Introduction Europeans invented the modern world. These days thatundeniable truth makes numerous people uncomfortable, to the point that, asobjectively undeniable as it may be, it is in fact strenuously denied by mostacademic historians, even (or especially) in those portions of the globe wherethose of European ancestry reside. That is because theanti-intellectual trends which have captured the historical profession overthe past sixty years--trends such as postmodernism, deconstructionism, criticalrace theory, radical feminism, and "wokeness" in general--condemn Westerncivilization for having produced most of the ills besetting the world in thetwenty-first century. This is a comparatively newperspective. As recently as sixty years ago, when I studied history in school,survey courses on Western civilization in general, and the ascent of Europe inparticular, celebrated those persons and nations who had invented, defended,and spread such ideas and institutions as limited government, the rule of law,religious liberty, popular sovereignty, capitalist economics,industrialization, and the unprecedented prosperity to which they gave rise,not to mention universities, the scientific method, serial technologicalrevolutions, maritime explorations, and globalization. Teachers and textbooksof that era did not overlook or minimize the nearly constant warfare,imperialism, racialism, and social oppression that tarnished European history,yet they still depicted Europeans and their overseas descendants as leaders inhumanity''s grand march of progress. My own exposure to thesubject of this book first occurred at New Trier Township High School inWinnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. I enrolled in a freshman survey onworld history, then a sophomore survey on modern Europe.

My teacher in thelatter course assigned a textbook authored by a prominent twentieth-centuryhistorian named Carl Becker. That text, the subjects it dealt with, and myinspiring teacher hooked me on European history. Indeed, I became so fascinatedby the excitement, pathos, glory, and tragedy of modern Europe that I latermajored in history at Amherst College, even though I had no expectation that itwould lead to a successful career. My minor fields, German and classical music,supplemented my studies of French, British, German, Austrian, Italian, andRussian history. During 1967 and 1968, my senior year, the Vietnam War was atits peak and American boys of my age group faced conscription. Upon graduationI enlisted in the army, more out of duty than patriotism, but not before applyingto graduate programs in history. I figured that by the time my tour of duty wasover I would have reached a decision about what I really wanted to dowith my life--not realizing that soldiers at war do not think about anythingother than coming home in one piece. So when I did return safely (thank you,Lord!) I matriculated at the University of Chicago.

Only a couple weeks passedbefore I knew that this was exactly where I belonged. The University ofChicago''s faculty was uniformly outstanding, and I took full advantage oflecture classes and seminars offered by esteemed scholars such as William H.McNeill, Donald Lach, Michael Confino, S. William Halperin, Peter Novick, andF. Gregory Campbell. I added a reading knowledge of French to the Latin I hadlearned in high school and the German I had learned in college. After passingmy oral exams I undertook dissertation research at the Quai d''Orsay, the Frenchforeign-ministry archives in Paris, and in libraries and archives elsewhere inLondon, Brussels, and Bonn, then the capital of West Germany. So tirelessly didI labor that I was awarded the doctoral degree in 1974, after just four and ahalf years of graduate school.

The academic job market wasalready poor for aspiring historians. The baby-boom generation had grown up,and college and university faculties were stagnant, if not shrinking.Nevertheless, I was fortunate to be recruited by two institutions: Clemson Universityin South Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley. Needless tosay, I accepted an assistant professorship in the world-class history department at UC Berkeley, and I distinctlyrecall driving my rental car from the San Francisco airport across the BayBridge, singing "California, here I come!" Nevertheless, I wasapprehensive in September 1975 when the fall semester began. Since theUniversity of Chicago''s undergraduate college was small, its faculty did notemploy graduate students as teaching assistants. As a result, when I arrived todeliver my initial lecture at Berkeley, it was the first time I had ever facedstudents. Would I enjoy teaching history? Would I be any good at it? After tenminutes I learned the answers were yes and yes. Once again, I knew that I wasprecisely where I belonged.

My primary responsibility was to teach atwo-semester sequence on European diplomatic history from the French Revolutionto the Cold War (then in full flush). Within two years my reputation had spreadacross campus such that my course enrollments surpassed three hundred studentsper semester. Perhaps that popularityaroused the envy of some of my colleagues, or perhaps they judged a Vietnamveteran who taught about power politics to be reprehensible (don''t forget thiswas Berkeley in the 1970s!), so I had to struggle for no less than nine yearsbefore the provost promoted me to associate professor with tenure. It wasduring those years that another popular professor named William Slottmandecided to retire. He had taught History 5, asurvey of modern Europe from the Renaissance to the present. Since I liked andadmired him, I decided to attend his last lecture and pay my respects. I took aseat near the back of the large lecture hall, expecting my presence would gounnoticed. Imagine my surprise when Slottman ended his lecture with thesewords: "As you all know I shall be retiring at the end of this year, but I ampleased to report that I shall be placing History 5 in the capable hands ofProfessor McDougall.

" I have been teaching versions of that course for fortyyears, not only at Berkeley but throughout the decades following 1988, when Iaccepted a chair at the University of Pennsylvania. That course inspired me towrite the book you are now reading. The contents of my lectureshave been periodically updated as new scholarship has appeared and new themeshave become relevant, among them the end of the ColdWar in 1989-91 and the onset of wars against Islamic terrorists afterSeptember 11, 2001. My lectures have also integrated several generations of newtechnology, especially PowerPoint. I know many audiences consider slidepresentations a MEGO ("my eyes glaze over"), but my PowerPoint presentationsare not at all boring. I carefully select colorful images of people, events,battles, maps, and other images illustrating the times and places described inthe lectures. The slides contain informative captions as well. To purchase therights for the enormous variety of images that accompany this course would takeyears and cost a small fortune.

But I have nevertheless included at least twoimages in each chapter of this book, and I encouragereaders to Google anyone or anything that strikes their fancy or aboutwhich they desire to have visual aids. In live lectures I also screenten-minute YouTube clips of classical music in the hope of interesting collegestudents in the rich repertory of European orchestral music. Readers of thisbook may enjoy Googling masterworks by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, andBrahms as accompaniments for those chapters whichdiscuss the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Romantic eras ofEuropean culture. Nowadays grand surveys ofmodern European history are seldom if ever published, while academic monographson aspects of European history are often arcane, tendentious, and theoreticalrather than descriptive. Too often academic treatises these days are insufferably"woke" or even unreadable, thanks to their postmodern jargon. This book, bycontrast, consists of old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes history. Rudyard Kipling(1865-1936), the poet laureate of the British Empire, once said that if historywere taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. Long before Iknew of that precept, I was practicing it.

Narrative history, loaded withdrama, tension, passion, and irony, is what most readers crave. To be sure, textbooks that describe the sweep of European history inchronological fashion are still being published. But textbook authors andeditors tend to strangle drama, tension, passion, and irony by chopping uptheir subjects into short sections and by interrupting the flow with numerousboxes, charts, tables, and snippets from primary sources. Moreover, textbooksthese days are compiled by teams of scholars and therefore lack a clearnarrative voice. I could have coauthored a textbook, whichwould have been far more lucrative. But I have no interest in collaborativeprojects that entail tedious debates with one''s colleagues over what to includeand what to omit. Hence this volume is one historian''s earnest effort to tellthe tale of the ascent of Europe from the fifteenth to the twenty-firstcentury. The tale is highly stochastic, which is to say too complex to beunderstood through simple patterns of cause-and-effect, much less reductionist"laws.

" I have tackled the chore of telling the tale in the faith that history,when all is said and done, amounts to far more than Hamlet''s "tale told b.