During the nineteenth century Europe underwent dramatic changes: unprecedented demographic growth; industrialization and urbanization on a large scale; changes in transportation and technological innovations that significantly shrank time and space; successful and less successful revolutions; the crystallization of important ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, nationalism and socialism. However, despite these changes, the "old regime" continued to exist in many places: agrarian elites continued to be dominant in many places; religion continued to play a large role; linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity continued to be a central feature of central, eastern and southern Europe, and so was a nostalgic longing for small, intimate communities. The tension between a dynamic capitalist society and traditional frameworks gave the nineteenth century its dramatic and turbulent character.

This course aims to introduce basic aspects of the history of the nineteenth century in Europe and to identify long-term political and social developments that occurred between 1789 and 1914. We will focus particularly on the appearance of nationalism as an ideology and as an identity and try to understand the similarities and differences between national movements in different parts of Europe. We will also examine the depth of some of the major events of the nineteenth century in Europe and their long-term implications: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars of 1848-49, and the establishment of the German Empire (the Second Reich).