商品簡介
Recent dramatic changes in eastern Europe, and its moves towards closer integration with the west, have drawn increasing international attention towards the continent's northern periphery - the Baltic, Europe's 'other inland sea', and its neighbouring states. Will the Scandinavian countries act in unison in their relationship with the European Union, or will regional and national interest divide them, as often before? How will the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia face up to the challenge of renewed independence? What role will Russia play on her northwestern doorstep?
David Kirby offers a historical perspective on these and other contemporary questions in this eagerly awaited sequel to his earlier survey of Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period, 1492-1772. He gives an analytical account - from the Napoleonic Wars to the collapse of the Soviet Union - of the major events that have shaped the nations on Europe's northern edge; and examines in detail the ways in which their peoples have responded to the immense social, economic, religious and political changes of the last two centuries.
He pays particular attention to the history of the region in the nineteenth century, which is much less well covered in English than the comparatively familiar developments of our own time. He is particularly concerned with the nineteenth-century transition from an agrarian social order that was patriarchal and 'controlled' to the 'open' society of modern times. Even in the twentieth century, however, his breadth of treatment (which is regional rather than national throughout) provides many fresh perspectives and unexpected insights on events and processes that we are used to perceiving from quite different standpoints.
A number of core concerns run through the entire book. They include: rural society; social welfare; religious and secular activism; and, above all, the many facets of national identity, from the early efforts of German-speaking clergymen to improve the status of the Estonian language, and hence raise the self-esteem of the recently emancipated peasantry, to the 'singing revolution' of the late 1980s.
The new volume shares the characteristics of its distinguished predecessor - wide geographical and chronological spans; expert mingling of political, social and economic history; and David Kirby's ability to keep the separate national threads of his account from tangling as he weaves them into the broad regional picture that is his main concern. This is a masterly study of a region that is far from peripheral politically to the post-Soviet world.
作者簡介
David Kirby is Professor of Modern History at the School of Slavonic Studies, University of London.
