Eighteenth-century: Europe, 1688-1815 (Short Oxford History of Europe) - Tapa dura

The complete "Short Oxford History of Europe" series covers the history of of Europe from Classical Greece to the present in ten volumes. In each, experts write to their strengths tackling the key issues including society, economy, religion, politics and culture head-on in chapters that offer wide-ranging surveys and searching analyses. Each book is specifically designed with the non-specialist reader in mind; but the authority of the contributors and the vigour of the interpretations makes them suitable reading for fellow academics across a range of disciplines. The word which best summarises the variety of human experience in the 18th century is "expansion". The size of armies, literacy rates, state intervention, the acreage of overseas empires, productivity or just the number of Europeans on the planet all were appreciably higher in 1800 than in 1700. It is the century which forms the hinge between the old world and the new for, by its end, change was not only detectable, it was also seen to be irreversible.

T.C.W. Blanning is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.