Dramatic events in the contemporary world—wars, revolutions, political upheavals, terrorist attacks, catastrophic natural disasters, economic crises, and the endless stream of daily news—often obscure the long-developing historical processes that have created the societies in which we live and the current problems with which we have to cope. The mass media pay little attention to the broader historical patterns and contexts that shape the deeper meaning of swiftly moving public events and private lives. This new edition of this book, which has been retitled A History of Europe in the Modern World, may therefore be seen as the newest version of an ongoing search for historical perspectives on the complex, often bewildering, events of our own era. The book’s new title, which adds the words “Europe in” to the concise phrase that has entitled every previous edition, acknowledges the fact that even a long book cannot adequately describe historical events in the entire “modern world.” At the same time, however, this slight change in a familiar title reflects other revisions in a new edition that focuses more specifically on the history of Europe, while also emphasizing that modern European history has always evolved through interactions and exchanges with the wider world.

It is impossible to understand European history without placing it “in the modern world, just as it is impossible to understand the modern world without knowing the history of Europe. This book thus carries the guiding assumption that events and ideas in modern European societies have often influenced people in every part of the world, but that Europeans have also been constantly influenced by their encounters with other peoples and cultures. More generally, the themes of this book build on the presupposition that contemporary events and conflicts are deeply connected to the diverse cultures, institutions, social systems, economic exchanges, power struggles, empires, and ideas of earlier eras in human history. Nobody can truly understand present times, in short, without studying the past; and in modern times the history of Europe has often entered (for better or for worse) into the history of almost the whole world.

The multiple levels of human history and cross-cultural exchanges have created modern societies that both resemble and differ from the “modernity” that has evolved in Europe since about the fifteenth century. This book thus describes the main features of this dynamic modern history by examining specific nations and landmark events, such as great revolutions, economic transitions, and changing cultural beliefs; but it also emphasizes broad historical and social trends that have developed beneath the most prominent events, gradually creating what we now call “the modern world.” Although the following narrative explores the rise of nation-states and the conflicts that have reshaped modern societies over the last several centuries, it links such public events to the wider historical influence of the global economy, the development of science, technology, and new forms of knowledge, the rise of industry, the significance of religious and philosophical beliefs, the origin and diffusion of new political ideas, the changing mores of family and social life, the evolving views of human rights, and the complex relations between European cultures and other cultures around the world.

The term modern, as it is used in this book, refers to a phase of human history that began about five or six centuries ago and steadily transformed both the material conditions of human societies and the meaning of individual identities or selfhood. “Modern” ways of life have developed in diverse historical contexts, and they are now evolving more rapidly and in more places than ever before. This book affirms that every culture and historical era has made important contributions to the collective history of human beings, but it focuses primarily on developments in Europe, even as it traces the growing European involvements with other peoples, economies, and political systems far beyond the relatively small continent of Europe itself. The narrative stresses the influence of European societies on the emergence of “modern” institutions and social practices, yet it also notes the worldwide exchanges that have contributed to the increasingly global culture of the contemporary era. Europeans were never the only influential “actors” in the global creation of modernity, but they were often present wherever the transitions to modernity were taking place.

These historical transitions generated violence and oppression and political conflicts as well as social, cultural, and economic progress; and it is the combined effects of these modern developments on all human lives (and the natural environment) that provide the essential rationale for historical studies and for this new edition of A History of Europe in the Modern World.