Asked this in the c/history comm a few days back, figured I'd ask here also
Looking for some books or other resources that serve as good overviews of the long nineteenth century, especially as it pertains to Western Europe. I of course know of the Hobsbawm series which people have recommended. But does anyone know of any other good histories of this period that are worth checking out? Looking to give myself some historical context for Marx.
This is a damned good global history, arranged more by theme than chronology, and the introduction comes with the welcome warning that it's probably better chapter-by-chapter than cover-to-cover, since it's 1200 pages: The Transformation of the World, by Jürgen Osterhammel (Libgen)
I just saw a new book on the 1848 revolutions that looks promising: Revolutionary Spring, by Christopher Clark (review) (Libgen)
Check out the relevant volumes of the Cambridge Modern History, too. If I'm reading something about Western Europe I've found those to be good for getting the lay of the land.
I did see that Christopher Clark book and was considering checking it out, thanks! I will definitely take a look at those other things also
it seems like there are two Cambridge Modern Histories? are they both pretty equally useful, or is one of them better than the other?
The older edition (published in the early 1900s) is more casually readable. It's old-fashioned top-down military and political history. The New Cambridge Modern History (relevant volumes published in the 1960s) will have more chapters on particular themes (economic, cultural, etc.) and assuredly has more references that are still in general circulation. They're both mainstream
scholarship with occasionally laughable lapses in judgment - like the preface to the final volume of the first edition, published in 1910, where Lord Acton lets loose some optimistic predictions that would have been punchlines four years later. I like them well enough for what they are because they're more in-depth than any one-volume survey and usually lead me to other research. Since they're all collaborative volumes it also gives me a list of scholars in fields new to me where I might not know where to begin. So I treat it like a very heavy Wikipedia.
Given how old and non-Marxist they are, and the perhaps idiosyncratic way I use them, I maybe shouldn't have recommended them. Worth flipping through at the library, absolutely, but perhaps not the answer to what you're looking for.
no definitely looking for a resource that I can flip through and might shed some light on these really obscure references Marx makes that might have been well-known at the time, but I have no clue what he's talking about. Seems like it would be good for that.