It was rather bold of Furnivall, less than a decade after the event, to announce that the Depression had brough to an end the history of European overseas expansion over almost half a millennium. Against a background of renewed disorder in the international economy, the current historiography seems to be taking this bold suggestion fairly seriously. The 1930s slump is now the accepted starting point for studies of the relations between the west and the rest in the postcolonial era.

The last major bastions of dynastic rule exist among the Muslim states of the Middle East. In the last thirty years, as they have emerged from under the “protective” umbrella of European domination, the rulers of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States have attempted to maintain their personal control while coping with problems, on the one hand of unstable external conditions, and on the other of the pursuit of economic and administrative modernization. Their successes and, more recently, their failures, have held the attention of the world. In some ways their predicament represents a more acute aspect of the problem confronting some of the Indian princes in the 1930s when, as British dominance in the subcontinent was increasingly challenged by the Indian National Congress, they attempted to lead their states on the first halting steps towards modernity.

Americans who visited the young Soviet republic during the first dozen or so years of its existence were astonished at the degree of interest, fascination, respect, and even liking that their hosts displayed for them and the United States. “Ours is the only important Government which refuses to grant Russia political recognition,” one of them wrote, “and yet it is our country that Russia emulates and admires.” Another reported that “the word for industrialization is Americanization, and the passion to Ford-ize the Soviet Union is even stronger than the passion to communize it.”

When one nation looks to another as an example for social and economic change, as the Soviet Union did to certain aspects of American experience for a time after 1917, the results are likely to reveal much about the borrower nation—its dominant values as well as its economy and social structure. The role which foreign, and particularly American, technology and industrial expertise played in the Soviet economy during the interwar period is still inadequately understood and is a subject of some controversy, with implications not only for an understanding of Soviet history and society but for the study of international technology transfers. (The term technology will be used here not only in the sense of “machinery” and processes, but in the broader sense of Simon Kuznets's phrase, “stock of knowledge,” that is, the knowledge of techniques of production, including economic organization.) Such transfers, particularly those between economically advanced and less-developed countries, have played an important but as yet inadequately studied role in modern history.

Economists have increasingly recognized that one of the main sources of economic development is technological change. Since it is much easier to borrow than to invent new technology, an important source of technological change has been the diffusion of new technology from its place of origin to subsequent users. When such diffusion involves movement between two countries, it is usually referred to as technology transfer.

Historians have long recognized that the large body of periodical literature surviving from the eighteenth century, along with the smaller amount preserved from the seventeenth century, is an important source of insight into the early development of modern society in the West. Newspapers and other periodicals—magazines, reviews, and a miscellany of other publications difficult to characterize precisely—provided eighteenth-century readers with fundamental information about their world and with news of the ways in which it was changing. It is not surprising that this voluminous printed record also yields evidence to those seeking to understand that world from the vantage point of a subsequent era.

Eugène Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris created a stir when it appeared in 1842–43 in serial form in the daily Journal des Débats and in ten one-volume installments, plus a number of truncated and pirated editions. This rambling episodic work comprises over a dozen melodramas held together mainly by the direct or indirect involvement in them of the hero-savior Rudolph Grand Duke of Gerolstein, the miserly notary and arch villain Jacques Ferrand, the vulnerable sullied virgin Fleur-de-Marie, and the well-meaning aristocratic lady Clemence Marquise d'Harville. Longer than most serial novels, Les Mystères maintains its readers' interest with lurid exposés of Paris low life, heart-rending descriptions of the sufferings of the deserving poor, diabolical intrigues, knick-of-time rescues, and scenes of sex and violence at all social levels. Periodically the author interrupts his narrative with moralizing commentaries and proposals for social reform. Contemporary observers claimed that everyone from duchesses to house porters read Les Mystères de Paris for its sensationalism. It has also been argued that the book's working-class readers wrote so many letters to Sue urging him to stress the high moral qualities of his fictional workers—epitomized by the craftsman Jérome Morel—that their “collective constraint” transformed it from a book about the “dangerous” classes into a book about the laboring classes, and converted the author himself into a champion of their cause.