Vanished Kingdoms

This is a fascinating look at the history of fifteen European countries that no longer exist, running from roughly the fall of the Roman Empire to almost the present day. When we think of European history, it tends to be through the lens of today's countries - British history, French history, and so on - so the result is that this an askance look at Europe; history seen through different eyes.

Of course, all of these nations have been part of the larger sweep of European history, so that often impinges here, perhaps most notably in the chapter on Etruria, a short-lived Napoleonic puppet state that was intrinsically tied up with with the story of Napoleon himself. On the other hand, even when the story is familiar, it's approached from an unusual angle. The final chapter, for instance, deals with the USSR, but it's not told from the perspective of the Soviet Union's largest member state, Russia, but of its smallest, Estonia.

One chapter that feels out of place is that on Ireland, which obviously still exists. However, this is in part an excuse to look at what it would take for the United Kingdom to enter the dustbin of history... and one can't help but notice that two of the things on the list Davies arrives at have actually happened since the book was published. (Although the others don't look close, for what it's worth).

Another oddity is the chapter on the Byzantine Empire, which skirts over the history as a subject far too large for such a book, and instead examines how that history was largely ignored by academics until the last couple of decades. Other than this, we have a plethora of obscure and not-so-obscure former nations - The Kingdom of Montenegro, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Transcarpathian Ruthenia, Galicia-Lodomeria, Savoy, Prussia (told from the perspective of its original heartland, and not Brandenburg-Berlin), the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Aragon, Burgundy (all fifteen of it), Strathclyde, and Tolosa.

There's an underlying theme here of how nation-states die, and a discussion on this exact topic forms a short postscript to the book. But there's also a mourning for lost ways of looking at the world, for peoples once independent but now gone and often entirely forgotten.