Germany 1770-1866

"James Sheehan, who is now retired, but was a professor for a long time at Stanford University in the US, is one of the most fluent writers and most readable historians of the period. He is just a wonderful stylist. In a way it’s a textbook. It’s a volume in the long-running Oxford History of Modern Europe , which takes a country-by-country approach. It was set up just after the end of World War II . The first volume to appear was A. J. P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe , which came out in 1954. And there are still volumes coming out. Sheehan’s is the first of two volumes on 19th century Germany. The other one, by Gordon Craig, goes up to 1945 and is now seriously out of date—though Craig is also a wonderful writer. “I have a reader in mind who really doesn’t know very much about the subject or where to start” This book is over 900 pages, but it’s a delight to read and gives you a narrative spine of German politics in the period. But it also covers a lot of basic features of society, social change, culture, literature, religion, philosophy and, of course, the economy—this is the period of the beginnings of industrialisation. It’s very wide-ranging and it’s a wonderful book to read. It came out in 1989 so, of course, to some extent, in some small areas, it has been superseded by more recent research. But it’s still the book on the subject. Traditional German nationalist or, as they’re sometimes called, Borussian historians , tended to look back and see the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century as an inevitable, predetermined process. The German Reich was founded in 1871 and up to then there were a number of developments, beginning with the 1848 revolutions, which failed to unify Germany on a liberal basis. What Sheehan does is to open up this whole process and show that it wasn’t inevitable that Germany was unified in 1871 in the way that it was. He is the author of an earlier, very important study on German liberalism , which was really the driving force of German unity for most of the 19th century. So, he has an open-ended approach, which I think is very salutary."