Examines the rise of the explosive social and national tensions in late nineteenth-century Europe which culminated in world war and revolution (Russia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland). Key themes are industrialisation and the rise of the labour movement; urbanisation and its impact on gender roles; the flowering of bourgeois culture and its fin de siecle crisis; the transformation of revolutionary into "integral" nationalism and imperialist jingoism; great power rivalry and the origins of the First World War. Aims to understand how the period laid the foundations for the dramatic events of the "short twentieth century".