From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Dark Continent and Hitler's Empire, comes a visionary, far-reaching history of two centuries of international government that also goes to the heart of current world crises. In 1815 the shocked and exhausted victors of the decades of fighting that had engulfed Europe for a generation agreed to a new system for keeping the peace. Instead of independent states changing sides, doing deals and betraying one another, a new, collegial 'Concert of Europe' would ensure that the brutal chaos of the Napoleonic Wars never happened again.

Mark Mazower's remarkable new book, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, recreates two centuries of international government - the struggle to spread values and build institutions to bring order to an anarchic and dangerous state system. It shows how what started as a European story became the framework for today's world, as free traders, communists and nationalists all put forward their own radical visions of international harmony.