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.

All the liberal democracies of north-western Europe, with the exception of Great Britain and neutral Sweden, underwent occupation by the enemy. Alone amongst them to have a government that collaborated with the Germans was France: all the other governments sought refuge in Great Britain and carried on the war as best they could. Everywhere the occupying powers met with stubborn resistance.

Almost the whole of the British people accepted resolutely, from the very outbreak of the war, the entire gamut of those measures which, having been tried out during the Great War, were now reintroduced. Very wide powers were accorded to the government, new ministries and departments were created, but the control exercised by parliament was never interfered with, and the liberty of individual citizens was consequently always upheld. The nation's economic life was very strictly controlled in order to avoid the waste of manpower and materials, as well as to equalise living conditions as much as possible. Universal rationing high taxes on unessential goods, the control of wages and of working conditions—such measures made it possible to maintain national unity in an atmosphere of goodwill and fraternity to a degree unknown during the Great War.

Furthermore the Cabinet formed by Winston Churchill in the darkest days of 1940 included six Labour members of parliament of whom two were members of the War Cabinet; their presence did not lead to the passing of any specifically Socialist legislation, but it was a guarantee that strict control was kept on all the national undertakings including banks and private enterprise.

In the nineteenth century social and industrial revolution required a new architecture. New building types such as railway stations and department stores evolved, and in them new materials like iron and glass made possible unsupported spans and better lighting. But only in temporary or utilitarian structures such as the Crystal Palace, Paddington Train Shed or the Garabit Viaduct could these facts be admitted. Elsewhere, as at the Albert Hall, an engineer's structure was clothed in stone and a period style.

Inspired by Ruskin, William Morris attacked this dishonesty, arguing that the present age should imitate the methods and not the style of the Middle Ages; that it should base art on craft to give it roots in society. He devised a new ornament freshly stylised from plant forms to replace the machine-made and tasteless decoration in which everything was smothered. His own house (built in 1859 by Philip Webb) replaced pomp by domesticity, showed its bricks and structure, and was planned in terms of function rather than of symmetry and facades. Charles Voysey continued this reticence into the 1890s. His homes too had period flavour without period detail, but were lighter and more suburban. Contemporary were the Garden City (city in the country) experiments which made a first attack on the squalor of industrial housing. But the whole Art and Craft movement was flawed by Morris's rejection of the machine which was becoming the central fact of civilisation, so that after 1900 it lost relevance.

In the Europe of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century, the political society of the greatest vitality was that of the German Empire. United within the curious federal framework provided by Bismarck, the Germans displayed different levels of political development, sharp social contrasts and conflicts, and yet a dominant centripetal tendency. The kingdom of Prussia extended from Aachen to Memel, from Flensburg to Kattowitz, right across the map of the new Germany: two-thirds, indeed, of the Germans were technically Prussians, and Prussia embraced the coalfields both of the Rhineland and of Silesia. The Prussian Landtag was elected according to the Three-Class system which gave far more representation, as well as strong administrative influence over the elections (which were indirect), to the rich. In the south-west public opinion was more justly mirrored in the Chambers of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, as it was in those of the northern city-states of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck: Bavaria, after Prussia the biggest member of the Federal Empire, had special rights of her own, and headed the Catholic minority interest against the Lutheranism of Berlin and the north. The life of the ordinary German depended primarily upon the authority of the state in which he lived rather than on the imperial authority: he paid direct taxes for instance to the state of Prussia or Bavaria and only indirect taxes to the empire.

It was extraordinary to observe that Nazi Germany constantly lost sympathy yet won admiration: opinion in Europe evidently shirked the discreditable evidence which was painful, and jumped at the impressive slogans. After the Enabling Act all political parties other than that of Hitler were abolished, and the rights of Bavaria and the other Länder destroyed in favour of rigid centralisation under the Nazi party. The trade unions were suppressed in the spring of 1933 in favour of the Nazi Labour Front, and employers and workers transformed into leaders and following. The press was strangled. Every newspaper that survived became some sort of organ of the National Socialist party except for the Frankfurter Zeitung: this great liberal paper was allowed a little unreal liberty and survived until 1941. It suited the Nazis to parade this curious mascot—before the end, indeed, it became Hitler's property, a birthday present from his publisher, Max Amann, in April 1939. The effect of seeing and hearing party slogans at meetings, in the press, on the wireless, everywhere, warped the attitude of convinced anti-Nazis in spite of themselves.

Anti-Semitic action was at first sporadic. It began to be systematised in a boycott of Jewish shops ordered by the Nazi party for 1 April 1933. There was not much violence on that day. If foreign papers reported anti-Semitic incidents, the Nazis pointed out how peaceful things were on 1 April and blamed the Jews for stirring up world opinion against Germany.

Charles V had failed to secure the imperial succession for his son. But the fact of empire was not changed by this failure. Philip II still ruled over Spain and her dependencies in Italy, Franche-Comté, the Netherlands and the Indies. These had been the main sources of Charles V's imperial strength, of his money and his soldiers. Materially, at least, it was to Philip's advantage to disengage Spanish policy from the problems of central Europe while, at the same time, keeping on amicable terms with his uncle and cousins of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family. His marriage to Mary I of England (1554) was the logical complement to such a policy and even after Mary's death (1558) it was not immediately obvious that England would not remain, or become again, a Habsburg satellite. But the absence of the imperial title raised its own difficulties about the nature of Philip II's empire. Charles V's views of the transcendental nature of his position and of his destiny to create a Christian world monarchy had depended on this title. What was left for Philip II was another part of his father's mission, the defence of the Catholic church. ‘You may assure His Holiness’, Philip wrote to his ambassador in Rome in 1566, ‘that rather than suffer the least damage to religion and the service of God, I would lose all my states and an hundred lives, if I had them; for I do not propose nor desire to be the ruler of heretics.’

When in 1520 Charles V left Spain after his first visit to his new kingdom, the towns of Castile rebelled against the Flemish domination of their country. In 1559 the roles were reversed. It was the Netherlands which had suffered a foreign succession and were alarmed by Spanish domination. Yet such a foreign domination did not exist, any more than it did in Spain in 1520.

Philip II's residence in the Netherlands, from his father's abdication until 1559, was not a success. He appeared as foreign to the Netherlanders as his father had at first appeared to the Spaniards. His government's demands for money for the French wars led to prolonged and exasperating wrangles with the States General, the joint sessions of the provincial estates. The nobles and patricians in the assemblies of the estates blocked every attempt by the government to introduce new and fairer types of taxes which would no longer fall most heavily on the poorer people. In 1557/8 the States General made a grant of 800,000 florins per annum for nine years, but only on condition that their own commissioners should control the collection and expenditure of the money. Some of the provincial estates, notably Brabant, Flanders and Holland, had done this before and had built up their own financial machinery. Now it was to be extended to all the thirteen provinces normally represented in the States General. The purpose was primarily the practical one of preventing money earmarked for the payment of troops from being used to pay the government's debts.

At the beginning of the second volume of his massive Histoire générale du Protestantisme Émile Léonard describes the disappearance of Luther as a coup d'arrêt for Lutheranism, contrasting it in this way with the effects of Calvin's death upon Calvinism. There is a real aptness in this comparison. For Lutheranism was, and to a great extent remains, the religion of a personality, of an often stormy and erratic genius, but one capable of influencing and inspiring his followers to an almost unique degree. That Luther's influence has survived his death is apparent from the endless stream of books upon his thought produced by Lutherans in Europe and America and could never be doubted by anyone who has heard a committed Lutheran decide a problem with the reverential words, Luther sagt… Nevertheless, Léonard is not mistaken in seeing Luther's death as a calamity for the confession he had founded, in contrast to the comparatively calm way in which Calvinism reacted to the death of the Genevan reformer in 1564, less than a year after the ending of the Council of Trent. For Calvin created a system; he lived in his works and in the clearly defined church polity he had established in Geneva, which formed a pattern for all Calvinist churches. Luther was not a man of system; one might almost say that he abhorred systems and organisation as much as did St Francis of Assisi.

When the peace treaties came into effect, serious problems faced the countries that had been at war. Great Britain had not been invaded, but she had suffered heavy losses of human life and materials, and she too had her ‘devastated areas’: industry which needed to be reconverted and re-equipped, the fleet to be rebuilt, former markets to be won back, American and Japanese (and before long German) competition to be faced; the national debt was very heavy, and the balance of payments was threatened. Exports had to be redeveloped and the pound restored to its old supremacy, for this had formerly been the condition of her prosperity.

In France the terrible bloodshed of the war had cost 1,750,000 lives, and the birth-rate fell below that of 1913; the ruins remained to be built upon, but the country's debts were made worse by having to pay for war damage and for pensions to war victims of all categories. The international situation was sombre. France and, to a lesser extent, Britain assumed an attitude of resolute hostility towards Russia, whose revolutionary propaganda they feared. Germany was also the subject of their distrust, all the more so since she seemed to be trying by all possible means to evade the restrictions of the Versailles ‘Diktat’. France, particularly sensitive on this question, insisted on strict compliance with the terms of the treaty, with a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law symbolised by Poincaré.

The educational achievements of the post-Reformation period must be set against a background of widespread ignorance. It is probable that half the men and more than half the women were illiterate even in the more advanced European states. East of Vienna, north of the Baltic, conditions were a good deal worse. Illiteracy was found more in the country than in the towns, more among women than men, more among the poor than the well-to-do, but it existed everywhere and at nearly all social levels. To have received any degree of systematic teaching was a prerogative of the fortunate or the unusually persistent.

All the same, it is possible to maintain that the opportunities for instruction open to the young were more extensive than they had ever been before, and that they were eagerly utilised. We shall find it convenient to consider them under three heads: popular education, apprenticeship, and the training offered by universities and schools. We know only a little about the first and a good deal about the last; but they were of equal importance for the future of Europe.

Popular education may be defined for our purposes as education acquired independently of Latin. Its range varied greatly. While the majority of those who were ignorant of Latin remained ignorant in most other respects, some could claim to be well informed and an exceptional individual could attain to the many-sided learning of a Palissy. But in nearly all cases non-Latinists who made some progress in their studies did so through private reading.

Outside Italy political thinking in the sixteenth century was focused on problems raised by the Reformation. In the first place the ordinary individual was forced into an altogether novel situation, and one fraught with the most serious consequences to his peace and security. For the first time humble individuals had to make a decision for themselves as to which of the various claimants was indeed the true church. There had, of course, been heretical movements in the middle ages. But even the most serious of these, such as the Lollard movement in England or the Hussite in Bohemia, had been localised. They precipitated no general crisis of conscience. To the great mass of the faithful, Rome was the citadel of the Catholic faith and those beliefs condemned by her were rejected without hesitation as indubitably heretical. Where there were no doubts, there were no decisions to be made. But in the sixteenth century Rome's authority itself was challenged, and great congregations, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican and Unitarian were organised, besides lesser sects such as the Anabaptists. Distinctive theologies were developed, noticeably by Calvinists and Unitarians, and rival theologians thundered mutual denunciations of their adversaries as heretics and children of Antichrist. Moreover, most of these churches took the traditional view that it is the duty of the secular arm to destroy the heretic, a duty which most princes in the earlier part of the century, for various mixed motives of their own, were ready enough to discharge.

To the south and south-east of Germany there lay the dominions of the Habsburgs ruled in 1900 by an old man of 70. Since 1867 the administration of Austria had been sharply divided from that of Hungary. Within Austria the authorities had haltingly admitted the non-German, mainly Slav, populations to certain rights, first and foremost that of being educated and tried in court in their own languages. In 1907 the Minister-President of the day, Freiherr von Beck, put an end to a system for electing the House of Representatives of the central Reichsrat by electoral bodies called curiae which gave German voters great advantages. He enfranchised virtually all men of 24 and over, and he grouped the constituencies so as to make them homogeneous nationally, not racially mixed. For some time the Germans of Austria had failed to recognise that they were a diminishing minority, but the new system made evident that Austria was predominantly Slav. The most flourishing Slav group was that of the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, with its own university in Prague—it demanded a second one in Brno (Brünn) in Moravia. The Moravian Compromise of 1905 had arranged for the roughly proportional representation of Germans and Czechs in the Moravian Diet. The inability of the Czechs and Germans to come to similar terms with one another in Bohemia was, however, already in 1900 ominous, since for many reasons Bohemia was of great importance to the Monarchy.