read it, I really highly recommend it."