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A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789-1914

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXIII; Issue: 505 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cen286

1477-4534

Mike Rapport,

European Political History Analysis

When writing a history of Europe, the very first challenge facing an author is the choice of approach: should the story be told as a narrative or should the material be broken down into themes? Should national differences be emphasised in a country-by-country discussion, with some linking passages for comparison, or should there be a more explicitly European focus, emphasising the similarities from the Atlantic to the Urals (or wherever ‘Europe’ is held to end, which is yet another issue to be grasped)? Stefan Berger, the editor of this fine volume of essays, has grasped the thistle firmly and steered the project towards a genuinely European panorama. In his thoughtful introduction, Berger argues that ‘future European histories will no longer resemble an assembly of parallel national histories and instead become histories of cultural encounters within the geographical space constructed as Europe’. Berger also emphasises that these entangled, transnational histories are also interconnected with the wider, non-European world, ensuring that there are no ‘autonomous and internally stable national cultures’, but rather that such cultures have selectively adopted ‘foreign’ elements . Berger is probably correct, not least because these trends are already discernible in historical writing. Historians of every period have been drawn recently to the ‘frontier’ regions both within Europe and on its ‘periphery’. They are also intrigued by the points of cultural and other forms of exchange, sometimes violent, between Europeans and other peoples of the world. There are many examples of what might be called an historiographical push for the frontiers: one thinks of Robert Bartlett's intriguing medieval history, The Making of Europe (1993; rev. ante, cix [1994], 656–8) and works on later epochs, including the Napoleonic era (such as those by Michael Rowe and Mike Broers on, respectively, the Rhineland and Piedmont, both contested frontier regions during the French Revolutionary Wars).