2006 Handbooks

This unit offers a political, social, cultural and economic overview of Europe's relations with the wider world. It traces the obsession with race and empire in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and considers the postcolonial view that the twentieth-century European 'civil wars' were a result of European practices of colonialism turned inward. Was Europe indeed the 'Dark Continent' suggested by Mark Mazower? The crisis of European liberalism in the face of the Great Depression, Russian communism, the Spanish civil war, fascism and Nazism, two world wars and the Holocaust support such a view, but the second half the century presents a more complicated picture. We look at the Cold War, the Americanisation of Europe and the fall of communism; the effects of decolonisation and postcolonial immigration on European societies; the growth and eventual erosion of the welfare state; civil rights, peace and environmental movements; the development of the EEC and the EU.