Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export of Dutch cannons, this is the book for you). The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.
This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. With a German death toll similar to that of World War II but among a much smaller population, it is the defining national tragedy for Germans, with around 25% of the population of the territories comprising modern Germany dying over the course of the conflict. You might vaguely recall it was a religious conflict, or that it resulted in the Peace of Westphalia which is important in international relations for some reason, or if you really remember high school history you might even be able to mispronounce " Cuius regio, eius religio." You could repeat a joke you saw on r/historymemes about how the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” It was a war that was enormously destructive some 8 million people died, and millions more were displaced. If you're not German, you probably do not know much about the Thirty Years War. Wilson's Europe's Tragedy, or at least not what he would say it was, but it might be the biggest theme you come away from it with. That's not the central thesis of Peter H.
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