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Title: Europe Emerges Transition Toward an Industrial World Wide Society, 1600-1750 by Robert L. Reynolds ISBN: 0-299-02294-3 Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr Pub. Date: 01 June, 1961 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.75

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Absolutely required
Comment: Two decades ago, it occurred to me that the history of medieval Europe was singularly fascinating. From a very broad and rough perspective, it seems to me, the "ancient" world and the "modern", with their bureacratically centralized states and relatively stable geographic configurations, have much more in common with each other than either of them have with the medieval European milieu, with its tangled tapestry of intersecting levels of power (the Church, the aristocracies, the royal dynasties, the towns, the monastic orders) and quixotically shifting political and ethnic borders. In this sense, it is a complicated fulcrum, pivoting civilization from the ancient empire to the modern nation state and world economy, and much of my reading has been an attempt to understand how this transition from ancient to modern worked. I should have started with this book. Reynold's provides an astonishingly complete picture of western Europe from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, from the evolution of its basic geographic and ethnographic constraints and opportunities, to the transformations of power, technology and wealth that convulsed its patchwork of societies. In addition, he attempts a somewhat lower resolution, but just as ambitious inventory of conditions of the rest of the planet as it stood during Europe's breakout to transoceanic hegemony. Written forty years ago, it is striking to see just how nearly up-to-date he is on so many details of world history. Even more masterful is that he manages all this precocious breadth and accuracy in a work clearly directed to undergrads with little knowledge of history (there are no footnotes or references, centuries are referred to as, e.g., the "fifteen hundreds" rather than the "sixteenth century", etc.). Indeed, the writing style is breezy--almost conversational--and very often humorous. Eschewing theory for description, Reynolds nonetheless makes clear the various connections among phenomena such as trade fairs, the growth of towns, the spread of literacy, the power of the church--and a host of others. Unapologetically "eurocentric" (the subject, after all, is Europe), his treatment of non-European spheres is tantalizingly cursory and directed purely towards how they hindered or accommodated European expansion. In view of this, I was nevertheless struck by how closely his treatment of the rest of the world resembled other, much more recent, works explicitly designed as curatives to eurocentric approaches (such as Eric Wolf's brilliant "Europe and the People Without History"). If you are striving to grasp the "big picture" of medieval and early modern Europe, this book, despite its age, is an absolute--and immediate--requirement.