The best of times

The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. By Richard Evans. Viking; 928 pages; $40. Allen Lane; £35.

TO APPRECIATE the social transformations that took place in Europe between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the start of the first world war, consider what happened to its towns and cities. Economic growth and technological innovation allowed them to reach new and vertiginous heights. Lofty creations like the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, or the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool, which opened in 1911, symbolised a richer, more confident world following the Napoleonic wars.

In “The Pursuit of Power”, an impressive and richly documented new book, Richard Evans of Cambridge University says that most contemporaries were convinced this was a time of “open-ended improvement”. Breakneck industrialisation turned rural economies into metropolitan ones. Superior medicines and public sanitation, along with state vaccination programmes, cut the impact of epidemics like smallpox and typhus. Wars were relatively small and short-lived (the death rate of men in battle was seven times less than in the previous century). And steam power and electrical engineering freed societies from the limitations of human strength.

Motor transport and the expansion of roads, canals and railways shrank distances and modernised conceptions of time. In 1875 William Rathbone Greg, an English essayist, said that people were living “without leisure and without pause—a life of haste”. Such developments, alongside steamships and the telegraph, were also the technological foundations of Europe’s global domination.

The century was not one of inexorable progress, however, or of collective triumph; there were winners and losers. The former milked the benefits of what Mr Evans calls “the first age of globalisation”. They profited from the dismantling of trade barriers, industrial growth and expansion of the state, which required unprecedented numbers of administrators.

For many, though, this proved to be no more than new forms of old miseries. Serfdom on the land gave way to wage labour in the factories. Workers lived in poverty, and gross disparities existed between the poor and well-off in health, nutrition and infant mortality. Perhaps the biggest losers were the traditional landowning aristocracy, who were undermined by economic change, the abolition of serfdom, the advent of elected legislatures and the commercial feats of enterprising bankers and businessmen.

A distinguished scholar of Germany, Mr Evans is just as sure-footed across the continent. His interests also extend beyond the usual subjects of war and revolutions. There are, for example, timely sections on efforts to master the natural world, and early fears about climate change. The book is particularly illuminating on how social trends after 1848—the spread of education, the standardisation of languages, railway development and the mass production of newspapers—led to the rise of political forces like nationalism and democracy.

Much of this history is well known, but Mr Evans is a skilled synthesiser with a strong eye for narrative. He acknowledges the pioneering work of other historians like Eric Hobsbawm and Jürgen Osterhammel. But if Hobsbawm identified the development of capitalism and the expansion of empires as hallmarks of the century, and Mr Osterhammel documented the emergence of “globalisation” avant la lettre, Mr Evans argues that it was the universal pursuit of power that defined the age.

Serfs wanted emancipation from landowners and women sought liberation from men. Industrialists required economic control and new political parties campaigned for office. All major European states imposed colonial mastery over Africa and Asia. But the book’s real success lies with its timeliness. Europe is rendered not as a geographical space—its eastern borders have always been hard to define—but as a collective entity with a shared history. European leaders invited ruin upon themselves when they forgot that in 1914. They should never do it again.