The Covenant of the League of Nations formed Part I of each of the treaties of peace concluded after the first world war, and, when the first of these, the Treaty of Versailles, entered into force on 10 January 1920, the League began to exist. The incorporation of the Covenant in the treaties was a point on which President Wilson had strongly insisted at the peace conference; he looked to the League as a means whereby injustices and imperfections in the treaties would at some future time be corrected, and he probably foresaw that if the making of the League were postponed until after the treaties came into force there would almost certainly be no League at all. For the League this course had both disadvantages and advantages. On the one hand it led to the League's sharing in the unpopularity which assailed the peace treaties, for it could be represented by hostile or ignorant critics as merely an instrument which the victors had devised in order to rivet on the vanquished the injustices of the settlement. On the other hand the treaties had many provisions to which effect could only be given by a continuing organisation such as the League was intended to be, and by using the League for this purpose they ensured that it would at once be called on to play a part in great affairs and not be relegated to the obscurity to which, as Wilson had reason to suspect, some of his colleagues would have liked to consign it.

By the end of 1930 the precarious international order established at Versailles had begun to totter and crumble. In western Europe, the German Foreign Minister Stresemann's successors were being driven by unemployment and the rocketing growth of the Nazi party to abandon his policy of gradual revision of Versailles for a policy of adventurism from weakness. In south-east Europe and the Mediterranean, Franco-Italian amity was breaking on France's refusal to consider the Italian position on disarmament and in the Balkans. In eastern Europe, the Soviet drive for collectivisation had weakened the vital link with Germany without providing the Soviets with any alternative way out of their isolation. And in the Pacific, by the terms of the London Naval treaty of 1930, Britain and the United States had driven the extreme Japanese nationalists in the army and elsewhere to plot external adventure against China in Manchuria and internal revolution as the only alternatives to what they saw as national humiliation.

These largely political issues were linked and made more extreme by the steady spread of the economic crisis. Europe's recovery after the war and the disastrous German inflation of 1923 rested on a precarious but little-understood system of international trade which, being rigidly anchored to gold, had inadequate reserves of liquidity and was burdened with the extra task of handling the immense transfers of funds involved in the payment of reparations by Germany to the victors and of war-debts by the victor countries to the United States.

The truce with the Porte and the conquest of Portugal marked a turning-point in Spanish policy. The greatest danger to Spain was no longer in the Mediterranean but in the Atlantic. France and England were supporting her enemies in the Netherlands and in Portugal. Drake and the English pirates were wickedly and illegally disrupting Spanish trade with her colonies and robbing the king and his subjects. The pope, Cardinal Granvelle and Philip's Spanish advisers were pressing for a more aggressive policy. Gradually, the king himself became convinced that the defence, both of his own interests and of the church, demanded more active Spanish intervention in western Europe.

The immediate occasion for the change in Spanish policy was the death of the duke of Anjou and of the prince of Orange (1584). Even before Anjou's death, the United Provinces (i.e. the members of the Union of Utrecht) had once more approached both Henry III and Elizabeth I with offers of the sovereignty over the Netherlands. Henry III again refused. William's death and the fall of Antwerp made help urgent if the Union was to be saved. On 20 August 1585 Elizabeth therefore, while likewise refusing the sovereignty, agreed to send five thousand troops, under the command of the earl of Leicester, to the Netherlands. Leicester and two other Englishmen were to have seats in the Council of State. Brill and Flushing, commanding the estuaries of the Meuse and the Scheldt, were handed over to the English as bases and as security for the repayment of the English government's expenses. Elizabeth had driven a hard bargain and had still not yet broken completely with Spain. But, for the first time, she was committed to fight Philip II openly and, as it turned out, committed more heavily than she had bargained for.

In 1895 Jude the Obscure was published, Hardy's last, and perhaps his greatest, novel. It was promptly reviled by a majority of reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and burnt by a bishop, ‘probably in his despair’, Hardy suggested later, ‘at not being able to burn me’; by so much had progress eroded the fervours of faith. The only long-term effect on the author, as Hardy also revealed, was that of ‘completely curing’ him ‘of further interest in novel writing’. Fortunately it did not also cure him of the habit of poetry; and, meanwhile, Jude seems an excellent place to start.

In certain obvious ways, it is very modern; its treatment of human sexuality is more frank, if not necessarily more realistic, than one finds in any previous important English novel. The claims for naturalism made by Flaubert, Zola, Ibsen and other European writers were at last influencing the British tradition, as they might have done much earlier had it not been for the excessive public prudery of Victorian taste. But, like nearly all major novels, Jude is not primarily naturalistic. Its total impact has more the force of myth. To Hardy, as to many other progressive Victorians, modern life had come to seem a tragic affair. Jude and Sue pursue the romantic quest for self-fulfilment, but the very nature of things conspires against them. Certain of the sufferings arise, it is true, from social causes that might be alleviated; though Jude himself is rejected in his search for education, no laws of nature decree this fate.

The earlier half of the sixteenth century saw the publication of important and even revolutionary new works in various fields—notably the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium of Copernicus and the De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Vesalius, both published coincidentally in 1543—and the introduction of new ideas and methods in other fields besides astronomy and anatomy. The work of Paracelsus and Fernel in medicine, of Belon and Rondelet in zoology, of Carden and Tartaglia in mathematics, of Nuñez, Oronce Finé and Gemma Frisius in navigation and cartography, was all complete by mid-century. The major work of Kepler, Galileo and Harvey was not begun until 1610 or later. The men of the later sixteenth century were consolidators and continuers rather than innovators. With the exception of Tycho Brahe and William Gilbert there are few great names or startling ideas; yet it was in this period that the men who were to make the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century grew to manhood and it was by the scientists and scientific literature of this age that they were trained and prepared for innovation. Fabricius of Aquapendente, a respectably second-class scientist himself, has more often been remembered as the teacher of Harvey than for his own accomplishments. Yet, though the scientists of the later sixteenth century were in general of no very original turn of mind, they had an important role to play: they provided a necessary and salutary link between the respect for authority which prompted the innovations of the earlier sixteenth century and the consciousness of novelty that prompted the innovations of the seventeenth century.

After the death of Michelangelo sculpture declined, for art turned to effects of light and space which favoured painting. This phase reached a climax with impressionism, and with its exhaustion painting returned to object and picture plane and sculpture recovered. Its modern history is the story of that recovery, largely through movements launched by painters.

It began with Rodin, who in himself summed up romanticism, realism and impressionism, but who joined his use of these to a fresh understanding of Michelangelo, from whom he learned something purely sculptural—the expression of movement through tactile values. Like Degas, he never forgot inner muscular tension even while his surfaces expressed the play of light; but unlike Degas he preserved not only the Renaissance technique but its full heroic humanism, and this, while it added to his stature, made him the culmination of an old rather than the primitive of a new tradition.

Maillol led a reaction to neo-classicism, the only movement Rodin had not absorbed. His re-working of Greek sculpture was in terms of nature, so that his ‘Chained Action’ (1905) combines generalised and static volumes with the animality of Courbet, but his revival of humanism kept Maillol also within the nineteenth century.

German expressionism was in sculpture a classic heresy, so that Lehmbruck, its most talented exponent, preserved Maillol's clarity even through elongated and emotive forms.

France had adopted the principle of universal suffrage in 1848, but in Great Britain, although the Act of 1884 had increased the number of voters from four to five millions, the franchise was not universal, and plural voting was possible for persons owning houses or premises in several constituencies. In Sweden three-quarters of the citizens were denied the right to vote, and in Holland a property qualification was still in force, although it was reduced from ten florins to one in 1896; Belgium introduced a system of plural voting in 1893, whereby supplementary voting rights were granted to heads of families, citizens owning property worth 2,000 francs or providing an income of 100 francs, and those who had reached a certain level of education. But the proportion of voters to the population as a whole remained generally low: in France, 26·6 per cent (1898), in Belgium, 22 per cent (1900), in Holland, 11·9 per cent (1900), in Norway, 18·6 per cent (1900) and, in Sweden, 7·4 per cent (1902).

The bicameral system was in operation everywhere, but this system was always tempered by the extensive powers of the upper Chamber, drawn from a much narrower sector of the population than the lower Chamber, and also by the influence—considerable but highly variable—that still remained in the hands of the head of state.

The parliamentary system was as yet securely established only in a small number of nations: in Norway since 1880, in Denmark since 1901, and in Great Britain—a model admired by liberals everywhere, where the queen always chose as her Prime Minister the leader of the majority party.

The ‘first world war’ is a misnomer. Its causes were no more world-wide than its battlefields. The national antagonisms which exploded in it were European, and the alignment of the belligerent powers inside and outside Europe did not correspond to the lines of real cleavage between either the imperial interests of European powers or extra-European national ambitions. As world-wide causes have been assigned to the war, so also have causes comparatively remote in time. In each case the enlargement in retrospect of its true limits above all reflects the magnitude of the experience for contemporaries. But it accords as well with the preoccupations of various doctrinaire schools of international and national politics and history which have helped form popular interpretations of the war. The dogma, for instance, that war at this stage of history must express ‘imperialist contradictions’—one not confined to Marxists—required that the war should be treated as global, while the doctrine current in post-war Europe that it was the necessary result of German authoritarian militarism required that the origins of the war should be traced back to the foundation of the second German empire.

Most schools of interpretation, however, accept a distinction between remote and immediate origins of the war of 1914 and to most a dividing line in 1912 makes sense, if not for all the same reasons. Then began the crucial developments in two of the three main causes of the crisis of July 1914, or at least of the final order of battle, the alliance system and Balkan nationalism—the third being Anglo-German naval rivalry.

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.