Books like The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 — picked by fans

Charles Esdaile, a specialist of Spanish history, is one of the more prolific writers on the Napoleonic Wars, so it was not easy choosing only one of the numerous books he has penned, including a general history of the wars. Spain, however, has always remained a bit of an outlier in the history of the period. Here we get an insider’s view of the situation in Spain leading to the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy and an accessible, lively account of the often complicated events that followed. Esdaile doesn’t shy away from treating either the Spanish, the guerrillas, or Wellington head on.

Speaking of which, this is the first of a two-volume biography of Wellington and is no doubt the most exhaustive and the most up-to-date biography of the man and his career. I’ve personally always found Wellington to be a fairly unlikeable character and there is nothing in this biography that made me change my mind. However, Muir’s familiarity with the sources and the archives enables him to integrate the personal, the military, and the political into this thorough examination of the man that ultimately defeated Napoleon.

The most important strategic fact in this war was the defeat of Napoleon’s great army which invaded Russia in 1812, and its destruction by winter weather during the retreat from Moscow later that year. It was a blow from which Napoleon never recovered.

This fascinating book is written from Russian sources, bringing the extraordinary story of the decision to abandon and burn Moscow, and how the Russian army was used and commanded. No one who looks at the war as a whole can ignore this book. The fact that Hitler repeated the same mistake of invading Russia in 1941 makes it even more powerful.

I dove into this book because I wanted to know about the Napoleonic Wars and was surprised that a historian could write so well. The points are clear, and the anecdotes are appropriate, not just gimmicks. I liked how the small fact was connected to the big point about how mass mobilization changed the nature of war and made it more penetrating and inescapable.

I saw the French levée en masse and the massacres of the Vendée and Goya’s Spain in new light. It made me want to hear more about the colonial wars like Haiti.

I think Maartje’s book has been transformational in the study of neutrality. As she rightly points out, the study of neutrals has been skewed by more modern ideas of neutrality being a passive concept. It shows that in the nineteenth century, it was held in ‘high regard’ in diplomacy and statecraft. She superbly describes how neutrality, far from being a sideshow outside of the main events, was at the center of political thinking and shaping of the period between the Vienna Congress and the First World War.

I like how Maartje shows that neutrality after the Napoleonic Wars was self-serving. States avoided conflicts that they did not need to enter, and overall, this prevented any conflicts that did arise (such as the Crimean War) from becoming wider European conflagrations. Some states, like Belgium, were ‘neutralized’ by the larger, more powerful states to avoid conflict, whereas other countries actively sought neutralization… show more.

Again, this may be a bit dense reading but Wolff tackles the very notion of “Eastern Europe.”

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that began in the mid-17th century and lasted until about 1800, and it focused on remaking politics. Enlightenment thinkers believed in change and progress, that Europeans were not doomed to suffer under the tyranny of feudal kings.

Wolff explores how these Enlightenment thinkers celebrated an Age of Progress in Western Europe – but were less impressed with the Eastern half. For thinkers like Voltaire, “Eastern Europe” came to mean backward, under-developed, superstitious, and violent Europe.

These thinkers began using this term, “Eastern Europe” in the 1770s to mean “the Other Europe,” like an embarrassing, unwanted sibling. Wolff describes how these attitudes shaped Western policies towards Eastern Europe. 

It takes real historic breadth to write a comprehensive history of the nineteenth century and only a historian of the quality of Evans could pull it off so convincingly. Like his mentor Eric Hobsbawm—but unencumbered by the Marxian straight-jacket—Evans masterfully draws the links not only between decades and between countries and continents but also between the social, the economic, and the political. His book is no demographic history, but it takes demography seriously. This really matters in a century in which the Malthusian bonds were broken for some of humanity, not all of it, making it a period of European global supremacy underpinned by demographic takeoff, the effects of which we are still feeling.

Surely the rise of Hitler and the impact of global depression gave an air of inevitability about the holocaust to follow? In this successor volume, Steiner makes clear many other factors were in play that might have altered Europe’s fate. She details the West’s overriding fear of Soviet communism, the crucial role Mussolini played as termite to the tentative international order built in the 1920s, and the deep internal divisions that French leaders ultimately were unable to overcome, divisions that played their own role in strengthening British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to deal with Hitler at the Munich conference. 

I like how Tilly's book emphasizes how democracy was often the outcome of popular protest.

Its analysis is careful enough to note that such protest could be peaceful or violent, as well as spontaneous or planned. As such, this book does not provide sweeping generalizations for the development of democratic institutions, and sometimes for their demise.

And its last chapter provides food for thought regarding democratization outside of Europe.

Fascism and Communism purported to explain all social and political phenomena and, on that basis, justified their authoritarian or totalitarian rule. The term ‘fascist’ tends to be loosely applied to intolerant and autocratic political behaviour, but the outstandingly lucid, and highly readable, book by Robert Paxton not only surveys fascism in practice – in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and in fascist movements and parties in many different countries – it also shows what its distinctive components are. What he calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of fascism include the glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, a fixation on national solidarity, rejection of the legitimacy of diverse interests and values within a society, and, not least, a cult of the heroic leader, with the leader’s instincts counting for more than reasoned, evidence-based argument.