After disastrous defeat in Abyssinia in 1896 and a dangerous collision between the government and the governed, especially in Milan, in 1898, with the turn of the century Italy entered into a period of conciliation and prosperity. When in 1900 King Umberto was murdered by an anarchist in revenge for the civilian casualties of 1898, his successor, Victor Emmanuel III seemed able to turn over a new leaf. In February 1901 the enlightened radical, Zanardelli, was appointed Prime Minister: his right hand was Giovanni Giolitti as Minister of the Interior. These two men were the first Italians in authority to show understanding for Italy's new social problems. The king of Italy had a less thorough control of government than the emperors of Germany and Austria, and men like Zanardelli and Giolitti played up the powers of parliament—they were deputies and depended upon a parliamentary majority.

In the preceding decade, in spite of the lack of coal and iron, the industrialisation of northern Italy on a modern scale had begun. Milan had become a great industrial centre as well as Italy's financial and commercial capital. In 1899 the FIAT car factory was founded at Turin, whose life was transformed by this. The port of Genoa had been developed by the Ansaldo concern. Population increased quickly in evil conditions. Industrial profit was monopolised by the rich, who were absurdly favoured by the fiscal system. Although the franchise had been slightly extended since the foundation of the kingdom, only the better-off classes elected the deputies to the Chamber.

On 2 and 3 April 1559 at Cateau-Cambrésis the powers of western Europe once more agreed to make peace. The settlement then achieved after prolonged manœuvres and hesitations was destined to find its place among the decisive treaties in European history. Historians have accepted it as such, confirming its importance with that fanfare of trumpets so often reserved for the great acts of peace-making which check the persistent quarrelling in Europe. And they have done so with good reason.

In the first place, this great political event marked a turning-point. Although Charles V had died the year before, on 21 September 1558, the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was the effective closure to his dramatic reign. With the accession of Philip II to power and majesty, a new epoch opened, certainly not less dramatic but of a different and harsher texture. It seemed as if an outdated style of empire, largely medieval in character and justifiable as such, maintained by imponderable and time-honoured traditions, was being directed by a more realistic and oppressive hand, henceforth devoid of political raison d'être and hesitant to show its true purpose. Such was the political importance of the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Can we assume that its economic importance was just as great?

Certainly the coincidence was more than slight. The peace allowed the international economy to recover its strength, and this brought considerable benefit. As the major conflict between France and the Habsburgs did not officially return to open warfare until 17 January 1595, almost half a century later, the economic activity of western Europe enjoyed a period of prolonged ease and recuperation. On this occasion, as often happens withthe disbanding of armies, there were the pleasures of peace: the wines of the south once more found their way northwards in regular abundance.

‘They are wretched Tridentines everywhere.’ Thus Hurrell Froude, in one of his epigrammatic and often contradictory judgements, described the Roman Catholic church of the early nineteenth century. How true is the implication that the Council of Trent created modern Roman Catholicism? In one sense the conclusion is inescapable. The fact that after Trent closed in 1563 the Roman church summoned no further general councils until 1869 tells its own story. In the three hundred years between there was much development. Doctrinal disputes evoked papal condemnations of certain types of theology. Although the canon law, destined to be codified in 1918, was not fundamentally changed, yet the development of the supervisory powers of the papal curia by means of the Roman congregations was a post-Tridentine innovation. Missionary work in and far beyond Europe vastly increased the area of Roman Catholic influence. Yet no comprehensive review or reform of Catholic teaching and practice comparable to that effected by Trent was attempted until the Second Vatican Council of our own day—for the First Vatican Council of 1869–70 was limited in its aims and in any case was cut short. Trent, then, was certainly formative. Was it innovatory? It is far too easy to overlook the extent to which it merely codified and defined medieval teaching and practice. On the doctrinal side this is very apparent, and even the disciplinary reforms, which seemed to many at the time revolutionary and for that reason aroused the suspicion of Catholic states jealous of their lucrative control over ecclesiastical institutions, were often in essence attempts to restore old principles, such as the episcopal control of the lower clergy and religious, so much undermined by medieval exemptions and privileges.

On completion of their seizure of power in Russia's two capital cities, in November 1917, Lenin and his associates found themselves faced with two outstanding problems, both dangerously urgent. One was the need for consolidating and extending to the remainder of the country the power they now so tenuously held in the great urban centres. The other was the need for a clarification of the relationship of the new revolutionary Russia to the world war, then at the apex of its intensity. Russia was, after all, a belligerent; hostilities were still in progress; the situation could brook no delay.

The political grouping on which Lenin based his power—the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party—could scarcely have numbered at that time much more than 70,000 members in a country of some 160 million. This tiny following was concentrated largely in the great cities and a few outlying industrial communities. Although they had by this time gained control of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, the Bolsheviki could not claim a majority even within the socialist component of the Russian political spectrum as a whole; and this component embraced only about half of the country's voting population. In the ranks of organised labour, in particular, their support was small, though increasing. In extensive outlying regions, such as the Caucasus and Siberia, they had only the merest smattering of followers.

The revolution of 1917 broke out in the middle of the first world war, in which Russia, although belonging to an eventually victorious coalition of powers, suffered the heaviest defeats. The revolution may therefore appear to have been merely the consequence of military collapse. Yet the war only accelerated a process which had for decades been sapping the old order and which had more than once been intensified by military defeat. Tsardom tried to overcome the consequences of its failure in the Crimean War by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 was immediately followed by an annus mirabilis of revolution. After the military disasters of 1915–16 the movement started again from the points at which it had come to a standstill in 1905: the December rising of the workers of Moscow had been the last word of the revolution in 1905; its first word in 1917 was the armed rising in St Petersburg. The most significant institution created by the revolution of 1905 had been the ‘council of workers' deputies’ or the soviet of St Petersburg. After an interval of twelve years, in the first days of the new upheaval, the same institution sprang into life again to become the main focus of the drama that was now to unfold.

When the events of 1917 are compared with the great French revolution or the English puritan revolution, one is struck by the fact that conflicts and controversies which, in those earlier revolutions, it took years to resolve were all compressed and settled within the first week of the upheaval in Russia.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the countries of the Far East and the Pacific were regarded by the West from the standpoint of imperialism. Economically, they were important to it as sources of raw materials, fields of investment, and markets for manufactured goods. Politically, their relations with Western powers were conducted on terms of inequality. Some countries—especially China—had been compelled to grant the powers concessions in relation to trade and investment and jurisdiction in respect of the latters' nationals residing within their boundaries. Others had become colonies or protectorates. Even Australia, which became a federal Commonwealth in 1901, and New Zealand were not exceptions to the general situation. As high-income countries with predominantly European populations, they occupied advantageous positions within the framework of imperialism; but, though they possessed responsible government, they were subject to British control of their external relations. Japan alone had reached a stage at which the Western powers were beginning to treat her as a full member of the community of nations.

The international standing of Japan had been attained over a remarkably short period. Till the 1850s the country had maintained, for over two hundred years, a policy of seclusion mitigated only by limited contacts with the Chinese and the Dutch. But, within less than fifty years of its enforced entry into treaty relations with the Western powers, it had carried through a programme of political modernisation unequalled elsewhere in Asia. This adaptation to the circumstances of the new age was facilitated by the characteristics of Japanese social and political structure.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the creation of modern art, that is, a revolutionary art which broke with traditional ideas of representation; and since the public now looked at nature with eyes conditioned by photography, the gap between artist and public widened. Modern art grew out of impressionism and therefore began in Paris where impressionism had matured; but when impressionism was shown on a large scale at the Paris World Fair of 1900 it became international, and modern movements began to develop in Germany, Italy and Russia while the art of Paris itself became cosmopolitan. In France orthodox painting continued to be organised round the annual Salon from which the jury excluded all advanced work, so that the avant-garde had been forced to organise on its own, setting up first ad hoc impressionist exhibitions, then in 1884 the Salon des Independents and in 1903 the Salon d'Automne. So art was organised into conservatives and radicals like contemporary politics.

In 1900 two movements were dominant—divisionism and symbolism. The divisionists following Seurat tried to make impressionism scientific by painting in complementary colour dots which fused at a short distance. The symbolists followed Gauguin into rejecting science for poetry; they neither imitated nor analysed but sought a pictorial equivalent for nature in broad colour zones closed by decorative lines. During the next ten years three other artists came to be understood: Van Gogh, whose fierce colour and tempestuous brush stroke keyed painting to the expression of emotion; Cézanne, who, struggling to realise his sensations before a motive by modulating small colour planes, combined the freshness of impressionism with the solidity of a new classic structure; and the Douanier Rousseau, whose naive realism invested objects with an aura of wonder.

As the nineteenth century drew to its end, the mechanism and pattern of Nature seemed to have been revealed to the scientist in broad outline; and his researches appeared to some degree, especially in the physical sciences, to have assumed the form of investigations into a structure that was more or less known and established by the work of those who had gone before him. Scientific thought had already undergone three great changes that are properly described as revolutions, since they were no mere changes of emphasis but fundamental changes in outlook. They had all been effected in modern times and in western Europe. The seventeenth century had seen the revolution in mechanics and the foundation of modern physics, begun by Galileo and completed by Newton and marked particularly by the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687; in the eighteenth century there came the revolution in chemistry, brought about by Lavoisier's classic experiments and associated, so far as such events may be dated, with the publication of his Traité élémentaire de chimie in 1789, a date which still conveniently marks the foundation of modern chemistry; the revolution in biology was more recent, introduced by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Biology had not kept pace with the physical sciences, but it too now seemed at last to have set out on its modern road; and the scientific mind appeared to be concerned at this period with what may be described in general terms as an increasingly refined anatomy of nature.

The Ottoman empire had attained under Sulaimān the Magnificent (1520–66) the summit of its power and splendour. Now, during the period that followed his death, strains and stresses originating both within and without the empire gave rise to notable changes in the structure of the Ottoman state. The general trend of events after 1566 cannot be understood, therefore, without reference to some at least of the essential characteristics of the Ottoman regime as it was in the reign of Sultan Sulaimān.

The household of the sultan was far more than a domestic organisation designed to meet the private and personal needs of the monarch. It included also much more than the apparatus and adornments of an imperial court. The household embraced within itself the personnel of the central administration and of the great executive offices of state; of the higher ranks in the provincial administration; and also of the armed forces of the central régime—the Janissaries, the mounted regiments of the household (sometimes known as the Sipāhīs of the Porte) and the various specialist corps such as artillerists and engineers. The numerous personnel of this household had in general the status of ghulām (pl. ghilmān), a term better interpreted as ‘man of the sultan’ than as ‘slave’, since it in no wise implied, as the English word ‘slave’ might suggest, a position of inferiority, but was on the contrary a mark of privilege and prestige within the state. A basic principle observed in recruitment to the household was the exclusion of Muslim Turkish subjects of the sultan from the ranks of the ghilmān.

At first sight it might seem that the obvious approach to Indian history from 1905 to 1947 would be the study of the development and triumph of the nationalist movement with its corollary of partition. Yet a little thought must modify this view. Indian nationalism itself, though much influenced by Western ideals and examples, had taken root in Indian soil to produce much which was unique in itself. Further, the Indian nationalist dialogue with the West had an economic aspect also; indeed, in the long run this proved to be one of its most potent ingredients. One cannot isolate political nationalism from economic issues, or both from the structure of Indian society. And here we find a conflict of ideas, values and behaviour patterns which suggest a movement in progress far deeper and more complex than political programmes or even economic changes. In fact what the sanguine reformers of the reform era had looked for in vain was beginning to materialise. Indian society had gone beyond the acceptance of this or that from the West from motives of duress or convenience; it was beginning to wish to integrate the new with the old; it was beginning to question some of the basic presuppositions on which it was itself based. A survey of the period must therefore be concerned not only with political and economic issues only but also with ‘cultural’ ones; not only with the signposts of westernisation, but with the evidence of assimilation and modification.

Until late in the sixteenth century, over most of Asia, except the Spanish Philippines, the only Europeans wielding military and political power and engaged in corporate commercial activity were the Portuguese. Their officials, troops, settlers and traders, and the clergy working under the patronage of the Portuguese crown, were Europe's only representatives in wide areas from east Africa to China. Their eastern empire, the Estado da India, an established and familiar part of the Asian scene, thus represented the first solution to the problems of organising European enterprise in a very distant East. The problems were manifold: problems of management, the creation at home and overseas of instruments of control effective over unprecedented distances, technical problems of navigation, supply and defence, the political problem of relationships with powerful, aggressive, though often mutually hostile, Asian powers, the commercial problems of attempting to secure a monopoly in the spice trade and of securing the purchasing power to sustain trade when Europe had few products suited to eastern markets, and the moral problem of combining politics and trade with Christian duty. The pioneering solutions offered were not all equally effective, though some were taken over by other European powers in Asia, but all are interesting.

The original impulse to expand overseas had come from the Crown, and the Estado da India remained a royal enterprise throughout the sixteenth century. The main purpose was commercial, to tap Asian trade directly and secure the middleman's profits for the crown.

The forty years before the second world war brought far-reaching changes in the ways of life and the standards of living of European peoples. These changes were wrought by historical forces and events which had diverse effects in different countries. When the twentieth century began Europe already fell into three fairly well-defined regions. Europe east of the Elbe remained essentially a peasant Europe, where industrialisation had spread slowly for some fifty years and where national consciousness had developed speedily, often on a linguistic, family or racial basis. Economically and socially eastern Europe lagged well behind most countries west of the Elbe. These, however, fell into two categories. The nations of the north and west—Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland—had pressed furthest with industrialisation and with other economic developments which usually accompanied it. They experienced urbanisation, capital accumulation and credit organisation, foreign trade, and higher general standards of living. Areas of the south and south-west—Spain, Portugal, southern Italy and southern Ireland—belonged geographically (and in certain respects historically) to the west, but in economic and social underdevelopment they more closely resembled the countries of the east. Spain and Portugal had won and lost large imperial possessions in the New World: the residue of past glories remained a drag on their modern development.

There were, inevitably, important exceptions to this tripartite division. Some of Austria was almost as industrialised as Germany, whilst parts of south-west France were as underdeveloped as southern Italy. But the three regions preserved broad characteristic differences which greatly affected the impact of twentieth-century changes on their social life. In the general balance of forces in the continent Germany was the pivot on which in their relations with one another the three regions turned.

The treaties of Cateau-Cambrésis signed at the bishop's château on the outskirts of Cambrai on 2 and 3 April 1559 marked the abrupt end of one era of European diplomacy and the beginning of another. The signatories were the delegates of the three major Atlantic powers, Spain, France and England. The main issue that was settled was the one that had dominated European power politics since 1494: who was to be paramount in Italy? And it was symptomatic of the new times that the fate of Italy was finally decided around a conference table at which sat not one Italian negotiator, not even a representative of the pope, while the ambassadors and agents of vitally interested parties, Florence and Mantua and the Republic of St Mark's, scrounged for crumbs of information on the fringes of the court at Brussels seventy miles away. Along with the pope and the Italian powers the potentate until recently most concerned about the fate of Italy had been the Holy Roman Emperor, but there was no representative of the empire at the conference either, not even though the next most important question on the agenda was the disposition of the three cities of Metz, Toul and Verdun. With the transfer of the imperial title to the cadet branch of the house of Habsburg, the emperor assumed the role of warden of the eastern marches, vigilant on the Danube, but for the next seventy years intervening only occasionally and feebly in western affairs.

The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 marked a pause for breath in German affairs, with the failure of the Emperor Charles V either to establish an effective monarchy in the empire or to suppress the Lutheran heresy. Rather than be a party to the registration of the double defeat, Charles relinquished the authority to promulgate the legislation implementing the peace to his brother Ferdinand, the first of a line of rulers whose authority was to endure on the eastern marches of Germany for some three and a half centuries. The basis of Ferdinand's power lay in the lands that had been ceded to him and his descendants by his brother: the Austrian archduchy proper with its double set of institutions ‘above and below the Enns’, the various Alpine provinces extending from Tyrol and Vorarlberg to Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and the scattered remnants of the ancient Habsburg patrimony in Swabia and along the upper Rhine. In addition, Ferdinand by his marriage to the heiress of the Jagiellons had acquired a claim to the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary with their dependencies, a claim subsequently fortified by a show of election by the parliaments of the two kingdoms, though there was some opposition in Bohemia and a great deal in Hungary. The possessions over which he directly asserted his sway thus extended impressively over much of central Europe, from Alsace to the Carpathians, from Silesia and Lusatia in the north German plain southwards to the Adriatic.

During the first years of the century, political rather than social problems prevailed. Political democracy could only be brought about by the granting of universal suffrage, by fortifying the parliamentary régime and by the transfer of power wholly into the hands of the middle class. It was over principles such as these that the two sections of the ruling class did battle—the conservative elements and the liberal elements, however they called themselves (the Liberal party in Great Britain and Belgium, the Radical party in France). The Liberals were supported by the working-class parties (Labour and Socialist), which were as yet of insufficient size to do more than assist in the struggle. With the gradual fulfilling of the Liberal programme and the resolving of fundamental problems of a political character, the nature of the collaboration between the Liberals and the Socialists was to become more and more uneasy. The Socialists, having grown impatient of promises and rights devoid of any concrete value, soon demanded structural reforms which their erstwhile allies were to refuse.

In 1899 a particularly serious crisis, the Dreyfus affair, had shaken France. The Republic had seen the army, the church and all those who sought a return to the past rise against her, and attack her with far greater violence than ever they had in the days of Boulangisme. The republicans, from the progressives—now become the Alliance Democratique—to the Socialists, joined forces to support the Government for the Defence of the Republic formed by Waldeck-Rousseau, which included, standing symbolically shoulder to shoulder, a Socialist, A. Millerand, and General de Gallifet, one of the sabreurs from the days of the Commune.

The most vocal opinion in Austria-Hungary, and more particularly in Germany, believed in the early years of the war that German domination over the Danube valley, all Poland (with some regional autonomy perhaps), the Baltic provinces and probably the fertile Ukraine would complete the creation of a Great-German world power. The Russian revolutions in 1917 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 only confirmed these beliefs although the price paid for the war by the civilian populations in food shortages was already exorbitant and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary was proceeding. From 1916 onwards the kaiser had practically abdicated in favour of the military leaders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who represented the chauvinism of the old ruling class. The parties in the Reichstag, however, who were opposed to this, gathered hidden strength. Centre, Socialists and Progressives pressed for franchise reform in Prussia if public morale were to hold, and at the same time worked for peace without annexations; in July 1917 a deputy of the Centre party called Erzberger brought forward a Peace Resolution in these terms which was passed. The Russian military collapse encouraged the arrogance of the German ruling class, while the Russian revolutions added to the anxieties of the Austrian government since they profoundly disturbed all the Slav populations. They followed, moreover, quickly upon the death of the old emperor in November 1916, who had left the young and inexperienced Charles to struggle with his heritage, with no august side-whiskers to help him.

A recent historian, Alain Dufour, has written of ‘The Myth of Geneva’, by which he means the idea held by Calvinists of Geneva as the Holy City: the mirror and model of true religion and true piety, as the Englishman, William Whittingham, described it; ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles’, in the famous phrase of John Knox, the Scot. Certainly it was in this sense a myth which inspired Calvinists everywhere. To them Geneva was the Protestant Rome, and indeed it meant more to them in one sense than Rome did to Catholics, since, however firmly he might believe in the aura of the see of Peter, the candid Catholic had to admit the scandals of Rome as a city even after the Catholic Reformation had taken effect, whereas Geneva claimed, with some justification, that it presented a model of morality and piety as well as of pure doctrine. Nevertheless, as Dufour points out, there was also a counter-myth of Geneva as the throne of error and narrow heartless discipline which influenced Catholics and also those Protestants who were disgusted by the burning of Servetus in 1553, resented the restriction of evangelical freedom by the Genevan discipline, or thought of the lakeside city as the home of sedition where doctrines dangerous to civil obedience were taught.

There was a core of solid fact behind the myth. For Geneva was a religious centre to a degree which Luther's Wittenberg and Zwingli's and Bullinger's Zurich never became, influential as they were. Not only was Geneva the home of a systematic Protestant theology embodied in Calvin's Institutes, and of a church organisation and discipline increasingly thought of as what Calvin claimed them to be, the pattern set out in the New Testament and the primitive church.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, all the major European states could be characterised by their respect for the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and a social order founded on the predominance of a property-owning class composed of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. This was especially true of northern and western Europe; with the exception of republican France, the pattern of government was that of a constitutional monarchy supported by an electoral system based on property qualifications which usually excluded any popular elements from the elected assemblies. Political struggles were restricted to the two sections—conservative and liberal—of the ruling class—but neither of them ever thought of modifying the traditional structure of society in any way. Even socialism, still in its infancy, was not as yet strong enough to have any real influence on the pattern of society.

In the course of the following fifty years, however, the structure of society was to be shaken to its very foundations, partly because of the increase in population (although the rate of increase was slower here than elsewhere), but chiefly because of the rise of industry. This was to cause an upheaval in the social and professional distribution of the whole population, and, by altering the balance of power between the different classes of society, was to bring about a complete transformation of that society's institutions and mental attitudes. Two world wars and an economic crisis of unprecedented magnitude were to follow and in their turn speed up the rhythm of these transformations.