Blanning's introduction sets out what the volume's contributors have made of Europe since the French Revolution, and it reads largely as a study in how badly the continent handled its own modernization. Population more than doubled in the nineteenth century, life expectancy and literacy rose, and the class war Marx expected never came; the clergy lost most, the aristocracy diversified, and the middle classes set the cultural tone.

Culture is Blanning's own subject. Released from patronage by a literate public, the artist gained enormous status and then acquired a new master in the market, a friction he treats as productive rather than merely corrosive.

The twentieth-century chapters are bleaker: a single European civil war running from 1914 to 1945, a 1919 settlement that guaranteed the next round, a left divided against itself until too late, and total war ending in the Holocaust and the bomb.