Sublime

Pour n’importe quel Français, par exemple, ce sont les Américains et eux seuls qui ont sauvé l’Europe du nazisme. Il me semble pourtant que le rôle des Russes, avec leurs dix millions de morts militaires, est loin d’être négligeable dans la chute d’Hitler. Quand les Américains ont décidé d’intervenir, l’Armée rouge arrivait déjà en Allemagne. Je pe

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.

Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe’ by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

After ‘a few years’ Patrick was able to return to his family. This is remarkable: how on Earth was a young man, stolen from his home at sixteen, able to navigate his way back in a country with no maps or road signs and not much more than local knowledge of place names?

'Nationalism as a God must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true nationality is mankind,' Wells

Spain, like Rome, imposed uniformities on particularities. This could produce impressive results: it’s unlikely, otherwise, that either empire would have expanded so far so fast. The price, though, was shallow roots, which allowed adversity to shake authority.9 The English spread their influence more slowly, but adapted more easily, especially in N

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, one of the dominant features of European history was the ascension of Britain to a position of global primacy as a result of its strong economy, trade links, access to raw materials and markets through its colonies, and globe-spanning navy. This primacy arguably lasted until the mid- to late nineteenth centu