The Great Depression was a global phenomenon in origin and impact, but one typically viewed through an American lens. This chapter provides a European perspective, detailing and contextualizing European developments within that global context. The focus is not individual country experiences, which were significantly varied, but instead generic forces and factors set within an economist’s framework of the twin problem of attaining simultaneous internal and external balance in an age of marked instability. Three questions are addressed: the scale and scope of the depression and the unevenness of countries’ recoveries by the eve of the Second World War; the general causes, domestic and international, of the depression of the European economies; and the reasons why individual countries fared so differently as they sought to recover from the depression.