Simms, Brendan

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SIMMS, Brendan

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Graduate study at University of Cambridge.

ADDRESSES: Office—Centre of International Studies, Fitzwilliam House, 32 Trumpington St., Cambridge CB2 1QY, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Allen Lane Publicity, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Author, historian, and educator. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, professor of international history. Director of history studies at Peterhouse.

MEMBER: British Irish Association (member, executive committee), Bosnian Institute (trustee).

WRITINGS:

The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy, and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797-1806, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-1850, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia, Allen Lane/Penguin (London, England), 2001.

Contributor to periodicals. Member of editorial board, German History.

SIDELIGHTS: Brendan Simms, an historian of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuries, has written three books on European political history. His first book, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy, and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797-1806, looks at Prussia and the role of diplomacy near the end of that country's old regime. Simms rejects the traditional theory of a sudden change in Prussian policy after 1797 and, instead, argues that the transition was more fluid. While building his position, Simms examines many assumed facts about Prussian politics, as reviewer Anthony J. Steinhoff noted in H-German. The reviewer also commented that Simms' work, though sometimes confusing and irrelevant, is a "first-rate account of the mechanisms of politics and foreign affairs in old-regime Prussia."

In his second book, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-1850, Simms broadens his topic and covers seventy-one years of German history. The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-1850 looks at the contest for power between Austria, Prussia, and other German states prior to German unification in 1871. The work, by demonstrating the diplomatic impetus for unification and the need for Austria to divert attention to southern European concerns, summarizes of why Prussia dominated German unification, commented Donald O. Fries in History: Review of New Books. Fries described the book as an "excellent, well-written monograph."

With his next book, Simms jumps forward several centuries and shifts his attention to the United Kingdom. Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia criticizes decisions made by leaders in Great Britain regarding the Bosnian conflict that ended in 1995. Simms asserts that Britain was too slow to take action against the Serbs, and consequently failed to prevent four hellish years of war in Bosnia. Though reviewer Joseph Pearson acknowledged in his Cercles review that the book is one-sided, he also explained that Simms did not "set out" to write an even-handed account, but rather "a polemic." Simms' claims, Pearson noted, are substantiated by "hugely convincing evidence," and "Those who agree with Dr. Simms will love his book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

History: Review of New Books, summer, 1999, Donald O. Fries, review of The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-1850, p. 168.

H-German, September, 1997, Anthony J. Steinhoff, review of The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy, and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797-1806.