LITTLE REVIEWS
Conquering Peace is a truly significant reenvisioning of the last three centuries of Europe's history. It is an imaginative and beautifully written longue durée narrative that presents familiar names, dates, and events in a new way, forcing readers to rethink their understanding of the subject. The book traces the emergence, periodic revivals, and revisions of the idea that Europe can be defined as one cultural community whose people could live in peace by eliminating ethno-cultural violence and tensions between competing empires. Ghervas follows the continuing thread of this intellectual history as she recasts five “experiments [in] engineering peace,” all of them major events in European history: the Treaties of Utrecht that settled the Wars of Spanish Succession, the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars, the Versailles Conference of 1919–20, the post-1945 settlements that produced the Cold War division of Europe, and finally the enlargement of Europe since...
