Pursuit of Glory — Tim Blanning

Blanning covers Europe between 1648 and 1815 — from the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna — in a history that takes culture, commerce, and demography as seriously as war and politics. The book is structured around the concept of public culture: the growth of newspapers, concert halls, public opinion, and the associated idea that rulers required something more than dynastic legitimacy to govern. It is a history of the forces that made the French Revolution both possible and, in Blanning's view, not inevitable.