Courses

This course is intended to provide an introduction to some major debates in European history in the era of the two world wars. It is not an introductory-level survey course, and students should either have taken such a survey already or be willing to read a background textbook as the course proceeds. Beginning with the condition of Europe on the eve of the First World War, it explores the causes, experience and long-term impact of the First World War on European politics, societies and individual lives. It ranges from a consideration of the transformation of European capitalism, and the challenge presented by Soviet Bolshevism to the crisis of liberal democracy and the European embrace of the authoritarian and fascist Right. At the same time, it traces the way writers, artists, film-makers and poets came to terms with their age and exposes the way that beneath the creative expressions of a literate elite, long-term changes in the composition of society – the plight of the peasantry in an era of falling commodity prices, the immiseration of the urban working class faced with mass unemployment and the Slump – enhanced international tensions and complicated diplomacy.  It explores the unraveling of the post-1918 stabilisation and the undermining of the authority of the League of Nations as Europe split into warring camps for a second time. Finally, it traces the emergence of a Nazi Europe underwritten by Germany military power and transformed by racist ideas, the collapse of this edifice and the nature of the political and ideological reconstruction that followed after 1945.