This is Brendan Simms´ formidable, game-changing history of Europe. In this marvelously ambitious and exciting book, Brendan Simms tells the story of Europe´s constantly shifting geopolitics and the peculiar circumstances that have made it both so impossible to dominate, but also so dynamic and ferocious. It is the story of a group of highly competitive and mutually suspicious dynasties, but also of a continent uniquely prone to interference from ´semi-detached´ elements, such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and (just as centrally to Simms´s argument) the United States.