Read The New Penguin History of the World Online
Authors: J. M. Roberts,Odd Arne Westad
The Growth of British Power in India 1783–1804
British Atlantic Trade in the 1770s
Economic Resources of the British American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
Christian Missionary Activity in Africa and Asia in the Nineteenth Century
Africa in the Early Modern Era
The Slavery Problem in the United States
The Emergence and Consolidation of the USA
The British Empire (and Protected Territories) 1815–1914
South America after Independece
Partitioned Africa: Areas of European Domination in 1914
Major Religions of Asia in the Early Twentieth Century
Imperial Expansioin in South-east Asia 1850–1914
Migration from Europe in the Nineteenth Century
Ottoman Decline and the Emergence of Modern Turkey 1683–1923
Europe During the War of 1939–45
Proposed UN Partition of Palestine 1947; Israel 1948–67 and Israel 1967–75
Post-war Germany and Central Europe
The Post-war Recovery of Eastern Asia and Populatioin Pressure in South and East Asia
The Post-Ottoman Near and Middle East
Decolonization in Africa and Asia
Post-war Europe – Economic and Military Blocs
The Soviet Union and Its Successors
Preface to Fifth Edition
The first edition of this book appeared in 1976, and this is the fifth. There have also been several translations, whose texts have sometimes had to vary slightly from the English originals at the request of their publishers. I think that it is unlikely that I shall now have time to offer the public yet another version. Since, though, this contains a very substantial revision of the text after a comprehensive reconsideration it may be helpful to set out once more in a new preface some explanation of what I have tried to do, and why it seemed sensible to do it. At the very least, I feel I should indicate whether the events of over twenty-five years have led me to change the purposes and perspectives with which I set out to break the ground for this book in the late 1960s.
I have very recently heard it said of World History that ‘everything changed’, or something to that effect, on 11 September 2001. For reasons I have touched on briefly below, and because of certain ideas which have guided me from the outset, I think this is very misleading, untrue in any but a much qualified sense. Yet the first reason why a new edition seemed desirable is that world history for over a decade has been passing through and continues to pass through the most recent example of a recurrent phenomenon: a period of turbulent events and kaleidoscopic change. The beginnings of this confused and exciting period were already topics for the last, third, edition of this book, but events in the later 1990s alone made further consideration necessary in case new perspectives had to be taken into account, as well as new facts.
I feared the outcome would be a much enlarged book, but it did not turn out like that. Many changes of detail and style were required, but only the last section of the story underwent major rearrangement and reconstruction. Changes of emphasis were required, of course. There is a little more than in the last edition about recent changes in the position of women, about environmental concerns, about new institutions and assumptions, new questionings of old ones, and about shifts in the formal
and informal basis of the international order (these topics are most marked in recent history, and my views on them can be found set out at greater length in my
Penguin History of the Twentieth Century
, published in 1999). But none of this reflected fundamental change in my standpoint or general outlook, and they can be summed up in much the same terms I have used before and from the outset.
Perhaps my predominant concern, from the start, was to show and recall to a non-specialist readership the weight of the historical past and the importance, even today, of historical inertia in a world we are often encouraged to think we can control and manage. Historical forces moulding the thinking and behaviour of modern Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians and Arabs were laid down centuries before ideas like capitalism or communism were invented. Distant history still clutters our lives, and perhaps even some of what happened in prehistory is still at work in them, too. Yet there has always been tension between such forces and mankind’s unique power to produce change. Only recently (it is a matter of a few centuries at most) in terms of the six thousand or so years of civilization which make up most of the subject-matter of this book there has also been a growing recognition of mankind’s power as a change-maker. What is more, enthusiasm for technical advance now seems universal. Even if very recently indeed some have sought to temper this enthusiasm with qualifications, there is now a widespread notion that most problems can and will be solved by human agency.
Because in consequence the two phenomena of inertia and innovation continue to operate in all historical developments it remains my view – as the first edition of this book put it – that we shall always find what happens both more, and less, surprising than we expect. Judgements about the significance of recent or contemporary events, should only be made with this kept firmly in mind. I remain inclined to believe, too, that such judgements will always be influenced very much by temperament, and that our innate optimism or pessimism will tinge any attempt to make predictions. Even if we could handle their abundance, none but the most general statements about likely futures could ever be made from such facts as history provides. Since the last edition of this book, I am aware of a slight shift in my own feelings; I now feel that my children will probably not live in so agreeable a world as I have known, because even greater adjustments in humanity’s life everywhere may well be required than I once thought. But I do not claim to know. Historians should never prophesy.
Most of the foregoing I have said before at greater length and need not elaborate further now. It may, though, also be still helpful to new readers of this book if I repeat something of my reasons for choosing the general
approach reflected in its layout and contents. I sought from the start to recognize, where they could be discerned, the elements of general influences which had the widest and deepest impact and not just to collect again accounts of traditionally important themes. I wished to avoid detail and to set out instead the major historical processes which affected the largest numbers of human beings, leaving substantial legacies to the future, and to show their comparative scale and relations with one another. I did not seek to write continuous histories of all major countries or all fields of human activity and believe the place for exhaustive accounts of facts about the past is an encyclopedia.
I have sought to stress the significance of these major influences, and that means chronological and geographical unevenness in allocating space. Although we properly still take time and trouble to gaze at and study the fascinating sites of Yucatan, to ponder the ruins of Zimbabwe or wonder over the mysterious statues of Easter Island, and intrinsically desirable though knowledge of the societies which produced these things may be, they remain peripheral to world history. The early history even of such huge areas as black Africa or pre-Colombian America are only lightly sketched in these pages, because nothing that happened there between very remote times and the coming of Europeans shaped the world as did the cultural traditions in which the legacies of, say, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets and Christianity, Plato and Confucius were for centuries living and shaping influences for millions of people and often still are.
I also tried not to write most about those subjects where material was most plentiful. There is not, in any case, the slightest chance of mastering all the relevant bibliography of world history. I have sought to stress matters which seemed important, rather than those about which we knew most. Louis XIV, however prominent in the history of France and Europe, can therefore be passed over more briefly than, say, the Chinese Revolution. In our own day, it is more than ever vital to try to distinguish the wood from the trees and not to mention something because it turns up every day in the ‘news’.
New interpretations of the meanings of events are offered to us all the time. For instance, much has been heard recently about a clash of civilizations, presumed to be under way or on its way. This assertion, of course, has been heavily influenced by a new awareness of both the distinctiveness and the new excitability of the Islamic world in the last few decades. I have indicated in what follows my own reason for rejecting this view, at least in its most unqualified presentations, as inadequate and over-pessimistic. But no one could fail to recognize that there are, indeed, multiple tensions building up between what is loosely called the ‘West’ and
many Islamic societies. Both with conscious intention and unconsciously, sometimes even accidentally, profoundly disturbing influences from the West have now been at work to disrupt and trouble other traditions, Islam only one among them, for the last few centuries (the notion of ‘globalization’ is emphatically not to be seen in terms merely of the last few years). That process began, of course, with the activities of Europeans and that is why I have given considerable space to the evolution of Europe and its centrality until 1945 in world history.
No doubt such an emphasis reflects the most fundamental impulses arising from my own historical heritage and cultural formation. I cannot but write as an elderly, white, middle-class, British male. If that seems a shortcoming too grave to overcome, other approaches can be found, but the reader must weigh them, too, in similar scales before he or she comes to a judgement. I hope none the less that my efforts to be aware of what I might too easily take for granted may have made it possible to provide what the immensely learned historian Lord Acton termed a history ‘which is distinct from the combined history of all countries’, but which also indicates the variety and richness of the great cultural traditions which determine its structure.
In earlier prefaces, I have identified the many friends and colleagues who in many ways gave me help at earlier stages. I shall always be grateful to them but, because they are on record, I shall not repeat their names here. But I must add to theirs the name of Professor Barry Cunliffe, who was specifically of great help with this edition, and whom I thank most warmly. I continue, too, to owe thanks to the correspondents who have continued to write to me over the years, offering specific advice, suggestion, denunciation and encouragement, too numerous though they are to name here. But none of these friends and critics bears any responsibility for what I chose to do with what they told me, and therefore none should be blamed for anything in what I have written; the responsibility for it is wholly my own.
Finally, though the matter is somewhat personal, I feel I must point out that the final stages of my work of revision were carried out in the months since September last, when plans and schedules were thrown awry by a sudden and unanticipated collapse of health which necessitated frequent and disruptive stays in hospital. It must be obvious that this put considerable strain on others than myself. Very obviously, too, one of the most prominent among them is my editor at Penguin, Simon Winder. At a very difficult time, he continued to show me great patience and to offer encouragement as he has always done. I find it hard to express my appreciation
of and gratitude for his calmness and helpfulness. I owe him especial thanks.
Over those same months, though, more than to anyone else I owe thanks to my family, for the care they offered me, and the love with which they supported me, my children sometimes making long and transoceanic journeys to see me. But in my family, I must single out above all my wife, to whom earlier editions of this book have, in principle, been dedicated. This one is more than ever for her. To the encouragement, advice, judgement and taste she has always made available to me, I must now also recognize that the nearly forty years of devotion she has shown to me and to our children has made possible my own career. Now she has added to her previous tasks those of a full-time nurse. There is no one to whom I owe more and I hope she can find in my offering of this book to her some small evidence of how completely I recognize that.
Timwood, March 2002
Following John Roberts’ death, I was approached by Penguin Books with the author’s family’s approval to attempt an updating of the text in the light of events since 2001. I did this by revising and extending Book Eight so that it covers both long-term trends and specific developments that have become apparent to historians since the opening of the new millennium. The rest of the text for the Fifth Edition remains as completed by John Roberts before his death.
Professor O. A. Westad, July 2007
BOOK ONE
Before History – Beginnings
When does History begin? It is tempting to reply ‘In the beginning’, but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to be unhelpful. As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. We can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of vertebrates, or even to the photosynthetic cells and other basic structures which lie at the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet and even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not ‘history’.