In 1815 the shocked and exhausted victors of the decades of fighting that had engulfed Europe for a generation agreed to a new system for keeping the peace. Instead of independent states changing sides, doing deals and betraying one another, a new, collegial ´Concert of Europe´ would ensure that the brutal chaos of the Napoleonic Wars never happened again.
Mark Mazower´s remarkable new book, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, recreates two centuries of international government - the struggle to spread values and build institutions to bring order to an anarchic and dangerous state system. It shows how what started as a European story became the framework for today´s world, as free traders, communists and nationalists all put forward their own radical visions of international harmony.