This is a difficult book to review in under a thousand words, not least because it really consists of three separate books, or “essays” as the authors prefer to call their respective contributions. Each was written separately, published together in French in 2009, then translated into English for the present volume. Their combined efforts have a common topic, which is evident enough from the book's title. Each of their contributions, however, is quite different in approach and style. Indeed, the authors themselves warn prospective readers that they “will encounter not one essay but three in succession” (p. 4). Overall they convey a simple and convincing message, albeit one that is sometimes lost in the narrative and in copious detail.

John Tolan's contribution concerns relations between Europe and the Islamic world in the pre-modern period. He covers a range of familiar topics – the nature of jihad and crusade; the treatment of religious minorities in Muslim and Christian societies on both sides of the medieval Mediterranean; and the transmission of texts and ideas, by merchants, scholars, polemicists and others. The material covered is not new – all of these topics have been treated extensively by recent historians, starting with the many books written by Norman Daniel several decades ago, and ending most recently with the proliferation of books on holy war in Christianity and Islam in response to the terrorist attacks of 2001. Tolan's chapters in particular sometimes have the feel of an undergraduate lecture. That is no criticism; on the contrary, it makes for an engaging and compelling narrative of an important story.

In the book's second section, Gilles Veinstein (who died in February 2013) shifts the focus to the early modern period. He begins with an exhaustive narrative of the long history of military confrontation and diplomatic engagement between the Ottoman Empire and its Christian European rivals, from the first Ottoman incursions across the Bosphorus in the fourteenth century to the humiliating Treaty of Kuçuk Kaynarca which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74. He deftly demonstrates the “medieval” roots and character of the early modern European fear of and hostility towards the Ottoman Empire, how the religious ideal of crusade continued to inform the campaigns of the emerging nation states of Europe, and how this religious antagonism was eventually secularized into a view of the “Turk” as barbarous and tyrannical. His target audience, however, is a little more difficult to discern. The themes he addresses are compelling: for example, the “dissonant voices” on both sides of the civilizational divide which rose above the ideological discourse of hostility, or what he identifies as the “voices of political realism, commercial pragmatism, the appeal of exoticism, technological imitation, Orientalist scholarship, and philosophical speculation” (p. 206). (It is refreshing, perhaps, to see early Orientalist scholarship restored to its proper place in the history of relations between “East” and “West”, as an exercise in reaching across boundaries rather than in exploiting those boundaries for unambiguously political purposes.) But at times the narrative is bogged down by an avalanche of detail. As a result, this portion of the book at times reads like little more than an exhaustive list of those “dissonant voices” and the arenas in which they were heard: truces between the antagonists, the capitulations which gave legal protection to European merchants, diplomatic missions such as that of the Hapsburg envoy Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, travellers and the travellers’ accounts which became a staple of European literature, early Orientalist scholarship, the “dragomans” attached to European diplomatic missions, and the fashion for things Eastern which Europeans came to know as “turquerie”.

In the final third of the book, Henry Laurens brings the story into the contemporary period. Laurens’ contribution in particular illustrates that to which the authors drew attention in their introduction: that the book is less a “systematic treatise” or a “textbook” than it is an “essay”, “a more subjective and hence more arbitrary genre that privileges the significant event, the illustrative example” (p. 4). Laurens’ starting point is that a decisive shift in the dynamic of power in the second half of the eighteenth century produced a pattern of relations between Islam and Europe which has continued to the present day. His narrative is anything but a collection of data: indeed, appreciating it requires a previous knowledge of the sequence of events at the heart of the narrative of Muslim–European relations in the modern period. Laurens’ essay is meta-historical: it goes beyond the story of “Europe and the Islamic world” to touch upon the Enlightenment, the historical pattern of mass migrations from Central Asia, the American Revolution, Hindu nationalism. This can have fascinating results, as in his interpretation of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, which situates the event not simply in the usual story of Franco-British commercial and imperial rivalry but as a chapter in a much longer-term story of a seismic shift in cultural relations between Europe and the Islamic world, as a result of which “the geopolitics of Islam emerged completely transformed” (p. 272). At times, however, the reach for grand themes can also leave the reader uncertain about the precise meaning and value of the analytical categories Laurens employs: for example, the “East”, which plays an important role in his interpretation of Muhammad Ali's reforms in Egypt (p. 278).

For all their differences, the three essays are united around a common theme. Put simply, it is a response to Samuel Huntington's argument about a “clash of civilizations”. Humans have not, historically, thought of themselves primarily as members of “civilizations”. The wars – medieval, early modern, modern – to which many pages of this book are devoted were driven principally by particular factors rather than grand, religious designs. This, like much else, is particularly clear in John Tolan's essay, which demonstrates that crusades and jihads were “a posteriori explanation[s]” for conflicts that had other, more proximate causes (p. 27). Readers, therefore, “should not be fooled by the title of this book: it will have less to do with relations between Europe and the Islamic world than with those between Genoese and Tunisians, Constantinopolitans and Alexandrians, Catalans and Maghrebis” (p. 4). The authors see their book not as a response to Huntington on a theoretical level – there are already enough of those – but as an “attempt to revive a long history many aspects of which have fallen into oblivion and to replace simplistic and reductive schemata with evidence of a richer and more complex history”. Complex, their story certainly is.