Stefan Berger. A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe: 1789-1914. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006. 560 pp. $149.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4051-1320-5.

Reviewed by Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker (Indiana University South Bend)
Published on H-German (December, 2006)

An Intermediary Step toward a New History of Europe

The aim of the new volume, edited by Stefan Berger, is to provide a "firm grasp of debates and topics, which have made 'the long nineteenth century' such a rewarding field of study for generations of historians" (p. xvii). In six parts, thirty-two chapters and 528 tightly printed pages, the book covers the most important research fields in the last twenty years. The authors succeed admirably in providing an overview that is both accessible to undergraduate students as well as useful for scholars. Each chapter includes a short bibliographic essay that guides the reader to additional resources and highlights contributions to the field.

The volume includes a wealth of interesting and useful information. Gathered in part 1 are a large number of statistics on matters like fertility, living standards, school attendance, marriage age, population groups, mortality and food production. Many of the best essays provide a thematic overview as well as information that can give students a sense of what it was like to live in the nineteenth century. Carl Levy notes that in Denmark even fifty years after shackles of serfdom had been removed, nobles still claimed the privilege of flogging their peasants (p. 72). In her section on science and communal spaces, Kathryn M. Olesko writes that during the upheavals of 1830s, rebels destroyed street lanterns as a way to challenge the authority of government officials as well as to take back the streets (p. 339). In "The Age of Historicism," Matthew Jefferies notes that Romans called the monument to Emmanuele II in their native city "the false teeth" (p. 326). Hamish Graham describes a 1904 Galician field of thirty-two square meters in which one individual had the right to farm the land, another to collect the chestnuts from a tree that grew there and a third to receive an annual payment of six eggs (in alternating years) from the farmer of the land and the collector of the chestnuts (p. 32).

In his introduction, Stefan Berger describes this volume as an intermediary step towards a new history of Europe. In the future, the history of Europe will be written from a transnational perspective and no longer be composed of "parallel national histories." He writes: "Notions of national peculiarities and exceptionalisms will fade" (p. xxv). In general the chapters emphasize pan-European trends and many of the authors avoid country against country comparisons. Even in areas where states shaped developments directly many of the authors succeed in focusing on commonalities across national boundaries, as for example in Sharif Gemie's chapter, "Schooling."

Berger also seeks to incorporate the history of east central and southern Europe directly into European history narratives. He describes the "contributions in this volume as a first step in this direction" (p. xxvi). The authors do draw on the history of Russia, but other parts of Europe receive less attention. In general the focus falls on the large nations of western Europe, especially Britain, France and Germany. The chapter on sexuality can serve as an example; Ivan Crozier concludes, "a survey chapter of this type cannot deal with all aspects of sexuality, or with all the various local or even national cultures and interests" (p. 396). While he expertly handles a range of topics from pornography to masturbation and venereal diseases, he is forced to focus primarily on middle-class sexualities of Britain, Germany and France, making only occasional references to Spain, Scandinavia or Russia. Little space is available to include discussion of rural and peasant sexualities. In the volume as a whole, the chapters on "Rural Society," "Demography" and "Lords and Peasants" trace the experiences of a wide range of social groups, but most of the other twenty-seven chapters focus on the middle class and to a lesser extent on the working class.

Because of the nature of the project, the most successful sections include part 1 on the "Idea of 'Europeanness'," part 2 on "Agriculture, Industry and Social Change" and part 6 on "The International System." Part 2 especially achieves the aim of clarifying debates in economic history and of shedding light on pan-European trends. In contrast, in some sections of part 3 on "Political Developments," part 4 on "Intellectual Developments" and part 5 on "Cultural Developments," it becomes much more difficult to illuminate the complex developments in the small space that is available to each author. Here the volume begins to resemble a European history textbook with one or two sentences to describe individuals, events, trends, novels or paintings. As a result, in the attempt to cover 125 years and more than a dozen states in fifteen to twenty pages, some authors produce generalizations that obscure as much as they reveal. For example, John Garrard notes in his chapter on the democratic experience that "liberalization, outside of Britain, proceeded equally cautiously: many countries--notably but not exclusively Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia--remaining significantly absolutist until the end" (p. 151).

Following the trajectory of recent historiography, which emphasizes the continuing importance of religion and religious identities, the volume includes chapters on the "Age of Catholic Revival," "Protestantism," "Orthodoxy" and "The Jews: a European Minority." These chapters cover relations between religious institutions and states, the political roles of religious groups and the influence of religion on varieties of nationalism. Also consistently with recent work, the editors have chosen to give equal weight to topics in cultural history and more traditional accounts of politics, diplomacy and war. Students of nineteenth-century Europe will benefit from Matthew Jefferies's excellent "The Age of Historicism" and Daniel M. Vyleta's insightful "Cultural History of Crime."

The Berger volume also represents an "intermediary step" to a new history of Europe in its incorporation of empire into larger narratives of European history. Berger notes in his introduction that "it is impossible to write the history of Europe without constantly reflecting the ways in which colonial empires shaped different nation-states in Europe and thus became a part and parcel of the self-understanding of Europe" (p. xxiv). Trutz von Trotha provides a clear introduction to these developments over the nineteenth century and highlights some of the diversity in the relationships between the rulers and ruled over time. References to European empires, colonialism or imperialism, however, only appear in three of the other twenty-nine chapters.

I will certainly recommend this volume to my students. It provides a clear and concise introduction to many important topics in the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The helpful bibliographic essays at the close of each chapter and the comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book should provide students with additional resources as they pursue their research.

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Citation: Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker. Review of Berger, Stefan, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe: 1789-1914. H-German, H-Net Reviews. December, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12658

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