The Transformation Of European Politics 1763 1848

This is the only modern study of European international politics to cover the entire timespan from the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 to the revolutionary year of 1848.

This book takes up a question raised about the nature of the European international system in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries by Paul W. Schroeder's pathbreaking and controversial work, "The Transformation of European Politics, 1763 - 1848" (1994). Schroeder's central claim was that the European states system underwent a fundamental transformation in the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Vienna eras from a system of competitive, conflictual power politics based purely on a shifting balance of power to a more consensual, stable, and peaceful set of relations based on legality, acknowledged rights and obligations, and shared norms. The contributors to this volume, while examining this claim, primarily extend the debate to the entire history of European and world international politics from the early seventeenth century to the present. If this transformation was real, they ask, was it only a temporary episode, or does it represent an example of other transformations or structural changes in international politics over the centuries down to the present day, and a possible model for change in the future?

The three intervening decades between the Congress of Vienna and the Revolutions of 1848 are marked by enormous social, political, economic and cultural change. Liberalism, nationalism, romanticism and industrialism profoundly affected the course of Europe and compelled conservative monarchies to accept the principles of collective action and military force to curb political revolution. In the years immediately following 1815, the Quadruple and Holy Alliances served the dual purpose of preventing a restoration of Bonapartism and suppressing revolutions. By the 1820s these international associations dissipated, but the principles upon which they were founded informed the decisions of the respective governments through 1848. The classic articles and papers collected in this volume attempt to illustrate that despite the substantial changes to European society which occurred during these thirty years, European powers accepted common principles which influenced their state's domestic and foreign policies.

"In 'The Lights that Failed', Steiner challenges the assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war and provides an analysis of the attempts to reconstruct Europe during the 1920s"-OCLC

'a superb volume, complete with maps, and tells the story of a continent from the 18th century to the present day.' -Irish Times

This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.

These essays focus on the growth of representative institutions and the mechanics of European state finance from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution.

International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century gathers ten studies that reflect the ever-growing variety of themes and approaches that scholars from different disciplines bring to the historiography of international law in the period.