The Victorians [antikvár]

Preface The Victorians are still with us. This is not a whimsical statement, intended to suggest that the shades of the Prince Consort or Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Dan Leno are still to be discovered floating in the night air if we empathize sufficiently with their memory or purpose. Rather, the Victorians are still with us because the world they created is still here, though changed. Theirs was the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world. Before them major industrialization was confined to a few towns in Britain. After them, the whole world was covered with railways and factories; and the unstoppable rise and spread of technology would continue into the age of Silicon Valley. Before them, the world was a small world of nation states. East was East and West was West. Large tracts of the world, especially in Africa, were unmapped. After them, the 'Dark Continent' had been penetrated by European powers: the destiny of Africa had changed; India, parcelled out in the eighteenth century between the East India Company and its own native princes, had become the linchpin of a huge British Empire - stretching throughout Asia, Australasia, Canada. Before the Victorians, democracy was the dream of a few political theorists. After them, it became the inevitable political goal towards which all Europeans and subsequently the rest of the world strove. The Victorian era felt like a time of peace for almost everyone in Britain. Yet for the planet as a whole, because of the Victorians, it was in fact a time of almost perpetual minor warfare. Old empires and nations, most notably the Ottoman Empire, crumbled before the technological and economic giants of modern Europe, most notably France, Germany and Britain. Thereafter, their struggle for dominance and mastery led very nearly to their mutual destruction in two world wars during the twentieth century. And yet, when the dust and rubble of battle had subsided, when the twentieth-century experiments in European dictatorship and Marxist communism had been tried and discarded, when the Berlin Wall had been demolished and a new world order proclaimed with the United States as the dominant superpower, the Victorian world, with its problems, was still there. The Balkans were still the area of Europe where trouble could flare into conflict and