I'm interested in learning about the tumult of 1848 at a European level (as opposed to the revolutions in one country specifically), given how important that year seems to be in European history. Most of the books I've come across look like pop history books, so I thought I'd ask here. I would prefer books that study the insurrections from a political economic standpoint, if that is a tool historians have found useful for analyzing these many, separate uprisings.
Thanks in advance! And also apologies in advance if this violates subreddit rules.
Most of the books I've come across look like pop history books
Part of the reason for this is that it is very difficult to treat the events of 1848 as a discrete, singular event. The masses took to the barricades for many different reasons depending on the political, economic, social, and historical context of each area. The 48ers were an incredibly diverse lot with competing and contradictory agendas. Studying 1848 at a regional level often reveals how complex and multifaceted an entity it was.
That said, there are some solid academic books that examine 1848 at a European-wide level. Jonathan Sperber's The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 is a textbook-level synthesis of a good deal of scholarship on the various 1848 revolutions. The doorstopper anthology Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform is a series of essays written by specialists that tries to present a mosaic of 1848 on a European level. Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution is an influential Marxist take on the reverberations of both the French and Industrial Revolutions and places 1848 within this context. Axel Körner's anthology 1848- A European Revolution? examines the larger memory and processing of the 1848 events after their failure.