Кембриджская история - The New Cambridge Modern History (Vol. 8 -13) / Кембриджская история Нового времени (8-13 тт)

Between the Peace of Paris 1763 and the outbreak, thirty years later, of the war of the first European coalition against revolutionary France, the outlines of a Western civilisation which was recognisably 'modern' in most of its characteristic attitudes and attributes rapidly emerged. A civil war between the English colonists in North
America and the imperial government at Westminster, unparalleled industrial and commercial expansion in Britain, radical social and political reforms in France and a steady but uneven increase in population imposed on the western world a momentum of revolutionary change which has never since slackened. On a comparatively minor scale, but with results which helped to determine the trend towards greater social and political equality at this period, there occurred in western Europe another series of
revolutions—such as the struggles in the small city republic of Geneva between 1768 and 1789 for the political and economic emancipation of the middle-class reprdsentants and the socially inferior and unprivileged natifs, the Dutch 'patriotic' movement of 1784-7 and the schismatic revolt of the Belgian democrats in the Austrian Netherlands between 1789 and 1792. Even in conservative England the radicalism inherent in the ambivalent Whig creed received a fresh emphasis in the county 'association' movement of 1779-80 in favour of parliamentary reform and the agitation in 1787-90 for the relief of the Protestant Dissenters from their civic disabilities under the Test and Corporation Acts. The closer study of these radical movements and of their connections with the American
and French revolutions has led some historians to see in this period a pattern of radical reform and revolutionary change common to many parts of the western world.

An age so full of dramatic reversals of fortune and so big with consequences as that of 1793 to 1830 may seem to defy any attempt to compose in one volume a survey of Europe and some of its links with distant regions. Yet the very effort to survey the field in perspective, astride the 'natural frontier' of 1815, presents a challenge and provokes questions sometimes obscured. This volume is intended to offer a portrait or survey rather than a compressed record. Stirring episodes, locally decisive battles, commanding personalities may receive no more than passing mention or may even be sought in vain in the index. But the problem of compression is not the only or the most interesting one. More surprising is the uncertainty about some of the foundations. There is still plenty of room for debate. The printed records are bulkier than for the eighteenth century, but many of them relate to kaleidoscopic changes, blurred for us by political scene-shifting
and by the fog of war. Moreover, the voices of articulate contemporaries were more strident, more at cross-purposes with each other, than in the apparently calm and confident age before 1789, more even than in the short period when the Revolution in its first stages seemed, not only in French eyes, to signify clearly a few universal principles applicable to all Europe and perhaps to all mankind. On the other hand, in the following period after 1830, aptly described as the zenith of European power (Vol. X), the records, though even bulkier, were becoming more systematic, and the basic social data were either more regularly collected or at least collected in ways more capable of
statistical analysis.

The states of Europe might subsequently rule over dominions still more extensive, command armies still larger, and possess weapons more terrible by far in their destructive range; yet, as time went on, their supremacy would be increasingly open to challenge from the peoples of other continents. In the years 1830-70, however, it was scarcely questioned. This was a period when the European states were free from serious threat of political dominance by any one among them, and when, prone though they as ever were to shifting antagonisms, they were not more permanently divided into hostile and highly armed camps. Their wars were relatively brief and the loss of
life relatively small. Conflict had not yet attained the suicidal proportions of 1914-18, and, although men of vision like Tocqueville and Gioberti could foretell the immense future power of the United States or Russia, it was not until after that first 'world war' that a European statesman would write of the decadence of Europe and a European thinker dilate upon the decline of the West.

To ask what were the important developments of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century is to be reminded of the force of continuity in men's affairs and of the rarity of abrupt change. The growth of material power and wealth; of industrialism and urbanisation; of technology and scientific knowledge; of transport, communications
and trade; of population and of the movement of population; of centralised government; of democracy; of literacy and education; of public opinion and the press—these prominent developments of the age had been almost as prominent in the generation, if not in the whole century, which ended in 1870; and the same developments are no less central to an understanding of the years which stretch from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. If we call this period simply the age of material improvement or of industrial development or of democratic progress we have not said much of value about it. Nor does it help towards sharper definition to reflect upon another characteristic of the time; that these continuing massive developments, or most of them, occurred only in European society and its off-shoots in North America and the other areas of white settlement. This restriction and the consequent predominance of
European power and civilisation in the world had existed long before 1870. They were to last beyond 1900, when European monopoly of all this progress was still scarcely touched by changes in Japan, and the discrepancy between the European and less advanced societies had become more acute than it had ever been. In studying this other feature of the time, as in analysing the changes that took place in the more developed areas, the first problem is to allot the period its proper place in a much longer span during which the same forces and relationships were always dominant but
never at rest.

The present volume virtually begins where its predecessor of 1910 ended, though several of its chapters go back to the beginning of the century. It ends in 1945, at a far greater distance from the time of its writing than was true of the earlier volume, which was for its latter stages practically contemporary history. In this volume some of the chapters refer perforce to events which have occurred after 1945. In all of them, whatever the nominal limits, the knowledge of the history of the world since 1945 has
inevitably had its influence. How we view the period 1900-45 as a whole or in its parts is bound to be affected by our interpretation of the history of the last twenty years.
What, then, should be the theme of this volume, from the vantageground of 1966? The original edition was published in i960, and reflected in its planning and its theme the spirit of the 1950s if not of the immediate post-war years after 1945. It was natural to entitle it 'The Era of Violence'.
And no one would deny that violence characterised a great deal of the history it recorded—more so, perhaps, than in any earlier period of history, at least if the degree of violence and brutality, and the numbers of its victims, are reckoned in the balance.

Continuity and change: in a sense this is what all historians study all the time, and it is no surprise to find historical monographs on a wide variety of subjects appearing under this kind of title.1 Historians are professionally concerned with change, and therefore with the absence of change (which is one of the ways of defining continuity). If volumes I-XII of the New Cambridge Modern History have already dealt with these themes, the reader may well be asking what is the point of a thirteenth volume, which covers the same period as all the rest, from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The short answer to this question is that there is more than one way of being concerned with change, or more than one kind of change to be concerned with.