The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918 (Oxford History of Modern Europe)

This is a classic history of European diplomacy and foreign policy from the revolutions of 1848--the Springtime of Nations--to the end of World War I. The study concentrates on the policies and politics of the great powers of Europe (Br, Fr, Prussia/Ger, Austria-Hungary, Russia) that struggle to achieve domination in Europe while keeping any other power from achieving it. This is recommended for students of International Relations and European history, and those interested in seeing how Asian politics might develop in the coming decades. Can be easily read at the rate of a chapter a day.

What A. J. P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe suffers from in being nearly fifty years old, it more than makes up for in style. It is a riveting book that is smattered with wit and an author's thorough knowledge of his subject. Alternate titles might have been The Struggle to Prevent the Mastery of Europe, or the Decline and Fall of the Balance of Power.Taylor's unyielding faith in diplomacy reflects a Cold War notion that any political problem can be solved by maintaining a diplomatic balance. He deftly navigates the Byzantine web of diplomatic intrigue to show how negotiations, not war, ultimately resolves crises. His whig interpretations are at times blatant. Conservative Russia and Prussia are often "humiliated" and "old fashioned" while liberal France fell victim to its own "ingenuity" or suffered "shattered prestige."Not all events are treated equal. The 1867 Anschloss or the 1894 Dreyfus Affair receive practically no attention, while obscure diplomatic conventions receive detailed analysis. Great leaders like Napoleon III or Bismarck receive Taylor's praise while British statesmen of lesser stature receive criticism. Taylor is also anti-imperial, stating that colonies are a sign of weakness (though he later seems to suggest the opposite). His treatment of the coming of World War One is perhaps his greatest weakness, or perhaps this is where the book is most dated. He seems to be somewhat surprised that war erupted in the face of diplomatic failure. He fails to see that many at the time lost faith in diplomacy and allowed the war to happen.In the end, though, this is a fine work. Taylor interjects personal philosophies throughout the book. "Men learn from their mistakes how to make new ones (p. 111);" "Once men imagine a danger they soon turn it into a reality (p. 450); and "A historian should never deal in speculations about what did not happen" (p. 513) are but a few examples. (This last is a personal favorite as it flies in the face of alternative history.) Clever recto page headings and use of dates keep the reader aware of what is happening, and Taylor is a master of the semi colon. All in all this remains a very informative work.

Good book

This is the story - told from the point of view of the diplomatic players - of the last decades of European domination of the world. It is also about the death of the balance of power and the decline of both France and Austria-Hungary. The focus of the book is what leaders were thinking, how they pursued their goals, and the outcome of their machinations and wars, most petty, some major. This approach (diplomatic history) contrasts sharply with analytic or narrative histories whose principal aims include the search for broad trends, the interpretation of deeper causes, and portraits of culture and everyday life. Instead, here, you get what the powerful were trying to do, literally from moment to moment. For myself, while fascinating in many aspects and essential, I found it pretty dry as a reading experience.The beginning of the period, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, marks the end of a long period of "revolutionary diplomacy", whereby the ideals of the French Revolution influenced many diplomatic actions. Napoleon III seized power and concentrated on more traditional balance of power diplomacy, as head of the most powerful nation-state at the time. The Brits were content to develop on their own, only stepping into continental entanglements when they could no longer avoid it. Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey were in perhaps terminal decline, though clinging to the perquisites of power in their respective multi-ethnic autocracies, in which nationalistic ambitions of an astonishing array of players were threatening them with territorial dissolution. In the effort to unify the country, Italy was having its own revolution. The great wild card was Prussia, at the beginning of the period a small kingdom that, under the leadership of a strategic genius, Bismarck, was slowly consolidating its hold over a vast territory of Germanic speakers; it was a nation in birth, a coming industrial superpower with a huge population that would irrevocably shatter the balance of power.Until 1870, these powers struggled for the typical fruits of the time: gaining territories, trade rights, and any number of privileges or concessions from each other. The complexity of these concerns is daunting and almost without exception obscure, but they were indeed the principal concerns of the leaders of the time. When disputes reached a certain point of impasse, they were often resolved by small-scale war, giving the victor the spoils of whatever was demanded, be it passage into and out of the Black Sea, domination of Poland, or control of the Suez Canal for trade with Asia. The book attempts to cover every single one of these disputes, showing exactly what was contemplated in chronological succession and the what happened in the end. Some readers seem to like this detail, and the gist is important to understand, but a lot of it is historical trivia of little interest, at least in my estimation.Each power was juggling so many interests that the whole is like a dark forest of thorny complexities, obscure secret agreements, and tenuous alliances of mutual benefit. It was like they were all playing chess on the same board - some controlling the major pieces, some smaller ones, all in potential conflict or cooperation at one time but not another. Another analogy that comes to mind is competing LEGO constructions in a limited space, each player endowed with its own array of pieces that they traded and fought over or used collaboratively.Beyond the petty wars (to 1870), there were 3 major engagements that led to decisive consequences. 1) The Crimean War removed Russia as a top-tier player until after WWII. 2) The Prussian victory over Austria-Hungary reduced the latter, with all its ethnic divisions, to a dependent power, ratifying German domination of central EUrope. 3) In 1870, France also fell from the top tier, when it capitulated to Prussia after a brief war.The Conference of Berlin led to the longest period of peace in Europe since the Roman Empire. Over the next 40-odd years, European diplomats played the game of the balance of power, all the while investing in the new determinants of power: commerce, heavy industry (in particular steel production), and military technology; they avoided outright war. The two greatest achievers in this realm were Great Britain (with its mechanized navy) and Germany (split between navy and ground forces), leaving others behind in one or more areas. They created innumerable systems of alliances, peacekeeping, and trade, but all for the traditional parochial reasons. It should be noted that many of their motivations were face-saving and for appearance and prestige, for they had to take public opinion increasingly into consideration. This added to inflexibility.The outbreak of WWI is part of a long discussion in the book. This was one of the most interesting dissections of diplomatic detail that I have ever read. According to Taylor, the bottom line was that the various powers thought the war would be short and decisive. Germany wanted to dominate Europe and thought it could do so by aggrandizing its territories. France, Russia, and Great Britain feared this and hoped to preserve the balance of power to their advantage. Austria Hungary and Turkey wanted to maintain the integrity of their territories from splitting into ethno-linguistic nation states. Oddly, none of the major powers seemed to have any clear goals, backup plans, or even coherent strategies, but went into it as a way to impose solutions to their advantage by force rather than diplomacy - that is, the way things had been done prior to 1870, but with far more advanced military machines that mobilized not just whole populations but industrial economies. Once started, no one could back down and it became a catastrophic war of attrition, bringing in the USA and ending the era of EUropean domination of the world. That brings us to 1918.I believe Taylor's interpretation of the European modus operandi - the fight to maintain yet disrupt the balance of power - is correct. What I missed was a lively narrative with biographical texture and descriptive detail. I know that that is not part of the strict discipline of diplomatic history, but potential readers should be aware of this.Recommended. It is a fundamental text, but something of a chore to read.

Taylor successfully tackles a sprawling, detailed subject -- seventy years of byzantine European diplomacy that set the stage for the First World War and, not so indirectly, the Second. He doesn't hold the reader's hand, and assumes you are familiar with many of the events and people he discusses. I wasn't, so I referred often to Britannica, Encarta, and Wikipedia as I read. By doing so, I learned a lot from this book.

This is an oldish book but also an enduring masterpiece. Norman Stone, very different in his political outlook from Taylor, thought it was by far the best book on Pre-World One history. It is dense and challenging so you have to live with it and read sections separately. But it is far more useful—because analytical— than the plethora of narrative biographical books coming out in the last two decades.Why is there no Kindle version of this enduring giant among history books?

This is book about the European diplomacy between 1948 and 1918 of Taylor who by many is regarded as one of the finest historians of the 20th Century. You could say that the book is actually discussing how the Concert of Europe (set up after the Defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815) came to an end, how international relations were changing and with that the alliances. In this, you can see how slowly the alliances came into existence that eventually lived through till the First World War. But also how Germany feared being overran by either Russia, backed financially by France or Great Britain. How Great Britain feared of losing his dominant position in the world. That gives a pretty paranoid like kind of impression on how separate nations actioned and reasoned, and with that one can clearly understand how the First World War turned out to such disaster, and perhaps was a war that could have been avoided as all this other conflicts that were avoided. Along the way Taylor disuses a dazzling amount of events and people, most important of all of course Bismarck, but also the events of 1848, the Crimean War, the Japanese Russian War, the Balkan Crisis and the founding of several nation states, as the unification of Italy and Germany and fall of others, as the Ottoman Empire. But there is surprisingly less about the Franco-Prussian War, while by now, many regard this war as a pivotal moment in modern history and a war that eventually set the stage for both World Wars.

Highly condensed but still very readable. Best read with internet access at your side to look up who was playing which position for which country and just when. There are also a couple of pages WITHOUT footnotes - so there's a lot to consider throughout the book.Everyone trying to understand the worlds of politics and diplomacy today should read this book.

This was a book I have read many times over the years but lost my very beaten up copy It covers a large part of the period that interests me most and I consider it one of the all time great history books. It is not just a superb text book but a rivetting read. I confess to being a total fan of the author and am surprised that he is not quite as fashionable now. It never ceases to amaze me how differing interpretations of history come and go. It is almost as though this seasons historians feel obliged to put a new slant on known facts merely in order to justify a money making exercise.

A.J.P. Taylor is one of the few left wing historians so it's worth having a look at his work and his views, he's also a great one. The period it covers is a turn of the century kind of time where there was an industrial revolution, democracy was beginning to spread, there was the race between European states of building the biggest empire in which all wanted to beat Britain of course. This book covers everything that happened in this process in great detail, including every alliance no matter how insignificant, treaties between states, which essentially covers different reasons for the build up to World War I and discusses the view that it was "the struggle for mastery in Europe" that ended it because the stronger empires were basically too hard to beat.

Another re-read. Studies history under A J P via ATV and Rediffusion-London. Now that DOES date me.

Peek into past not known to me till I read this book. Very good

OK

Excellent all round service and good product.

Quality

Having always an interest in the formation of modern Europe, especially of Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe, I thought this would tie things together for me. Too true. It does the job perfectly so that you can see the machinations [or is superb diplomacy] of Metternich, Cavour, Bismarck, von Beust and Russell. Taylor explains in everyday terms why Austria didn't join with the rest of the German-speaking world; and how Italy came to have such a strange northern border; and why the Triple Alliance of 1883 predisposed Europe to a major war; and .....oh too many things to mention. Just well written and easy to follow, even if you need to make the odd note of who's who. And now the Balkan question has been reopened in our time; and the viability of Greece as a sovereign state; and the dominance across the continent of Berlin the old capital of Prussia; and France's continuing claim to be the focus for culture and European sensibility. So much of Taylor's book makes sense today, probably in a way he couldn't envisage. Highly recommended.

Before David Irving, there was A.J.P. Taylor writing truthful histories. And in his time he was impugned and attacked just as Mr. Irving is today.

Das Buch hatte ein bisschen spät bekommt, aber Qualität wie geschriebt. Worte, worte, worte, worte, worte, worte, worte, worte worte