David Blackbourn

David Blackbourn is the Emeritus Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His books include German in the Long Nineteenth Century, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, and most recently, Germany in the World: A Global History. He lives in Nashville.

"Startlingly original...Blackbourn shows how the visionary plans of kings, bureaucrats and engineers have devastating practical consequences for lesser mortals...Thanks to Blackbourn, this history of German landscape is no longer written in water." —Sunday Times (London)

David Blackbourn’s newest book,

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000,

out now with Liveright.

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000

Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany.

With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification—and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany’s evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history—the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime—are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany’s leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies. A global history for a global age, Germany in the World is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation’s history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation’s borders.

(Liveright, June 2023)

The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany

Majestic and lyrically written, The Conquest of Nature traces the rise of Germany through the development of water and landscape. David Blackbourn begins his morality tale in the mid-1700s, with the epic story of Frederick the Great, who attempted—by importing the great scientific minds of the West and by harnessing the power of his army—to transform the uninhabitable marshlands of his scattered kingdom into a modern state. Chronicling the great engineering projects that reshaped the mighty Rhine, the emergence of an ambitious German navy, and the development of hydroelectric power to fuel Germany's convulsive industrial growth before World War I, Blackbourn goes on to show how Nazi racial policies rested on German ideas of mastery of the natural world. Filled with striking reproductions of paintings, maps, and photographs, this grand work of modern history links culture, politics, and the environment in an exploration of the perils faced by nations that attempt to conquer nature. 70 illustrations.

(W.W. Norton, August 2007)