Europe
A History
What's it about
Tired of history that only tells part of the story? Discover the real Europe, a continent shaped not just by its famous Western powers, but by the diverse peoples and forgotten nations that have been written out of the narrative. This is the complete story you've been missing. You'll journey beyond the familiar tales of Rome, Paris, and London to uncover the hidden histories of Eastern and Central Europe. Learn how figures from Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine were just as pivotal as their Western counterparts and gain a truly comprehensive understanding of the continent's complex past.
Meet the author
Norman Davies is a leading British historian and Oxford-educated scholar renowned for his sweeping, multi-language narratives that challenge conventional perspectives on European and Polish history. His work is born from a lifetime of travel and research across the continent, from Portugal to the Urals, giving him a unique ground-level view of the diverse peoples and forgotten stories that shaped Europe. This pan-European approach allows him to weave a richer, more inclusive tapestry of the past, moving beyond the traditional focus on the great powers.
The Script
We tend to think of history as a neatly organized timeline, a series of famous battles and crowned heads arranged in chronological order, with the winners writing the final draft. But this clean, linear story is a powerful illusion. What if the most important parts of history are not the events that happened, but the ones that were systematically forgotten? What if the official record is less a faithful account and more a deliberately curated exhibit, with inconvenient truths and entire civilizations quietly removed from the display? This is about the gravitational pull of dominant narratives. The histories we learn are often shaped by a kind of cultural gravity, where the stories of the powerful pull all smaller stories into their orbit, or sling them out into the darkness of obscurity. The result is a distorted picture, where the edges of the continent are blurred and its center is artificially inflated.
This very distortion is what drove historian Norman Davies to undertake a monumental task. As a specialist in Polish history, he spent his career witnessing firsthand how the grand, Western-centric narratives of Europe consistently sidelined or completely ignored the experiences of the East. He saw a continental story that was fundamentally incomplete, told from only one perspective. Frustrated by the absence of a truly pan-European history—one that gave equal weight to Minsk as to Paris, to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as to the British Empire—he decided to write it himself. Davies, a Welshman teaching at the University of London, embarked on a decade-long project to re-draw the entire picture, challenging the very definition of what 'Europe' even means. The result, narrated by Derek Perkins, is a groundbreaking attempt to restore the continent's lost memory.
Module 1: The Illusion of Permanence
History is a narrative, and narratives are shaped by power. Davies begins by dismantling the idea that what we learn is objective truth. He learned as a child that the British Empire was a permanent fixture. The sun never set on it. This was a powerful story. It was also a complete illusion. Post-war decolonization revealed the empire's deep instability. This personal discovery sets up the book's central theme. Official narratives are often marketing for the powerful.
Think about the name Mount Everest. It honors a British surveyor. But the mountain already had local names. Sagarmatha in Nepali. Chomolangma in Tibetan. The English name is a monument to colonial self-aggrandizement. It erases local identity. History is filled with these distortions. The stories of conquerors overwrite the histories of the conquered.
This brings us to a crucial insight. All states, no matter how powerful, are temporary. Davies learned this from reading about the fall of Rome. But he saw it firsthand with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR was a nuclear-armed superpower. It had a vast security apparatus. It controlled half of Europe. Then, in 1991, it just dissolved. It vanished. This wasn't a slow decline. It was an abrupt disappearance. This event proved that no amount of power guarantees permanence.
So what happens next? Historians tend to focus on existing nations. They trace the roots of modern France or America. This creates a survival bias. We study the winners. This book does the opposite. It focuses on the losers, the forgotten, the vanished. It examines kingdoms like Burgundy, Aragon, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. These were once major European powers. Now, they are footnotes in someone else's history. Davies argues that to understand the present, you must study what was lost. You have to look at the full dataset, not just the success stories. This approach provides a more honest picture of how political entities rise and, inevitably, fall.