An Illustrated History of the Modern World [antikvár]

The Growth of World Civilization We divide history into periods, or 'ages', for our own convenience. An unfortunate effect of imposing labels such as 'The Classical Age' or 'The Modem Era' is that the dividing lines between the periods, arbitrarily chosen, come to look more concrete than they are. The Modem World did not begin at some particular date, not even in one particular century, and the point at which we decide to draw a line to mark that beginning depends on a huge number of variable factors - not least, what do we mean by 'modem'? History is very largely a record of the changes that have taken place in human society since it began. Change is a constant motif, but it is a variable one. In prehistoric times, change was almost nonexistent. For thousands of years human beings lived by hunting and gathering, dependent on nature in a way similar to that of the animals. Changes did occur, at immensely long intervals, but people lived for numberless generations, in the same way as their forbears. The mere notion of change is a very recent development. The first great landmark - often described as the first and most important historical 'revolution' - occurred when people leamed how to grow crops and keep flocks. Its importance lay not merely in economic improvement, but in what followed from that: the ability to settle down and live in permanent settlements, the greater abundance of food leading to specialization of labour, in short the beginning of what we call 'civilization'. The appearance of civilization - in several different regions though not widely separated in time - was not only a hugely important change in itself, it marked the beginning of an acceleration in the rate at which changes happened. At the simplest level, there were people who had time to think, and thus to learn. The acquisition of knowledge is a driving force of change.All the same, by contemporary standards, the pace of change remained very slow. It is sometimes said that the civilization of ancient Egypt remained unchanged for 3000 years, and although that is a very inaccurate comment, it is true that human life over that 3000-year span betrayed less obvious signs of change than those evident since the beginning of the present century. Change is self-generating: the pace of change itself accelerates. A rather grim example is the enormous advance in war-making capacity that occurred between 1939, when cavalry could still be seen among European armies, and 1945, when an entire city could be destroyed by a single bomb. Change requires a motive, in this case the need to defeat the enemy before being defeated oneself. The stronger the motive, the faster the pace of change. Motivation explains the varying rate of change. For long periods, life may continue much as usual, then, for one reason or another (nonmally a whole crop of them), comes a sudden burst of new activities. If it were possible to draw a graph of the rate of change in history, it would not be a steadily ascending line, rather one marked by plateaus (always, however, ascending), with occasional upward leaps, but with the median always growing steeper. One of the most striking of these leaps comes round about 1500, with the period known as the European Renaissance. Though medievalists become understandably restless at such generalizations, the civilization of the Middle Ages, dynamic though it was in many ways, was in little more than 100 years rapidly and unalterably transformed, and a demonstrably different form of civilization established. One of the most important features of that century or so of transformation was maritime discovery. Ocean voyaging was pioneered; the discovery was made that all the seas and oceans of the world are linked, and thus all the continents were brought into contact. In a development that was eventually to prove of the utmost significance, European colonies were founded in the Americas. Hitherto, civilization had continued to exist in several separate locations. There had always been contact between them (in fact the trend of research suggests that such contacts, from the earliest times, were greater than we know), but it was contact of a limited kind. Thus the Chinese practised certain techniques such as silk-making and printing for centuries before they were known in Europe. The discovery of the world and the foundation of colonies in other continents was a European enterprise, more precisely a westem European enterprise. Thrusting, acquisitive, and well-armed, the Europeans found their way to virtually all parts of the globe and penetrated other societies, other civilizations, which were ill-prepared to confront their intrusion. In most of Asia, where civilizations as old or older than Europe's existed, the effects were not at first very great. In Africa and the Americas, later in the Antipodes too, the European impact was devastating. To European technology and European aggression, these societies had no answer. They were overrun, superseded, assimilated, or simply destroyed. The Renaissance thus also marks the beginning of the dominance of the world by Europeans, or by European civilization. This dominance still exists, for although European countries no longer hold pohtical control of others, the aims and ideas of European civilization have become common to virtually all societies, however different from, or indeed antipathetic to, European civilization they may appear. With the Renaissance we amve at the traditional beginning of 'modem' history, the main theme of which is the rise of Europe to world dominance.