Sublime
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1300 Amsterdam c. 1575 Amsterdam c. 1650 Amsterdam c. 1980
Geert Mak • Amsterdam: A brief life of the city
What excited Europeans was the belief that they had both the right and the means to ‘make’ or remake America in Europe’s image, or even as an improved version of the old continent.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
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.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
Europe, as noted earlier, has in a short span of time gone from being the most predictable and stable region—one where history seemed to have truly ended (as suggested in an influential essay published in 1989 by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama)—to something dramatically different. Democracy, prosperity, and peace all seemed
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
Europe’s expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe’s modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
