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CHAPTER I - Introductory survey: On the limits of modern history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
C. L. Mowat
Edited by
C. L. Mowat
C. L. Mowat
Affiliation:
University College of North Wales, Bangor
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Summary

When Lord Acton was planning The Cambridge Modern History in 1896 he wrote of the venture:

It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath… Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.

Acton projected the History as a work of universal history, ‘distinct from the combined history of all countries’.

It moves in a succession to which the nations are subordinate. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.

Few historians today have Acton's confidence that universal history or ultimate history can yet be written. Indeed, Sir George Clark, in his ‘General Introduction’ to the New Cambridge Modern History, disclaimed for historians of his generation the belief that it would be possible to write ‘definitive history’. ‘This new issue of the Cambridge Modern History has been planned neither as a stepping-stone to definitive history, nor as an abstract or a scale-reduction of all our knowledge of the period, but as a coherent body of judgements true to the facts.’

Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge Modern History , pp. 1 - 9
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1968

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References

Barraclough, Geoffrey, An Introduction to Contemporary History, (London, 1964).Google Scholar
Carr, E. H., What is History?, (Cambridge, 1961).Google Scholar
Hailey, Lord, An African Survey, (rev. ed. Oxford, 1957).Google Scholar
Oliver, R. and Fage, J. D., A Short History of Africa, (London, 1962).Google Scholar
Thomson, David, World History from 1914 to 1950, (Home University Library: Oxford, 1954).Google Scholar

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