This second volume of Zara Steiner's two-part international history of the interwar period is a work of extraordinary scope and detail. Neither an old-fashioned monograph based solely on speeches and diplomatic exchanges nor a study that focuses primarily on domestic politics, culture, or economy, The Triumph of the Dark is a detailed interpretive examination of the six crammed years that ended in a devastating global war and the onset of the Holocaust.

Steiner's theme is straightforward: at the center of her book is Hitler, whose fixed goal was a war to achieve Lebensraum and German racial dominance over Europe but who was also a brilliant tactician well versed in the arts of patience and peace propaganda as well as bluntness and bullying. The bulk of Steiner's account (more than a thousand pages of narrative and analysis, based on an impressive range of primary and secondary works), however, focuses on Britain and France's attempts to avert war by their efforts to woo Italy and their desultory approaches toward the Soviet Union, but primarily on their various and often uncoordinated acts to abandon the peace treaties and appease Nazi Germany. Facing the political and economic toll of the Great Depression, public opposition to increased military expenditures, and unrest in their far-flung empires along with Mussolini's adventurism, Japanese aggression, U.S. isolation, the Comintern's machinations in Spain, and the ugly purge trials in Moscow, successive leaders in London and Paris were mired in wishful thinking over Hitler's moderation and their ability to contain or deter the Führer. After contributing to the collapse of collective security in the crises over Ethiopia and Spain and bowing to German aggression in the Rhineland and Austria, they utterly caved in to his demands at Munich. But only one year later, all illusions dispelled, Chamberlain and Daladier glumly drew the line over Hitler's demands on Poland.

There is much to praise in Steiner's book, beginning with her vivid pen portraits, apt quotations, deft use of intelligence materials, and skillful inclusion of trade and armaments data as well as her superb bibliography and fifteen excellent maps. Steiner provides astute connections between events and decisions in various capitals and continents. She illustrates how memories of the bloodletting in World War I shaped British, French, and Soviet decision making and also contributed to the widely disparate estimates of each nation's strengths and weaknesses. Underlining the importance of political symbolism, she reminds us, for example, how Speer's neoclassic structure glared at the Soviet pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, which also included Picasso's Guernica in the Spanish republic's pavilion. Although acknowledging the importance of ideology in international discourse, Steiner shows it as a highly flexible tool in the hands of the fascist and communist dictators and also in the appeasers', who tended to minimize Hitler and Mussolini's misdeeds and inflate Stalin's. Moreover, Steiner's text is punctuated with such tantalizing questions as why was the U.S.S.R. not present at the Munich conference (p. 645)? Why were so many countries hostile to admitting (Jewish) refugees (p. 985)? And what drove Hitler to take a massive gamble in 1939 while knowing that “time was not on Germany's side” (p. 1031)?

Moving beyond Europe, Steiner provides extensive coverage of the wars in Ethiopia and China. Drawing on her multi-archival sources, she is masterful in dissecting the layers of distrust and competition between Rome and Berlin and between Tokyo and its putative fascist allies. There is a brief but excellent chapter on the League of Nations's agony in the 1930s, another about the search for security among Europe's smaller states, and another about the strengths and liabilities of the British and French empires. Using a host of recent post-Cold-War research, Steiner tracks Stalin's torturous path from Litvinov's championship of collective security after 1934 to the decision to dismiss his foreign commissar and sign with the Germans five years later.

Steiner resolutely rebuts the revisionists. Her Hitler and Mussolini are not the traditional German and Italian statesmen who exploited a permissive environment as depicted by A. J. P. Taylor and Renzo di Felice but determinedly bellicose leaders. Drawing on her multiple sources, she issues unambiguous judgments of the others. Her Chamberlain is not the pragmatic architect of British rearmament but a vain, stubborn, and shortsighted politician; her Daladier is neither a “gravedigger” nor an abject follower of London but a beleaguered leader of a divided and vulnerable France; her Stalin is neither the victim of Anglo-French hostility nor an aggressive Russian nationalist but a wary, hard-nosed guardian of Soviet interests; and her Roosevelt, in his infrequent appearances, is a clear-sighted and canny but also exceedingly cautious leader hobbled by an antiwar Congress and public.

If this book's length and detail appear excessive, the reader's reward is its judicious weighing of evidence and its forthright (if not unanimously held) judgments. Steiner has retold the epic tale of how France and Britain, having lost faith in their ability to stop Hitler from going to war and fearing for their own survival as great powers, in 1939 plunged into the “darkness” they had sought desperately to avert, thereby marking the end of Europe's two-century-long global hegemony and the beginning of a new division of the world.