The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

(Paperback)

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A masterpiece of historical writing which brings to life an extraordinarly turbulent and dramatic era of revolutionary change The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about nineteenth-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic change. The aim of the book is to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes. It was a time where what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, where huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and where, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. Richard Evans gives full coverage to the revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but the book is about so much more, whether it is illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy. The Pursuit of Power is a book by a historian at the height of his powers and an essential book for anyone trying to understand Europe, then or now.

Reviews

Highly impressive ... chronicles a turbulent and confusing century with wonderful clarity and verve ... transnational history at its finest ... more complete but also much more fascinating than most histories of the period -- Gerard Degroot * The Times *
Splendid ... a traditional framework, perhaps, but one whose enduring value is confirmed by Evans's fine scholarship -- David Bell * Financial Times *
Dazzlingly erudite and entertaining ... He brings together an almost impossibly vast range of material (bear-hunting in Hungary, trade unions in Dorset, the wars of Italian unification) in a sweeping narrative underpinned by a persuasive central theme ... he handles his immense body of material with enviable subtlety and skill. -- Dominic Sandbrook * The Sunday Times *
This is a scintillating, encyclopaedic history, rich in detail from the arcane to the familiar. The canvas is vast and so much is now known about the period, thanks to a profusion of historical writing, that giving shape to the material must have been a daunting task. Yet Evans has risen to the challenge splendidly. The Pursuit of Power mixes political, social, economic, cultural and intellectual history to give a richness of texture and presence that the existing major accounts of the century - many of them written at a time when high politics, great men and balance-of-power diplomacy were what counted as history - were unable to deliver. To achieve that blend and yet retain coherence marks this volume as a veritable tour de force... for anyone who wants to discover just how entangled Europe's history is, there can be no better starting point than The Pursuit of Power. -- Richard Overy * New Statesman *

Author Bio

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power- Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm- A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies- The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.