‘Europe: A New History’ by Roderick Beaton review

Long shorn of a shared faith and distanced from its classical roots, Europe: A New History by Roderick Beaton discovers a continent searching for a definition.

Luka Ivan Jukic | Published in History Today Volume 76 Issue 4 April 2026

A bird's eye view of Europe, William Heath, c.1825-30. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

To call the story of European history familiar would be an understatement. From early childhood young Europeans are taught to see its stages – Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on – as the narrative superstructure of history itself. New events certainly occur and in time are inscribed into the history books, but rarely are they really so dramatic as to change the entire narrative thrust of European history.

Understandably then, Roderick Beaton begins Europe: A New History with a pre-emptive justification for its very existence, knowing that many readers will be picking it up with the same questions in mind: ‘Why a “new” history? Why might we need one? And what makes this one new?’ Perhaps a better question would be: how ‘new’ does the story of thousands of years of cataclysmic wars, febrile revolutions, apocalyptic plagues, transformational technologies, and social upheavals really need to be to be interesting? Beaton need not apologise for weighing down the nation’s bookshelves with another history of Europe. It is a great book, the kind of top-down grand-sweep history that can all too easily descend into drudgery when inelegantly handled. He follows a familiar enough sequence of events but plays with it enough that it does feel fresh.

Ultimately, what animates Beaton’s history is the question of what it has meant to be ‘European’ over time. There is a self-consciousness to the narrative that allows him to tell a straightforward chronological story from ancient Greece to the present while also exploring how Europeans at different stages have interpreted and identified with the past. In antiquity, ‘Europeanness’ was identified first with the Greeks, then the Romans. With the collapse of Roman authority in the West, Christianity emerged as the new binding force while building on the classical civilisation that had come before it. The continued existence of the Roman Empire in the East produced competing claims to that inheritance that have never quite been resolved, however. Its decline and fall allowed Catholic Europeans to claim the exclusive right to represent ‘Christendom’ at large, a conception of Europe that would not be challenged for centuries.

With the discovery of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, that old certainty was shattered. Christendom split in two and was forced to contend with its position in a world shared with many other civilisations. After religious conflict reached a crescendo in the Thirty Years War, Europe came to be defined by the modern state system. As the rise of the Enlightenment showed, religion’s centrality to the intellectual horizons of the continent was on the wane and a new, secular conception of Europeanness was in the ascendant.

It burst forth with unbelievable intensity at the end of the 18th century before being beaten back at the beginning of the 19th. The conservative but cosmopolitan architects of the ‘Concert of Europe’ envisioned a continent defined above all else by the balance of powers. It was the idea of nationalism and its seemingly unstoppable rise that would finally break that equilibrium, before setting Europe on the road to two catastrophic wars that tore the continent apart, paving the way for its division into two separate worlds only brought together thanks to the revolutions of 1989 and their consequences.

Once again, it is a familiar enough story, told at a brisk pace. Years fly by in sentences, decades in paragraphs, and centuries in pages. In one chapter we see the Mongols sweep into Europe, the Black Death follow in their wake, killing half the continent’s population, Turks arrive and topple the Byzantine Empire, a new world discovered, the intellectual and artistic revolution of the Renaissance emerge, the printing press invented, Charles V’s universal empire’s rise and its failure, the Protestant Reformation erupt, and much else. There is no reason to recount the many things missing from the book. A history as big as this is much likelier to succeed when it does not even try to address such vast topics as society, economics, art, or indeed identity on any level more granular than the ‘European’. A full treatment of all these subjects would be impossible in such a short book, while simply paying them lip service would inevitably feel shallow. Still, there is also a shallowness to their total exclusion.

Beaton ends on a sombre and somewhat strange point. Taking us to the present day through 9/11, Iraq, the Eurozone crisis, the migrant crisis, Brexit, Covid, and the invasion of Ukraine, it feels as though the last three decades of European history have been spent stumbling from one disaster to another. Using the history laid out in the book as his guide, Beaton muses that it is only by fulfilling the dream of the European project that the continent can defend itself against the internal and external dangers that threaten to see its states go the way of the city states of ancient Greece, ‘so obsessed with preserving their autonomy from each other that they fall, one by one, into the grip of a more ruthless neighbour’. An ‘authoritarian, Russian-dominated empire’ stretching ‘undifferentiated, all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific’ bringing a ‘literal end to the history of Europe’ is ‘not inconceivable’, he concludes. History may be made up of surprises, but that is inconceivable. Europe is not just a continent of states, but a continent of people. Is it not more conceivable that societal ageing, economic decline, or migration are the forces that might make the Europe of the 22nd century unrecognisable to Europeans today?

Europe ultimately only matters as an idea insofar as there are Europeans who carry it forward. Some 40 years ago the Czech writer Milan Kundera mused that there were no longer such people. Not because of Russia, which had ‘kidnapped’ that part of the West called ‘Central Europe’, but because European culture had already ‘bowed out’ in the Second World War. In that pessimistic reading, the last chapter of European history has already been written: there is nothing new to say.