Book Talk: The New Atlantic Order with Patrick O. Cohrs

The Centre for Grand Strategy invites you to attend a book talk with Patrick O. Cohrs, the author of the recently published book The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics 1860 - 1933. Patrick in discussion with Charlie Laderman will discuss the book and then will open it to the audience to ask questions. 

About the Book: This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric “world order” of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after the First World War, which became the long twentieth century’s cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.

About the Speakers

Patrick O. Cohrs is Professor of International History at the University of Florence. He specialises in the history of modern international politics. His work focuses on war and peace and the transformation of the transatlantic and global order in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before coming to Florence, Patrick O. Cohrs was Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Yale University where he also was one of the co-founders of the Yale International History Workshop. Professor Cohrs received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2002 and was subsequently Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 2006-7. Earlier, he was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He has also held fellowships in London, Paris, Tokyo and Budapest. Having early on taught at Humboldt University Berlin, he was a visiting professor at the Free International University of Social Studies in Rome (2016) and at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg (2017-18). Professor Cohrs is the author of The Unfinished Peace after World War I. America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and of The New Atlantic Order. The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is currently working on the third and final volume of his study of the transformation of the modern Atlantic and global order, which will cover the second half of the "long" twentieth century (1933-2020).

Charlie Laderman is a Senior Lecturer in International History at King's College London. He is part of the core team responsible for directing the Centre for Grand Strategy. Before joining KCL, he was a research fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, where he remains a senior research associate. In 2016–17, he was a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin and in 2021-22, he was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and German’'s March to Global War (Basic Books, 2021). Co-written with Brendan Simms, it explores the most crucial period in 20th-century diplomatic history, the days between Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has been shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History. It has also been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Foreign Affairs.

Host or Publisher Centre for Grand Strategy