Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace

ISBN-13: 9781137538932 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 452 str.

Derek Croxton

Opis

The Peace of Westphalia, which brought to a close the Thirty Years War, is arguably the most important treaty signed before the twentieth century. It was a signal event of the early modern era, thoroughly of its time even as it prefigured the radical political developments of subsequent centuries. This sweeping, exhaustively researched history is the first comprehensive account of the treaty and its wider significance to appear in the English language. Bringing together the latest scholarship with an engaging narrative, it retraces the European situation leading up to the Congress of Westphalia, exploring its political and intellectual underpinnings and placing it in a broad global and chronological context. In doing so, it definitively fills a massive lacuna in the scholarly literature while offering fascinating insights into the long historical transition to modernity.

Recenzje

"It provides a detailed but comprehensible account of the Westphalia negotiations that interweaves a narrative of events and an analysis of the structures and mechanisms of diplomatic interaction. ... an informative and important book." (David Parrott, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 87 (4), December, 2015)

'Here is everything one might want to know about the Peace of Westphalia and more. . . . Recommended.' - CHOICE

'A timely and extremely important study of the central peace settlement in modern European history, by the leading Anglophone historian of seventeenth-century European diplomacy. Derek Croxton's book is the most up-to-date study of the Peace of Westphalia in any language and will be essential reading for students of history and of international relations.' - Hamish Scott, Professor, University of Glasgow, UK

'Derek Croxton's scholarly, detailed account of the negotiations in Westphalia makes the actors' tangled motives, aims, tactics and assumptions comprehensible to the modern reader, thereby showing why a dreadful war continued for five years without even ending in a comprehensive peace. The peace settlement that emerged is seen not as the foundation of a new, modern international system, but as a distinctly Baroque product, the last effort at a Christian peace and the first of similar inconclusive settlements after major 17th-18th century wars - an important revisionist contribution.' - Paul Schroeder, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Spis treści

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Introduction 2. The Thirty Years' War 3. Origins of the Congress of Westphalia 4. Governments and Goals 5. Structures PART II: NEGOTIATIONS 6. The Long Beginning 7. Foreign Satisfaction 8. German Issues PART III: CONCLUSION 9. Consequences 10. Foundations 11. Innovations

O autorze

Derek Croxton is the author of two previous books on the Congress of Westphalia: Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643-1648 (1999) and A Historical Dictionary of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, with Anuschka Tischer (2001).