Book Review: The Pursuit of Power, Europe 1815-1914

By Richard J. Evans

The Penguin History of Europe series attempts to chart the history of the continent that is perched on the western end of the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the present day. The Pursuit of Power deals with the century or so from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of the First World War, when the empires of European nations dominated the world and the lives of ordinary people were irrevocably altered by numerous technological and scientific innovations. Richard Evans is a Cambridge historian who has spent many decades studying and thinking about nineteenth century Europe, this book represents the culmination of his academic life, and is not just a very interesting read in itself, but serves as an ideal springboard for those interested in studying a wide variety of topics related to this era.   

The twenty-or-so year period during which the Napoleonic Wars took place spelled disaster for people of Europe. Unlike in the First World War, the fighting took a heavy toll on civilians and devastated entire communities. During the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, the victorious powers of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain created a framework for how Europe might avoid similar conflicts in the future. Their purpose was also to quell the revolutionary fires that the French revolution of 1789 had lit. Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich was to be the chief architect of this supposed return to the conservative order. In France, the monarchy was reinstated in the shape of the portly Louis XVIII, and Tsar Alexander I continued to rule over Russia by divine right. In Evans’s word, they were “reforging the chain of time”. Yet this chain turned out to be a whole lot less durable that von Metternich had hoped. The nineteenth century was fraught with upheaval, truly it was the age of the -isms, as such diverse ideologies as fascism, liberalism, socialism, communism, utopianism, feminism and anarchism confidently entered the political stage. A new liberal bourgeoisie spoke up loudly for human rights from their prosperous suburbs, while countless workers in Europe’s teeming industrial centers turned to socialism and social democracy to ward of the excesses of capitalism. The success or failure of their uprisings depended on the support of a mostly conservative rural peasantry. The nobility and the church, who had been important power players during previous centuries, lost most of their power and privileges, while popular pressure ensured that many of the ideals of the French revolution were far from dead and buried. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century the institution of serfdom was abolished, voting rights expanded to include most of the male population and many laws were passed to protect common people from hazardous factories and unscrupulous profiteers.

Even a conservative bastion like Russia failed to fully ward off these clamors for reform, and in 1861 Tsar Alexander II emancipated the millions of serfs who had tilled the Russian soil since the time of Alexander Nevsky. The Austrian empire was unable to stay united and had to bow to vocal minorities in its diverse realms, granting concessions to Serbs and Croats and eventually allowing Hungary semi-autonomy and its own legislative body. The nation that changed least during this time, and as a consequence was the undisputed loser of nineteenth century Europe was the Ottoman Empire. Otto von Bismarck dubbed this harried patchwork of disparate realms, with characteristically caustic wit, as “the sick man of Europe”.

In 1815 everyday life for most Europeans was not that different from the way it had been in previous centuries. People travelled by horse and carriage, like they had done since the Dark Ages and peasants tilled the soil with ox and plough. In towns and cities refuse was thrown out of your window and landed on unfortunate passersby and any operation, no matter how trivial, was likely to end in infection and death. One hundred years later the onward march of science and technology had fundamentally changed all these previously immutable aspects of life and countless more, unless you lived in some remote rural hamlet that was exceptionally backwards, or the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to railroads that soon crisscrossed Europe like great serpents of iron, distances were greatly reduced and the bulk transportation of goods and people was now possible. Agricultural innovations meant that farmers could greatly increase their productivity, which was just as well since many of their farmhands were carving themselves a pair of wooden clogs so they could leave for the city. These cities had up until then been stinking collections of hovels, unhealthy breeding grounds for all kinds of nasty diseases. The more humans that gathered in one place, the worse it got in terms of squalor and uncleanliness. During the summer of 1858, the river Thames was overflowing with industrial waste and rotting refuse, not to mention the odd human corpse that had swelled in the summer heat to become a grotesque vessel of noxious gasses. Conditions were so bad that Londoners dubbed this assault on their olfactory senses “The Great Stink”, and tasked the visionary engineer Joseph Bazalgette with building a comprehensive sewer network for the entire city. This helped make cholera epidemics a thing of the past, and other European cities were quick to follow. Such improvements in public health may seem less interesting and noteworthy than pitched battles fought by hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the roar of cannon and shot, but they had an immeasurably more positive impact on ordinary people’s lives. Medicine also changed rapidly during the nineteenth century, with improved hygiene greatly increasing chances of survival after surgical operations and new methods of dulling the pain of going under the knife, such as letting the patient imbibe chloroform or morphine.  

The nineteenth century also saw Europe becoming industrialized. Britain led this revolution in manufacturing, but other nations, most notably Germany, gave them a run for their money. Production of goods was now possible on a grand scale, and the number of laborers required to work in the new factories that sprang up in many European cities led to the rise of several of the -isms that I mentioned earlier. Europe was the first continent to embrace the industrial revolution, which gave them a crucial advantage against other nations, and these technological breakthroughs enabled European nations to impose their will on other, less developed regions, by establishing colonies all over the world. The undisputed master, both in terms of industry and colonial possessions, was Great Britain, on whose empire the sun reportedly never set. Britain’s dominion over this blue planet of ours was so complete that the Reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was later known as the Victorian era. For all its imperial pomp and splendor however, Britain’s supremacy was about to be challenged. After having been the dominant continental power in Western Europe for many centuries, the unification of Germany, culminating in the formation of the German Empire in 1871, saw France reluctantly resigning itself to being number two on the continent. Jealous of the other “Great Powers” Germany also wanted its place in the sun, i.e. colonies in Africa, and started to expand its navy, a direct challenge to Britain. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, German industry, particularly in the fields of chemistry and electronics, led the world. Together with another rising empire of the same era, namely that of Japan, Germany was to accelerate the decline and eventually sound the death knell of Romanov rule in Russia. After having been humbled by the Japanese in the Russo Japanese war of 1905, Germany finished off the ailing colossus in the First World War.

Evans describes how a more cautious and measured generation of statesmen who remembered the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars were replaced with new blood towards the end of the nineteenth century, brash imperialists who had imbibed readily from the Kool-Aid of their own propaganda. As breakneck industrialization progressed and the Great Powers acquired more colonial possessions, they signed and countersigned a great many diplomatic treaties which soon meant that Europe was covered in a patchwork of alliances. Coupled with rising nationalism and xenophobia, the continent turned into a tinderbox waiting to go off. Worse still, shrewd statesmen like Otto von Bismarck were no longer around to restrain the more violent impulses of unsuitable autocrats like Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The First World War was surely one of the greatest tragedies to ever befall humanity. That devastating conflict, together with another world war a generation later, spelled the end of Europe’s global hegemony.

The Pursuit of Power tells the tale of a century where Europe progressed by leaps and bounds, and took the undisputed center stage in world affairs. Sometimes it tells too much, such as when the exact length of Austria’s railway network in 1855 is compared to that of France, but the reader gets the point that European countries progressed greatly in every conceivable metric during this time, except the Ottoman Empire. If you don’t want to read every chapter of the book I understand that, since it is exceptionally lengthy, but I would highly recommend The Pursuit of Power and feel that my own knowledge of this pivotal time for Europe has been greatly increased.