The nineteenth century

The complete Short Oxford History of Europe (series editor, Professor TCW Blanning) will cover the history of Europe from Classical Greece to the present in eleven volumes. In each, experts write to their strengths tackling the key issues including society, economy, religion, politics, and culture head-on in chapters that will be at once wide-ranging surveys and searching analyses. Each book is specifically designed with the non-specialist reader in mind; but the authority of the contributors and the vigour of the interpretations will make them necessary and challenging reading for fellow academics across a range of disciplines. Europe changed more rapidly and more radically during the nineteenth century than during any prior period. A population explosion, a communications revolution, mass literacy, secularisation, urbanisation, Imperialism - these were just a few of the many ways in which the lives of Europeans of every class were dramatically changed. It was the century when most of the ideologies of the modern world - liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, socialism, and racism - came of age. Yet in some respects, especially international relations, there was a surprising degree of continuity and harmony. In six pithy chapters experts on the political, international, social, economic, cultural, and imperial history of the period address and answer the big questions of the period.