For Americans, 1864 is famous mainly for being the penultimate year of our Civil War. But that's not all that happened that year.
As long term readers know, I am something of a military history buff. Indeed, I would have loved to be a military historian were it not for the fact that the pay stinks and most universities won't touch you with a 10 foot pole.
All of which is to explain how I came to read 1864: The Forgotten War That Shaped Modern Europe
Briefly, Schleswig and Holstein are two states at the bottom of the neck that connects Denmark to Germany. They were strategically important in the mid-1800s because control of them would give a rapidly expanding Prussia access to the Baltic via Kiel and to the North Sea via the planned Kiel Canal. An 1852 London Protocol (the British were fantastic busybodies in the 19th Century, sticking their noses into everything) had assigned them to Denmark, but in a constitutionally awkward manner. In 1863, Denmark amended its constitution to clarify their status, but Prussia and Austria claimed that the amendments violated the 1852 Protocol. The two German states seized upon the amendments as a casus belli and declared war.
The main battle was fought at Dybbøl, which Wikipedia describes as "a small town with a population of 2,495 in the southeastern corner of South Jutland, Denmark." It reportedly "has had an enormous impact on this country’s self-perception and foreign politics ever since. It is a complex part of its history, which has always been associated with tensions and strong opinions."
Buk-Swienty takes a somewhat unique narrative approach, starting with the preliminaries to the Battle of Dybbøl, backtracking to cover the start of the war and the events leading up to it, before coming back to tell the story of the battle and its aftermath.
In addition to vivid descriptions of the battle, Buk-Swienty does an excellent job of concisely explaining the political constraints under which both Denmark and Prussia were operating and the incentives that led them to choose war.
Buk-Swienty writes well and the book reads quickly and enjoyably.
Criticisms? First, I think he oversells the idea that this war shaped modern Europe. Having said that, however, he does make a convincing case that this was the first modern European war. The role of railroads and battlefield medicine, in particular, are fully developed.
Second, he almost completely ignores Austria. We get no sense of what the Austrian government was thinking, what Austria's war aims were, how its army fought, and so on. In particular, he fails to lay the groundwork for understanding how the unsatisfactory (from the German perspective) result of the war lead to the Austro-Prussian war two years later. That issue, however, is well treated in Geoffrey Wawro's fine book The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866
