Belgium in the long nineteenth century

By 1400 a new Europe had been made: a loose confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, broadly similar social and political institutions, and a developed inter-regional economy.

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

For all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact. It depended heavily upon local circumstance and the gradual evolution of specialized subcultures of contact and conquest. It was not the working-out of an inescapable economic destiny (as some historians have argued), or the inevita

1815 was as much of a watershed moment for Germany as it was for the rest of Europe. It was the beginning of a new balance of power and a chance for the German states to carve out a place for themselves within it.

The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics. Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much. One could procure the necessary goods through trade, and if, as in the thirties and forties, the markets closed down, well, that wasn’t the end of the world.