Why read Germany and the Modern World, 1880-1914?

Book cover of Germany and the Modern World, 1880-1914

Book description

The German Empire before 1914 had the fastest growing economy in Europe and was the strongest military power in the world. Yet it appeared, from a reading of many contemporaries' accounts, to be lagging behind other nation-states and to be losing the race to divide up the rest of the…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Germany and the Modern World, 1880-1914 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Matthew Jefferies

Author

I really like the work of Mark Hewitson, a historian based at University College London. This book appeared in 2018 and is one of his most ambitious to date. It looks at how Germans conceived of themselves and their place in the world in the years before the First World War. Although historians sometimes talk about the late 19th century as the first phase of globalization—and the German language certainly gained lots of new compound nouns starting with Welt (or world) Hewitson shows that most contemporaries’ interactions and horizons remained intra-European or transatlantic rather than truly global.

From Matthew's list on Bismarck and Imperial Germany.