Christopher Clark

Christopher Clark is an Australian-born historian based at the University of Cambridge. Educated at the University of Sydney and Cambridge, he became Cambridge’s Regius Professor of History in 2014. His scholarship centres on modern continental Europe, with particular attention to Prussia, Germany, religion, revolution and international conflict.

Clark writes ambitious narrative history built from close attention to institutions, personalities and competing centres of power. Rather than forcing events into a single chain of blame, he follows decisions across borders and shows how political actors worked with partial knowledge, conflicting aims and shifting assumptions.

Iron Kingdom traces Prussia’s history from the seventeenth century to its abolition after the Second World War; it won the 2007 Wolfson History Prize. The Sleepwalkers examines Europe’s movement toward war in 1914 through Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris, London and Belgrade. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was selected among The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2013. Revolutionary Spring later widened his scope to the interconnected European revolutions of 1848.

Begin with The Sleepwalkers. It is Clark’s best-known work and the strongest introduction to his method: panoramic but closely observed, attentive to diplomatic detail without reducing history to inevitability. Readers drawn to its account of states under pressure should continue with Iron Kingdom.