Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

by Keith Lowe

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Lowe documents the violent chaos that engulfed Europe after VE Day - revenge killings, ethnic cleansings, famine, and civil wars that claimed millions more lives between 1945 and 1949. He argues that the familiar story of postwar reconstruction obscures a continent-wide descent into savagery, and that today's European order was built on a foundation of forced population transfers and suppressed memory.

Published:: 2012
Pages:: 460

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II references 4 other books.

It draws on The Guns of August, The Lessons of History and Collapse.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Lowe references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Reverses the chronological lens of Tuchman's Guns of August, showing that the violence of total war did not end with armistice but metastasized into the peace

References

The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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Tests Durant's Lessons of History argument about the persistence of barbarism within civilization, using postwar Europe as the crucial twentieth-century case

References

The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

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Extends Diamond's Collapse framework to a political rather than ecological collapse, documenting how European states failed and reformed in the late 1940s

References

Collapse

by Jared Diamond

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Provides the violent prehistory behind Why Nations Fail's European success story, showing that inclusive institutions emerged only after massive ethnic sorting and state-led violence

References

Why Nations Fail

by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

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Intellectual Lineage

How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.

Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

The Guns of August

The Lessons of History

Collapse

Why Nations Fail

2 steps back

The Rise and Fall of the Thi...

The Origin of Species

The Republic

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Descent of Man

Unexpected Connections

Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.