Europe: A History

The primary flaw of the book is not that it lacks analysis or has poor analysis, but merely that the analysis is uneven.  The consequence is that--not unlike European history itself--there is a fascinating account of the ancient world and a gripping description of modern times, with a conspicuous void in the middle.  The chapters on the late Middle Ages especially feel like a list of dates, names, and places strung together.  This is particularly problematic because the modern reader is generally most interested in impressive political, cultural, and technological developments, of which there were already very few in the Middle Ages.  A dry account of a dry time is taxing to read.

These 300 pages in the middle notwithstanding, the book is superb.  While there are many periods in which Davies's exposition is noteworthy, two general features that correct flaws in prior accounts of European history are the most refreshing.  The first is Davies's conscious attempt to avoid equating European history with Western European history.  This equation has been a persistent feature of my previous education in history, even at the University of Chicago.  Many historical accounts of the post-ancient world focus almost exclusively on the Britain/France/Germany triangle with the Vatican occasionally thrown in.  Ancient history is frequently reduced to the Greece-Rome axis.  Davies overcomes these painful oversimplifications through extensive discussions of peoples at Carthage, Syracuse, and the vast expanse of Eastern Europe.  Nor does he even dwell on the typical suspects of these domains.  In the discussion of Russian history, for example, Novgorod is treated on equal footing with Muscovy until 1570, when Ivan the Terrible overran Novgorod.  Similarly, Davies exerts significant efforts describing developments in Poland-Lithuania and Constantinople.  These discussions are critical, even to an understanding of strictly Western Europe.  Many developments in western Christendom, such as the crusades and even the Renaissance, cannot be understood fully without Constantinople and its interactions with Islam.  Similarly, the Holocaust cannot be understood without first understanding why there were so many Jews in Poland.  The reason?  In addition to having a stunning number of liberal and quasi-democratic institutions for the period, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (also "The Most Serene Republic") had an amazing degree of religious freedom between Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and even Muslims.  Jews were not ghettoized in Poland-Lithuania like their counterparts farther west.  As a result, Poland became a center of the European Jewry.

The second bias which Davies attempt to correct with some success, is the tendency to "read history backwards".  At no point in history is this more prevalent than in accounts of World War II.  There is a rather pervasive tendency in the popular understanding toward the "victors' bias".  People tend to view WWII as a moral war of good against evil, Western liberalism against fascism, etc.  On a fairly superficial level this is true.  Hitler was evil, while the Western powers were certainly less so.  Hitler and Mussolini were fascists, while Churchill and Roosevelt were proponents of liberal democracy.  But Stalin was neither good nor liberal in any sense of either words.  This is where the popular belief in the moral supremacy of the Allied powers becomes overzealous.  Davies does a good job showing how the factors that determined the behavior of Britain, France, and the US were less influenced by grand ideological visions than strategic considerations.  Britain and France, for example, only entered into war after the failure of the Munich Agreement to contain Germany clearly demonstrated that it posed an undeniable territorial threat to the entire continent.  The US only entered in the war after Pearl Harbor showed that the war could pose a tangible strategic threat.  Western countries were quick to ally with Stalin, a leader who was arguably more morally repugnant and culpable than Hitler (if nothing else he killed far more people with methods that were about as brutal).  Stalin's USSR also conveniently shared no borders with the Western Allies, and could therefore not pose an immediate territorial threat.  One can only imagine whether the US and UK would have allied with Nazi Germany if the geographic positions of Germany and the USSR were reversed.  In short, the Allies were morally superior, but their behavior was driven far more strategic considerations than the ideological ones that people tend to believe.  Ironically, the country whose actions were most driven by ideological and moral considerations (perverse ones, that is) was Germany, which succeeded in being one of the world's most repugnant and failed regimes.  Basing war on morals is a dangerous and frequently insane proposition.  Davies's discussion of World War II, in particular, achieves an objectivity that cuts through the obfuscation of our victorious rose-colored glasses.

In short, the book is lengthy with a few dry spots, but it excels at objectivity and describing a representative cross-section of Europe.