The EC was founded in response to a checkered half-century of European history, when some of the world’s most civilized countries had plumbed depths of savagery, folly, tyranny, and genocide that in a work of science fiction would be hard to believe. The EC’s most obvious purpose had been to reconcile former enemies and prevent war. Its second aim was to avoid the economic errors Europeans had made in the 1930s, when, instead of collaborating on a global recovery policy in response to the Great Depression, they worsened the crisis through economic nationalism that was the breeding ground for dictatorship. Moreover, Europe’s individual countries, once great powers, were dwarfed numerically, politically, and militarily by the United States and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991–92) and economically by the United States and Japan. By the early 21st century the gigantic countries of India and China had also become economic rivals for the European Union and for a Europe that increasingly saw greater cohesiveness as the path not only to holding its own vis-à-vis political and economic superpowers but also to maximizing its power to meet its wider responsibilities in the world. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Europe
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 19 July 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading
Prehistory
A comprehensive introduction to European prehistory is offered in Timothy Champion et al., Prehistoric Europe (1984). Specific periods are covered in Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (1986); Clive Bonsall (ed.), The Mesolithic in Europe (1989); and Alasdair Whittle, Neolithic Europe: A Survey (1985). Among studies of economy and subsistence, Robin Dennell, European Economic Prehistory: A New Approach (1983), deals particularly with hunter-gatherers; Marek Zvelebil (ed.), Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their Transition to Farming (1986), includes regional studies of postglacial hunter-gatherers and the beginnings of agriculture; and Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (1985), is a detailed study of early agriculture. John M. Coles and Andrew J. Lawson (eds.), European Wetlands in Prehistory (1987), contains information on the unusually well-preserved archaeological finds in various European countries. N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 2nd ed. (1985), is a well-illustrated introductory survey; other useful studies of prehistoric art are Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld, Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967); and André Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting (1982; originally published in Italian, 1981). For the Indo-European question, the best account of the theory of invasions is J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (1989). Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987), considers the issues and argues for the spread of the language with early agriculture. Timothy C. Champion
The Metal Ages
General surveys include Patricia Phillips, The Prehistory of Europe (1980); Herbert Schutz, The Prehistory of Germanic Europe (1983); and A.F. Harding (ed.), Climatic Change in Later Prehistory (1982). Jacques Briard, The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe: From the Megaliths to the Celts (1979; originally published in French, 1976), describes the main discoveries; J.M. Coles and A.F. Harding, The Bronze Age in Europe: An Introduction to the Prehistory of Europe, c. 2000–700 BC (1979), offers a comprehensive account for different parts of Europe and an extensive bibliography; and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Roger Thomas (eds.), The Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition in Europe: Aspects of Continuity and Change in European Societies, c. 1200 to 500 B.C., 2 vol. (1989), is a collection of scholarly articles.
John Collis, The European Iron Age (1984), focuses on the links between the Mediterranean and the Iron Age culture of central Europe, and his Oppida: Earliest Towns North of the Alps (1984), discusses early urban settlements. Barry Cunliffe, Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction (1988), explores the influence of Classical civilization and commerce on the cultures of central and western Europe. Harold Haefner (ed.), Frühes Eisen in Europa (1981), is a collection of papers on the origin of iron technology in Europe. A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC (1971), examines the changes characterizing early Iron Age Greece.
Social, economic, and cultural developments are studied in Richard Bradley, The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain: Themes and Variations in the Archaeology of Power (1984); Robert Chapman, Emerging Complexity: The Later Prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia, and the West Mediterranean (1990), an analysis of the cultural sequence focusing on social complexity; Peter S. Wells, Farms, Villages, and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe (1984), a survey of the settlement structure of the Iron Age; J.V.S. Megaw, Art of the European Iron Age: A Study of the Elusive Image (1970), an illustrated interpretive survey of motifs and imagery; and Peter S. Wells, Culture Contact and Culture Change: Early Iron Age Central Europe and the Mediterranean World (1980), analyzing the cultural relationship between central Europe and the Mediterranean. Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen
Greeks, Romans, and barbarians
Appropriate volumes of the multivolume series Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ) survey the development and interaction of the civilizations. Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reprinted 1972), is a standard work on Aegean civilization. Other detailed treatments include Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization, 1100–650 B.C. (1961); N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 3rd ed. (1986); J.B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 4th ed. (1975); and Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (1980). John Boardman, The Greek Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, new ed. (1980), provides an overview of commercial expansion; and Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vol. (1984), is a history of the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic states.
H.H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World: 753–146 BC, 4th ed. (1980), is a standard comprehensive survey. Other relevant histories are Jacques Heurgon, The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (1973; originally published in French, 1969); Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders (1986), focusing on the social life, customs, and class structure of republican Rome; William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (1979, reprinted 1985), on Roman expansion; Joseph Vogt, The Decline of Rome: The Metamorphosis of Ancient Civilization (1967; originally published in German, 1965); and A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vol. (1964, reprinted 1986). Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), is a comprehensive collection of essays on cultural, economic, and social life in the Classical world.