E. N. Williams

An old-fashioned history, for better or worse. The better, here, outweighs the worse quite easily.

Better: Williams can write very nicely at every scale--fluid sentences, organized paragraphs, organized sections, organized chapters. He tells you the facts, as best he can understand them, before he preaches at you about how previous historians got it wrong, thus avoiding all the horrors of contemporary historiography, which often tells you about how wrong the accepted story is *before they tell you about either the accepted story or the bare historical facts*. In other words, if you are not a professional historian of the ancien regime, you will learn a lot more reading this than you will reading, for instance, Tim Blanning's perfectly good 'Pursuit of Glory.'

There are some problems with the book's organization: Williams just takes each of the 'great powers' in turn. So you get the Netherlands, then Spain, then France, then Russia, then Prussia, then Austria, then Britain. That is the book. So there's a bit too much repetition, and the domestic stuff works better than the international.

Worse: The book was published in 1970; it's pretty outdated. But even then it must have been a bit controversial. Williams has a very Weberian understanding of economic and social development, and is a little too prone to saying that such and such a city/area/country was economically backward because nobody there had the right attitude. If only the priests would stop telling people that poverty was noble, capitalism would have been able to take over the world so much more quickly! Well, we can argue about that. A greater concern is that Williams holds to a very strong *INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION CHANGED EVERYTHING IN A WEEK* understanding of the world, which most economists and a goodly number of historians would dispute. The most disturbing aspect of the book is the perspective from which Williams writes. I'm sure *he* didn't think this, but he writes as if the only criterion for value is how well a deed or development serves to consolidate the state and its economy. Thus he writes with chilling complacency about Ireland being intentionally turned into a wasteland for one paragraph, while otherwise lauding the greatness and brilliance of the post-restoration English state. Let's not even talk about where the money came from for that state, by the way.

So Williams has a story that needs to be corrected by reading Hobsbawm and Blanning and so on. But if you want a good overview of the facts, this is well worth tracking down.… (meer)