This is the only modern study of European international politics to cover the entire timespan from the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 to the revolutionary year of 1848.

This book takes up a question raised about the nature of the European international system in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries by Paul W. Schroeder's pathbreaking and controversial work, "The Transformation of European Politics, 1763 - 1848" (1994). Schroeder's central claim was that the European states system underwent a fundamental transformation in the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Vienna eras from a system of competitive, conflictual power politics based purely on a shifting balance of power to a more consensual, stable, and peaceful set of relations based on legality, acknowledged rights and obligations, and shared norms. The contributors to this volume, while examining this claim, primarily extend the debate to the entire history of European and world international politics from the early seventeenth century to the present. If this transformation was real, they ask, was it only a temporary episode, or does it represent an example of other transformations or structural changes in international politics over the centuries down to the present day, and a possible model for change in the future?

'a superb volume, complete with maps, and tells the story of a continent from the 18th century to the present day.' -Irish Times

This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

"In 'The Lights that Failed', Steiner challenges the assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war and provides an analysis of the attempts to reconstruct Europe during the 1920s"-OCLC

The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights. Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.

A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification. Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars. Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

Few scholars have provided as much insight into the struggle of leaders, ideas, and policies as Paul W. Schroeder. Constantly challenging conventional views, and drawing upon a masterly command of the sources and literature, Schroeder provides new answers to old questions about international history and politics since the age of Napoleon. Were European international relations really driven by balance of power politics, or has that traditional view blinded us to an underlying normative consensus on the 'rules of the game' that frequently contributed to cooperation among the leading states in the system? Are alliances primarily a means of the aggregation of power against stronger states, or do states often use alliances as instruments of influence or control over their allies? Was World War I contingent upon a confluence of independent processes that intersected in 1914, or was it the product of more deeply-rooted and interconnected structural forces that pushed inevitably toward war? What is the role of moral judgment in historical investigation? Raising new questions and offering provocative new interpretations, Schroeder encourages historians and political scientists alike to reconsider their long-standing beliefs about the evolution and dynamics of modern diplomacy.