The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe (Creed & Culture, 466 pp., $38) begins in the Mediterranean. Without Mycenae and Moses and Rome, argues Walter A. McDougall, there would be no Catholic Church and no medieval Europe. Without medieval Europe, there’d be no Renaissance and no scientific revolution. Without the Renaissance, no Age of Discovery, no Protestant Reformation, and no modernity. “Europeans invented the modern world,” as we know it, by variously synthesizing what the Greeks called techne and themis: science and culture.
Obviously, the aperture of the lens that McDougall uses is enormous; its depth of field must be commensurately shallow. The reader is catapulted over the ages and can take only snapshots of the rapidly changing scenery below. It’s the price of covering such a great distance. But McDougall is an expert guide. What you might miss in detail you’ll gain in understanding of Europe’s almost dialectical evolution. The might of the continent had begun to diminish by the start of the First World War; it was depleted by the end of the Second. Just as her birth was in the Eastern Mediterranean, Europe’s afterlife, too, is likely beyond her shores.
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