At that point one wants to know rather more about who the people were who made the decisions, and what these states were apart from large stretches of territory with oscillating boundaries. "Austria" is useful shorthand, but what were the real concerns of Maria Theresa, Joseph II or Franz Josef? Why on earth should the Swedes be so besotted with foggy, marshy, cold Pomerania (though one could say that for them it was more of the same)? Sometimes the roots of these relationships reached back very far in time, as with the ambitions of those Swedes in the Baltic. But then there is always the question of religion: crusading Swedes against pagans in the Middle Ages, who turn into Protestant Swedes with tricky Russian Orthodox neighbours in later centuries. As Simms is well aware, fighting constant wars meant heavy spending and the development of an elaborate military machine, which reached a new sophistication under Frederick II of Prussia. And once the military state was functioning well, with its officer class closely tied to the ruler, conquest and aggrandisement became the prime business of the day. Ferdinand and Isabella had understood this at the end of the 15th century; conquering Granada was not just a matter of completing the Christian reconquest of Spain, but of establishing military leadership when their claim to the throne was far from solid. But what about other ways of establishing supremacy? In the 19th century there was the opportunity for recourse to wealthy bankers such as the Rothschilds, whose willingness to support one side or another could affect the outcome of a power struggle significantly, and could, as Simms shows, take into account such matters as the treatment of their co-religionists in Russia. And then there was trade, about which he says rather little. Seventeenth-century mercantilists promoted theories about the world's wealth and how to exploit it. Sometimes the most successful exploiters were small states, notably the Netherlands. Austria-Hungary was well situated for commerce down the Danube, and Maria Theresa encouraged the growth of Trieste as the prime Mediterranean port of Austria-Hungary.

For Simms, Europe has much more elastic boundaries than one might expect, given his insistence on the centrality of Germany in European history. The European dimension to the history of the Thirteen Colonies and the United States is brought out clearly, as Spain and France lost influence in the New World, and the Austrian Habsburg Maximilian ended up facing a firing squad in Mexico; but Britain managed to retain its hold on parts of North America, even areas that remain to this day French-speaking. That said, we do not hear as much about Spain and Italy as one would find in older history books, which is odd, since both lands were heavily involved with the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as well as with one another — it is easy to forget that, as well as possessing the world's largest empire of the time, in the Americas, Spain possessed a European empire of great strategic and economic importance, in Milan, Naples and Flanders. It is also worth noting that Spain's western frontier is by far the most stable frontier in Europe — the boundary with Portugal has changed very little over the centuries, a statement one could not even make of San Marino and Monaco. Italy, moreover, was the seat of an institution that did have a pan-European, indeed universalist, agenda, the papacy, which features less in this account of power politics than it perhaps deserves.

By concentrating so much on relations between states there is always the danger of forgetting the importance of relationships within those states that moulded foreign policy, and, though this is a subplot, it is one that runs throughout the book. With Napoleon, we can see how the emperor's wars on many fronts transformed the internal shape of revolutionary France: having dispensed with their ancient nobility the French were foisted with a new imperial nobility, based on service — titles were hereditary, but would be cancelled if future generations failed to serve the state, as military officers or in other ways. There are other fascinating examples of the interplay between domestic politics and big power politics. One is the attitude of the European powers to the slave trade, in which Britain adopted a pioneering position; Simms shows how the United States dug in its heels over an issue that for the Americans was as much concerned with resentment at European interference in the affairs of the western hemisphere as it was with a wish to defend this horrendous traffic. Another example of the interplay between domestic and foreign policy issues is the attitude to the treatment of religious minorities, notably the Jews. In Simms's scenario, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration in order to steer the Jews away from sympathy for Germany and not simply in order to British interests on the route to the East. It was, he says, a delicate issue because Britain's Russian ally had had a well-deserved reputation for failing to protect its Jewish subjects. Yet power politics is only part of the issue. The idea of a Jewish "ingathering" appealed to many British Christians, and it even appealed to those like G.K. Chesterton who thought the Jews could never be truly British. People will continue to argue about the Balfour Declaration, but moral issues did intrude into the competition for territory and influence.