THE PURSUIT OF GLORY: Europe, 1648-1815 by Tim Blanning

Allen Lane £30 pp708

Going for the big picture in European history is always a hazardous undertaking. The problem is straightforward. To see the true extent and complexity of the historical terrain our intrepid historian must gain altitude. Many are the historical footsloggers who set out on the vertiginous path, only to lose their way (or their balance). Others seek to glide on the wings of the big idea — some modish theory — only to be brought crashing to the ground by a change in the winds of scholarly fashion. Then, there are the naturals, those eagles of the historical profession, who have the acuity of vision to focus on the particular without ever needing to sacrifice the broader perspective.

Tim Blanning is a such a one. Within the first pages of this magnificent book, one realises that travel in his company is going to be bracing. In 708 exhilarating pages, we traverse some two centuries — from the last days of Charles I of England through to the end of the Napoleonic wars — and travel across a continent that extends from the west coast of Ireland to the Russian steppes.

Appropriately, the book starts, not with some summary of prevailing historical theories, but by noticing first and foremost Europe’s networks of communication, its roads and canals and waterways, which made possible (and as often impeded) the interaction of peoples and ideas. So bad were most of Europe’s roads that travel was slow, dangerous and prodigiously expensive; with the result that all but the elite led lives “anchored”, in Blanning’s memorable phrase, “in glutinous immobility”.

Across the Continent, existence was dominated (to a degree almost unimaginable today) by the caprices of the weather, disease, and, so almost everyone believed, by the intermittent irascibility of God. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloped across this landscape with alarming regularity, endowing death with a “terrible immediacy” in a world where the average life expectancy was barely 35 to 40 years.

Professional medicine (for the most part, academically sanctioned quackery) did make real progress during this period, with the beginning, from the mid 18th-century, of large-scale inoculation and vaccination for disease. Plague, too, retreated and all but disappeared (although more because of changes in the social habits of rats than through improvements in medical science). But as natural dangers abated, man-made perils — in the form of warfare — became ever more destructive; and the final years of Blanning’s survey culminate, not with the triumph of Reason and the Enlightenment, but with the carnage of the great nationalist wars unleashed by the French revolution.

The grand themes are all here: the impact of the Enlightenment, the rise of nationalism and the nation state, the shift from the princely courts to a new bourgeois-dominated “public sphere” as the main locus of cultural patronage — to name but a few. When it comes to political power, Blanning discerns a slow but inexorable shift of influence from the European south — in particular, from the Great Powers of the 17th century, the Spanish and Turkish Empires — towards the new empires of the north: Britain, Prussia, and, by the end of 18th century, Russia. In 1657, the Russian ruler was such a nonentity in the European diplomatic circuit that Louis XIV could address a letter to “Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich”, oblivious to the fact that his addressee had been dead for 12 years. Nobody was making this sort of mistake a century later. Yet Blanning resists the temptation to oversimplify. Instead, he has a shrewd eye for the paradoxes of the past: the practical curbs that tempered the most “absolutist” monarch’s absolutism; the irony that the 18th-century Enlightenment, with its strongly anticlerical (even antireligious) spin, coincided with a “golden age” in European monasticism and a series of highly successful movements of religious revival. What is so often characterised as the Age of Reason could just as validly be characterised, Blanning points out, as the “Age of Faith”.

At every stage, this capacity for the Olympian view of epochal, continent-wide historical change coexists with an ability to telescope in, with vivid clarity, on the concrete and the specific: the papal legate in Brussels adding the gastronomic novelty of the potato to his diet for the first time in 1587; the discomforts of coach journeys; the astonishingly high relative cost of bread; the social significance of hunting; the hazards of 17th-century contraception; the miracles achieved in 18th-century music.

But perhaps this work’s most winning quality is the sense one has throughout of being in the company of not only the most expert but also the most congenial of historical guides, a man who is himself a perfect product of the European Enlightenment: humane, rational, sceptical and with an encyclopedic learning enlivened by a mordant Voltairian wit. Let the nations rejoice: this history of Europe is a truly glorious book.

That’s progress

Blanning is a master of illuminating detail. In 1648, people rang church bells to ward off electrical storms: by 1815, they had lightning conductors. In 1648, heretics were burnt, by 1815, their accusers were in the dock instead. But there was less to this than met the eye. In 1815, most Europeans were still illiterate, landowning elites still ran everything, states were more intrusive than ever and armies more destructive. “The fine houses and clothes of the few were financed by the involuntary sacrifices of the many.” Progress, then, but at a price.

John Adamson is the author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I. The Pursuit of Glory is available at the Books First price of £27 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Read on... website:

//andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/history.html Impressively comprehensive resources site on 18th-century history

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist