The title announces a world history; in the subtitle it is specified as a history of ‘Empires, Religions, and Systems’, covering the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In some ways the book offers just that. The first six chapters focus on the two basic continents of ‘Eurasiafrica’ (a term invented to denominate the geographical unity of Europe, Asia, and Africa) and the ‘Americas’ (which formed a separate continent until the age of European expansion). They then elaborate on China, India, Japan, and the British Isles, as well as on continental Europe, and give a general introduction to each place's cultural geography, population, economy, and political and social systems from prehistoric times until their encounter with European expansion. The second part of the book (Chapters 7–15) takes up specific themes, which are organized along the chronology of state-building in Europe (Chapter 7), from the rise of a global division of labour first based on European core states interacting with internal and external peripheries as well as with other world economies (Chapter 8), through the global expansion of the European world economy (Chapter 9), and the role of massacres and deportations as preconditions and consequences of the expansionist spread (Chapter 10), culminating in the development of the modern (nation-)states and their European system of alliances, the Concert of Powers, which took shape between 1648 and 1815 (Chapter 14).

Four other chapters do not follow this chronological order. Some take up questions that are essential to the author's argument (labour in Chapter 11, religion in Chapter 12, revolutions in Chapter 15); others form an appendix, such as Chapter 13 on ‘Everyday life and gender relations’, which the author adds without relating the topic closely to his argument. Calling this a world history is also misleading. What the author really presents in the second part of the book is a history of the European world-system and its encounters with other world civilizations, ending with the rise of a global European hegemony in the nineteenth century. However, while following a European chronology, Chapters 7–15 include comparisons with the non-European regions introduced in the first part of the book.

Nolte starts his book without outlining the structure, the selection, or the order of the chapters. Some explanations are supplied in the last chapter (Chapter 16), which concentrates on methodological approaches, theoretical backgrounds, the general idea of the book, and the author's location within the community of world and global historians. Nevertheless, the reader is left with challenging questions, elaborated with the help of broad and complex material, interspersed with empirical evidence, comparisons, links, and theoretical models. It is not easy to keep track of the thread and see why some stories are told while others are left out. Looking into the author's career may help. Although he specialized in eastern Europe and Russia, Nolte, who retired as a professor in the History Department at Hannover University in 2003, sees himself as a historian with a universal approach. He was one of the first in Western Germany to place world history at the centre of the curriculum and to elaborate a new approach relying on concise empirical studies of all parts of the world, inter-relating them by the means of comparison and embedding the results in global concepts. Nolte's bibliography shows a fascinating variety of books, articles, and edited volumes guided by the idea of global history.

In addition to promoting global history, Nolte himself became a representative of world-systems analysis, which he learned from Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and others, but which he transformed into his own systemic approach. Nolte's theoretical background is influenced by his regional specialization on Eastern Europe–an area that is often treated in isolation, or with a separate agenda, instead of integrating it into global history. As a consequence, key world-system notions of core, periphery, and semi-periphery are differently conceived in Nolte's theoretical framework. He places more emphasis on politics than most world-systems analyses, which give primacy to the economic sphere. As a world historian, Nolte attempts to cover all world regions on equal terms, giving as much empirical evidence as possible; this endeavour overlaps and sometimes contradicts Nolte's specific systemic approach, which requires the selection of topics and a focus on theoretical models, hypotheses, and conclusions.

Nolte's key notion is ‘system’ (p. 345), which he uses to analyse uneven economic relations (core, periphery, semi-periphery) as well as the hierarchy of power-relations within a state (core–internal periphery) or the inter-state-system (core and semi-periphery for sovereign states; core and periphery for colonies). Due to this broad definition, the book presents a variety of different ‘systems’. In the first chapters on geo-cultural civilizations of Eurasiafrica (separated from America), Nolte underlines the diversity of each civilization which follows its own structuring principles, including big centralized empires and small territories, each forming a system of its own. At the same time Nolte, in this respect following Abu-Janet Lughod's Before European Hegemony (1983) and Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient (1998), observes strong inter-civilization ties, contributing to the existence of a loose ‘Euroasiafrican system’. Nolte stresses the pre-modern global systemic ties but, when he elaborates the pre-modern ‘European System of Christendom’ that relied on the ecclesiastic structures of the Roman Catholic Church, his analytical framework rests on purely internal factors: cooperation, competition, accumulation of competence, and hierarchy (p. 115); there is no reference to the external conditions for these European features, which one would have to consider if Eurasiafrica was based on systemic inter-relations. Nolte dedicates six out of fifteen chapters to the period prior to European expansion. When he finally enters the period after 1500, balanced multi-centrality, which had been characteristic for the Eurasiafrican system, comes to an end. Following Immanuel Wallerstein, the transition is conceived as a long process, giving rise to the ‘European world-system’–initially relying on a limited number of regions in Europe and the Americas functioning as peripheries or semi-peripheries for the north-west European core, until the rest of the globe became incorporated into the system's unequal division of labour in the course of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

In his one-page introduction Nolte raises one single question: why Europe, which was not better or worse equipped than other world-civilizations in the fields of economy, military and political organisation, and science, took the lead from the Early Modern period onwards, successfully expanded globally, set up the criteria for progress and development, and achieved hegemony over the entire world? This question is the leading topic for this book. Nolte asks a second question, which is reserved for a second volume: What was the reason for what he calls ‘the fall of Europe’ in 1914, resulting in the implosion of the system?

Nolte traces the roots of the European system back to the Roman heritage; when a European system was reborn after the early medieval migrations (‘Völkerwanderung’), it was held together by the competition of separate but cooperating states instead of a central political power. Supra-state integration and inter-state relations were provided by the Roman Catholic Church, convincing Nolte to identify ‘Christendom’ as the basis of the European system. But this system was not restricted to the politico-ideological sphere; economically it relied on a network of cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries transcending political boundaries. South-eastern Europe under Byzantine (and later Ottoman) rule and Russia (under Mongolian rule and later, after the Muscovite restoration, as a Christian Empire) were not fully integrated into the ‘System of Christendom’ because of the Schism between the Roman and the (Greek) Orthodox Church (1054), which applied to the Russian Orthodox Church as well. The System of Catholic Christendom was replaced by what Nolte calls the ‘European Concert of Powers’ from the sixteenth century onwards. When the unity of Roman Catholic Christendom was challenged both by Protestantism on the one hand and by secular tendencies on the other, confessionalism became the driving force of state-building and inter-national relations. Furthermore, Russian military support was required against the Ottoman Empire. Europe developed into a new type of system, which now included all Christian powers, including Russia. Economically, north-west Europeans gained control over world trade and expanding commodity chains; this enabled them to incorporate Eurasiafrican regions, which until then had formed separate ‘worlds’ or world economies, into the sphere dominated by the European core. As a consequence, the ‘European World System’ became more and more global in the course of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, placing the ‘Concert of European Powers’ at the centre of the capitalist world economy. This is how Nolte combines a notion of system that is defined as an inter-state one with a notion of system based on (the control of a) transnational economic division of labour. Cooperation and competition in economic, political, and cultural fields guaranteed a delicate – and fluctuating – equilibrium of power, co-existing and conflicting with great imbalances in economic development and competitivity. In the nineteenth century it was ruled by British standards. The expansion of the core actors, economically and politically, into internal and external peripheries was a main condition of its stability; when the expansion reached geographical limits, the First World War broke out–according to Nolte, ‘the implosion of the system’ (p. 1). However, this argument contradicts Nolte's own definition: the collapse only applied to the political system of European powers, the Concert; it did not apply to the capitalist world-system with its core shifting to the United States in the aftermath of the First World War.

Nolte sticks to the broad concept of writing world history in the first part of the book. When it comes to the age of European expansion, however, his focus is on world-system history rather than on world history. Nolte's approach is from Europe, on Europe as a system with changing forms of integration, and on Europe's role in the global expansion of the system, which opens the ground for comparisons, inter-actions, transfers, and systemic links with other parts of the world in the second place. Non-European systems are discussed in the period prior to 1500, when they formed part of what he calls the multi-centred Eurasiafrican system. As soon as the European world-system starts to reach out globally in the early modern period, the rest of the world is approached by comparing and relating it with Europe (north-west), and in doing so by using European parameters. I am far from charging Nolte's Euro-centred approach with Eurocentrism; I would not join the critics who blame Immanuel Wallerstein's world-system model for being Eurocentric for the same reason. Nolte surprisingly does (p. 347), following Andre Gunder Frank.

Nolte's book deserves attention for conceptualizing the rise and the shifting meanings and manifestations of a European System, which was at the origin of early modern globalization. By differentiating between the political, cultural, and economic spheres of these systems, his model goes beyond Wallerstein, challenging the latter's concept of periphery in the case of Russia in particular (p. 338). In spite of these differences they share a common goal–a long-run, globally inspired history of the European world-system. It would have been helpful for the reader if Nolte had revealed his own model in an introductory chapter and set out the disposition of his book, before departing for complex empirical findings without outlining the theoretical aspirations behind them. This is why I suggest that readers start this fascinating book with the last chapter.