According to a fairy tale, after World War II, Europe rejected nationalism and subsequently started the European project, which brought uninterrupted peace from 1945 on. In this book, this version of history is unmasked. First, Europe did not desert nor transcend nationalism after 1945. On the contrary, since 1800, the nationalist program, based on linguistic divisions, has been implemented continuously, also after the end of World War II. Not the rejection of the nationalist program but i...

**From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower“A dazzling history of Western ideas.”—The Economist“Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal“[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe**Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenome...

From one of the world's preeminent political historians, a magisterial study of political leadership around the world from the advent of parliamentary democracy to the age of Obama.All too frequently, leadership is reduced to a simple dichotomy: the strong versus the weak. Yet, there are myriad ways to exercise effective political leadership -- as well as different ways to fail. We blame our leaders for economic downfalls and praise them for vital social reforms, b...

Spanning the divide between Europe and Asia, Russia is a multi-ethnic empire with a huge territory, strategically placed and abundantly provided with natural resources. But Russia's territory has a harsh climate, is cut off from most maritime contact with the outside world, and has open and vulnerable land frontiers. It has therefore had to devote much of its wealth to the armed forces, and the sheer size of the empire has made it difficult to mobilise resources and to governeffectively, e...

A panoramic global history of the nineteenth centuryA monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudi...

From 1789 in France to 2011 in Cairo, revolutions have shaken the world. In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and have at times won miraculous victories, though at other times suffered devastating defeat. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the revolutionaries, their strategies, their successes and failures, and the ways...

A great deal of the world's history is the history of empires. Indeed it could be said that all history is colonial history, if one takes a broad enough definition and goes far enough back. And although the great historic imperial systems, the land-based Russian one as well as the seaborne empires of western European powers, have collapsed during the past half century, their legacies shape almost every aspect of life on a global scale. Meanwhile there is fierce argument, and much speculati...

From the formation of the Russian state in the 14th century to the political power struggles of the 1990s and the uncertainties of the new millennium, this new history offers a fresh and systematic account of Russian history across six tumultuous centuries. With greater access to previously unobtainable material, and with the gradual depoliticization of what was once an intellectual Cold War battleground, historians are now able to tell the story of Russia more dispassionately and with gre...

In these four incisive and keenly perceptive essays, one of out most celebrated and respected historians of modern Europe looks at the world situation and some of the major political problems confronting us at the start of the third millennium.With his usual measured and brilliant historical perspective, Eric Hobsbawm traces the rise of American hegemony in the twenty-first century. He examines the state of steadily increasing world disorder in the context of rapidly growing inequa...

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, soc...

A groundbreaking interpretation of the intellectual origins of the United NationsNo Enchanted Palace traces the origins and early development of the United Nations, one of the most influential yet perhaps least understood organizations active in the world today. Acclaimed historian Mark Mazower forces us to set aside the popular myth that the UN miraculously rose from the ashes of World War II as the guardian of a new and peaceful global order, offering in...

This dramatic narrative of breathtaking scope and riveting focus puts the "story" back into history. It is the saga of how the most ambitious of big ideas -- that a world made up of many nations can govern itself peacefully -- has played out over the millennia. Humankind's "Great Experiment" goes back to the most ancient of days -- literally to the Garden of Eden -- and into the present, with an eye to the future.Strobe Talbott looks back to the consolidation of tr...