To ask what were the important developments of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century is to be reminded of the force of continuity in men's affairs and of the rarity of abrupt change. The growth of material power and wealth; of industrialism and urbanisation; of technology and scientific knowledge; of transport, communications and trade; of population and of the movement of population; of centralised government; of democracy; of literacy and education; of public opinion and the press—these prominent developments of the age had been almost as prominent in the generation, if not in the whole century, which ended in 1870; and the same developments are no less central to an understanding of the years which stretch from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. If we call this period simply the age of material improvement or of industrial development or of democratic progress we have not said much of value about it. Nor does it help towards sharper definition to reflect upon another characteristic of the time: that these continuing massive developments, or most of them, occurred only in European society and its off-shoots in North America and the other areas of white settlement. This restriction and the consequent predominance of European power and civilisation in the world had existed long before 1870. They were to last beyond 1900, when European monopoly of all this progress was still scarcely touched by changes in Japan, and the discrepancy between the European and less advanced societies had become more acute than it had ever been.

The last thirty years of the nineteenth century were for the peoples of western Europe, if not for those of the world as a whole, an era of virtually unbroken peace. In western Europe there was an interval between the Wars of Unification which had shattered the pattern of the Vienna Settlement and the conflicts over the lands of the disintegrating Turkish empire which were to develop into the first World War. Even outside this area there were only three instances where two major powers were involved in mutual conflict—the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Spanish-American War of 1898—and these quarrels, either by their nature or from the agreed policy of the great powers, were kept strictly within local bounds. European powers protecting or extending their interests in Africa and Asia were constantly engaged in minor conflicts, and Great Britain in 1899 became involved in a struggle with the Boer Republics of South Africa which assumed proportions transcending the category of ‘small wars’; but within Europe itself, outside the Balkan Peninsula, the Peace of Frankfurt signed between France and the victorious German empire in 1871 ushered in forty-three years of uninterrupted peace.

Yet during these years the great powers, particularly those of Europe, were preparing for war with a diligence for which modern history had hitherto offered no parallel. Engines of war, maritime and military, were multiplied prodigiously in number, complexity, and cost. Defence preparations received an ever-swelling allocation in national budgets; and the male populations of the mainland states of Europe became bound to military service from the end of their adolescence until the onset of later middle age.

Abrupt change is not characteristic of the economic process in history. In most respects even the nineteenth-century world was working out, on a much larger scale, the logic of methods inherited from an earlier age. What distinguished the nineteenth century increasingly from earlier centuries and explains the pace, rhythm and scale of its economic growth was the extent to which international trade and investment came to transmit the very means of economic change themselves from the forward to the backward areas. The sale, or more often the loan, of capital equipment—railways, engines, rolling-stock, mining gear, pumps, machinery—accelerated the rate at which the economic arrangements and social structures of the less advanced nations were transformed. As trade came to imply not only the exchange of goods, but the permanent nexus of investment, a new type of politico-economic relationship emerged, rich in material promise and heavy with political risk. Much of the foreign trade of Britain, still the leading economic power in most respects in 1900, rested upon contracts designed (in the most simplified terms) to enable nations which could not afford to pay for capital equipment on current account to borrow it. The supposition underlying these transactions was that the opportunities they created would enable the borrower to pay a return to the lender.

This phenomenon was not new in 1870; but it owed its new prominence to the period of railway building which had begun in continental Europe before the mid-century. This was still going on vigorously in the fourth quarter, both through new construction and the replacement of old iron track by steel.

The last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the European balance of power at its most perfect: five great powers (with a doubtful sixth), each able to maintain its independence, none strong enough to dominate the others. The irreconcilable antagonism between France and Germany, and the equally irreconcilable, though less persistent, antagonism between Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans, prevented the creation of any preponderant combination. The balance of power took on the appearance of a natural law, self-operating and self-adjusting; Europe enjoyed the longest period of peace known in modern times; and the powers turned their energies outwards to ‘imperialist’ expansion. All acquired empires; some at their own backdoor, the others overseas.

The Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in July 1870, created this exceptional balance. It began as a French attempt to arrest the progress of German unity; instead it freed Europe from the shadow of French predominance without putting German predominance in its place. It was the last war fought solely in Europe and confined to European great powers. It was indeed confined to two powers. This was unexpected. Great Britain was genuinely neutral once Belgium was secured. But Austria-Hungary prepared to intervene on the French side, though only after French victories. Russia first talked vaguely of threatening Austria-Hungary into neutrality; then, with equal vagueness, planned to compete with her for French favour. These calculations came to an abrupt stop as the campaign developed. The first battles on the frontier went against France. On 3 September the main French army was defeated and compelled to surrender at Sedan. Napoleon III became a prisoner. The French empire was overthrown, and the Republic proclaimed in Paris.

During the late nineteenth century the United States lost their former place in the imagination of Europe, and by 1900 the accusations of immaturity, materialism and indiscriminate self-praise, formerly the stock-in-trade of conservative critics, had been accepted by the European left. In spite of attempts to treat this as an ‘age of enterprise’ modern Americans have been inclined to echo these criticisms, and ‘the Gilded Age’, with its implications of ostentatious wealth and intrinsic worthlessness, remains the popular label. Yet America remained the land of opportunity both for millions of poor European migrants and for well-to-do investors, and Americans themselves moved from the doubts and divisions of civil war to self-confidence, to social stability, and to a surprising uniformity in their fundamental beliefs. Movements of protest and criticism appealed to a traditional stock of American principles; proposals for radical change in the political, social and economic system won little support. For critics and conservatives alike the American utopia remained America.

The period was dominated by the rise of a highly developed industrial and capitalist society in the North and Mid-West. This society experienced internal tensions similar to those of other industrial societies, but avoided the great fissure of politics based on class. Until the last years of the century it did not encounter the problem of dependencies overseas, but it faced comparable problems in its relationship with the less-developed rural regions occupying a greater part of the territory of the United States.

About the year 1870 Europe entered upon a new phase in its history with the final achievement of the nation-state in Germany and Italy. The emergence of two nation-states in central Europe marked the sole great change within the European system of states during the century between the Congress of Vienna and the first World War. It was a change that transformed the system without disrupting it. Two predominant features of the nineteenth century, liberal constitutionalism and the principle of nationality, characterised this event; the third dynamic of the age, socialism, did not make its advent till the revolt of the Commune in 1871.

In the 1870's liberalism was at the zenith of its historical course. In most of the countries of Europe it had brought into existence written constitutions with parliaments, a widening franchise, and constitutional guarantees of personal freedom. The last relics of legal inequality and bondage were removed by the Revolution of 1848 and Russia's abolition of serfdom in 1861. Equality before the law and personal freedom had practically everywhere become principles in law, despite strong opposition from both the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Liberalism had thus achieved its civil programme; but the liberals' constitutional aims, an executive controlled by parliament and a legislature with unlimited powers, had been realised only partially and in differing degrees in the various countries. From about the mid-1870's the liberal parties, hitherto drawn from notabilities in the middle classes, became more and more involved in difficulties that raised problems of form and organisation.

Of all the European powers, Russia made the least concessions to (the liberal spirit of the late nineteenth century. Until 1906 the tsar remained an all-powerful autocrat; he could make and unmake laws without the consent of his ministers, who were responsible to him alone. Efforts at constitutional reform met with stubborn opposition from conservative elements amongst the bureaucracy and landowning gentry, the two main bulwarks of absolutism. The survival of the regime depended ultimately upon the political inertia of the peasants who formed the overwhelming majority of the population. Modern ideas were slow to penetrate into the Russian village. To millions the tsar was still an almost superhuman being who had their interests at heart and whose rule, they long believed, brought them solid advantages.

An immense social and cultural gulf separated the masses from the tiny educated minority. The position of this elite looked impregnable, so great was its power and prestige. In reality it was poised over an abyss. A land of extremes, Russia lacked a strong middle class. The most important intermediate group, the intelligentsia, who provided the leadership of the opposition movements, did not succeed in acquiring a mass following and forcing the government to grant concessions until the turn of the century. But the long and bitter struggle between the autocracy and its enemies began in earnest soon after the accession of Alexander II.

Alexander's reign (1855–81) opened auspiciously with the inauguration of a broad programme of social, cultural and administrative reforms; it ended with an unprofitable war and a wave of revolutionary violence, of which the tsar himself was the most prominent victim.

Education during these thirty years exhibited certain similar characteristics all over the world which enables us to view them together across the national boundaries. Accordingly we shall be concerned not with the various nations one by one, but with aspects of education illustrated from time to time by some particular nation.

The study of the development and content of education cannot but be ecological. Systems do not flourish in the air. They affect and are affected by the social, political, intellectual and religious structure as well as by the movements of their time. Of no period was this more true than of the last third of the nineteenth century. This was a period of the aftermath of wars in Europe, in America, in China and the Far East. It was a period of vast industrial expansion and of the rise into importance of the working class. It was a period of the expansion of Europe into Africa and elsewhere. And above all it was a period of secularisation. The Church, even in Catholic countries, was losing its grip on one department of life and thought after another. In education it saw the emergence of education as a civil right and as the concern of the whole community as such, instead of being merely a private or sectional concern.

One of the earliest aims of education, an aim as old as Plato, was the training of a social elite in the art of government. This attitude to education, which assumed that ability went with status, was but slowly replaced. It was not until the nineteenth century that an educational elite was recognised anywhere as an alternative to one that was purely social.

In tracing Indian developments in the second half of the nineteenth century it is important to balance carefully the Indian and British sides of the scales. And the British side was not British only, but European and western as well, for in much of their activity the British were harbingers of general western culture rather than the purveyors of Anglo-Saxondom. In the past there has been a tendency to regard the significant features of Victorian India as the completion of the British dominion, and the gradual spread of British administrative techniques and public works, of western cultural ideas and western humane values. The groups who secured the decision to introduce western institutions into India believed that Indian institutions were effete and Indian traditional ideas inferior if not positively harmful. They looked to a gradual replacement of things Indian by things European, though they did not all clothe their expectation in the vivid imagery of Macaulay. The first school of writers on British India were fascinated by the spectacle of the rise of British power, the most striking and lasting, as they believed, in the long procession of Indian empire. There followed, with James Mill's History as a bridge, those who thought that the true significance of British Indian history consisted in the introduction of western institutions. Both schools were absorbed in the British raj; while the first emphasised the raj, the second emphasised the British. Neither, along with most contemporary administrators, thought that India herself had much to offer towards her own future.

At the half-way mark of the Victorian era Britain held an undisputed position as the greatest power in the world. Her economic, political and social institutions rested on firm foundations, and served as models for old and new states both in Europe and overseas. The empire controlled by Britain included large areas in Africa, America, Asia, and Australasia; British sea-power dominated the oceans; British trade spanned the globe; and Britain had long been recognised as the financial and industrial centre of the world. While in some particulars this picture changed before the end of Queen Victoria's reign, British influence and power were still immense, and the British empire of 1901 was vastly larger and richer than that of 1870.

Throughout the eventful closing decades of the nineteenth century Britain played a leading part in all aspects of world affairs. She pioneered in fields of science and technology; she promoted the development of communications by land and sea and furthered the Europeanisation of Africa, Asia, and Oceania; her capital and entrepreneurial and technical skills helped to unlock the resources of far-away lands; her cultural, economic, political and social institutions were planted in regions throughout the world. The period witnessed a large diaspora of British peoples and the unpremeditated role of Britain as a builder of nations.

In 1870 the leading British statesmen believed that Britain was sated territorially. But in the next thirty years Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Chamberlain urged expansion of the empire. Both were converts to this cause. In the 1860's Disraeli had advised abandoning British outposts in West Africa; in the early 1880's Chamberlain had fought imperialism.

A period inaugurated by Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867), Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), Clerk Maxwell's Electricity and Magnetism (1873) and Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was unlikely to be devoid of intellectual ferment. The men who exerted the largest influence on social, political and religious thought during the last three decades of the nineteenth century were Marx and Darwin: but the nature of this influence was greatly affected by the changing character of scientific and social thought in general, and by the repercussions of scientific ideas upon social thought. It was also profoundly affected by the rapidly changing condition of society and government, a condition brought about by scientific inventions, industrial expansion and new forms of social and political organisation. In no other period is intellectual history more inseparable from economic and political history—an inevitable consequence of the conquests of science in both thought and action. Under the impact of Marxism and Darwinism on the one hand, of unusually fast-moving social change on the other, adherents of older political philosophies and social faiths had to modify their arguments and outlooks. Utilitarianism, idealism and positivism continued as operative schools of thought. But they survived within a new context of philosophical and religious beliefs, amid a new ethos and new material conditions: and this context coloured their whole development.

Marx's analysis of economic forces in Das Kapital was designed to be the massive underpinning of the political doctrines which he and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, had propounded since they issued the Communist Manifesto in 1848. As the avowed ‘continuation’ of Marx's Critique of Political Economy (1859), Das Kapital presented detailed evidence of the working of the laws of dialectical materialism.

After the final triumph of Italian and German nationalism in 1870 the Danubian lands and the Balkan Peninsula remained the one considerable area of unsatisfied nationalist aspirations in Europe. These aspirations provided the most considerable threat to the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Yet in both cases the dynasty, in spite of recent challenges, was still sustained by a tradition of inevitability; both had existed for so long, and in spite of the declining glamour of the imperial or any other embracing role each could still ask with some plausibility what was to be put in its place. The question in the international field found a ready answer from the new Germany, which was soon to tell Russia that Austria-Hungary was a European necessity, and from Great Britain, which was still making the same extravagant claim for Turkey; and if Russian views were divided they were not pressed to the limit. At home, many could still not conceive of life without emperor or sultan. Echoing Palacký, Prince Charles Schwarzenberg asked the Young Czech extremists in 1891, ‘what will you do with your country, which is too small to stand alone?’ and in 1897 the Young Turk exile Murat Bey said that the ruling dynasty must remain at the head of the empire, for without it Turkish power had no existence. Nevertheless, the chance of survival for both Habsburg and Ottoman came to depend less and less on past glory or present convenience and more and more on two conditions: the international stalemate after 1878 and the hostilities which divided the national minorities and which postponed and confused their challenge to the state.

Science and technology were far more closely related between 1870 and 1900 than in any earlier period. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century there were few branches of industry that were not affected by new scientific discoveries, although this is by no means the same as saying that traditional empirical methods were entirely or even largely ousted. Empiricism remained dominant in many industries; in some it remains so to the present day; but after 1870 we can clearly see the beginnings of the scientific industry of the twentieth century. The changed outlook is naturally more apparent in the new industries—such as the electrical industry—that originated wholly in scientific discovery than in those, already long established, in which the application of science resulted to a great extent in improving old processes rather than in creating quite new ones.

While the close relationship between science and technology within this period is evident, it is in many instances exceedingly difficult to distinguish cause from effect. Sometimes a purely scientific discovery, resulting from research with no practical objective in mind, was of such obvious practical importance that its commercial development followed almost as a matter of course. The development of the dyestuffs industry was a conspicuous example: the first coal-tar dye was the result of an unsuccessful—and, as we now know, wholly misguided—attempt to synthesise quinine. Other scientific discoveries, however, became significant primarily because contemporary conditions favoured their application; in different circumstances their historical significance might have been slight, or have been apparent at a much later date.

At the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century two generations had passed since the continental American colonies of Spain and Portugal had won their independence. During these years these new states had maintained their independence, expanded their commercial and cultural relations with Europe and progressed toward political stability. The half-dozen larger Spanish American units, roughly coincident with the colonial viceroyalties and captaincies-general which had emerged from the struggle against the mother-country, had split into sixteen separate republics, and within each of these national feeling had grown and increasingly justified a political map which at the outset had not set off really separate peoples from each other. Portuguese America, in contrast, had successfully weathered centrifugal tendencies, and in 1870 the empire of Brazil was the largest, the most powerful, and the most stable state in Latin America. In the West Indies, the political pattern remained colonial: Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish control; the lesser Antilles were subject to their various European metropolises; and isolated Haiti and the precariously sovereign Dominican Republic alone represented the republican principle in the Caribbean.

After 1870 the chief source of changes in this area was the unprecedented development of its connections with the outside world. Expanding industry in Europe and in the United States required ever larger amounts of raw materials such as hides, cotton, and wool; the new chemical and electrical industries required more and more rubber, copper, zinc, lead, and other metals. New concentrations of urban population also needed increasing amounts of imported food: sugar, wheat, meat, coffee, and cacao.

In the first place and for a long time the increasing pressure for expanasion in the Pacific and China areas which was so prominent a feature of the last third of the nineteenth century did not come from the European governments. Before 1894 it came almost entirely from Asian governments and their foreign advisers or from European settlers and officials in Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific islands and Asia. For special reasons the latter received strong official support from Europe for a brief period between 1882 and 1885; but apart from this the European governments remained reluctant to extend their responsibilities and their rivalries to this area until the last few years of the century.

Among the earliest problems to arise in the area were those created by the expansion of European trade and settlement in some of the Pacific islands. Clashes between Europeans and between Europeans and natives were becoming serious as early as 1870 in consequence of the growth of trade and plantation agriculture, the improvement of communications and the effect of these developments in dislocating native social and political systems. In Fiji the British Colonial Office had already rejected, twelve years before, a suggestion from the British settlers, who were also afraid of annexation by France, that these problems should be solved by annexation by Great Britain. It had felt reluctant to risk a quarrel with France. Since then the number of settlers, predominantly British, engaged in trade and cotton production had continued to grow despite the lack of effective government and increasing disorder.

By 1870 it was plain that in the great area, at once a crossroads and a frontier, which is bounded by the waters of the Mediterranean, of the Red Sea, of the Arabian and Indian Oceans, of the Persian Gulf, and by those of the Caspian and the Black Seas, the influence of the European powers was becoming ever more widely extended.

The capitals of St Petersburg, Paris, and London, rather than those of Constantinople, Cairo, or Teheran, had of course long been the centres wherein Near and Middle Eastern policies were decided. If something unforeseen, something spontaneous and native to the area, actually happened, then steps had at once to be taken in those centres to bring the consequences of any such ‘untoward events’ under control. One concert of Europe had, in 1840–1, curbed one such disturber of the Levantine peace, the ambitious Mehemet Ali of Egypt. Another concert had, in 1854–6, taken the measure of a more formidable innovator, someone who was not supposed to be a native of the area at all—Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. In 1856, too, the British had sent gunboats into the Persian Gulf to stop the Shah of Persia from absconding with his Afghan neighbour's property of Herat. The existence of peculiar ‘spheres of interest’ was mutually recognised by the powers: it was their expansion that was objected to. No one went to the assistance of the Circassian leader Shamil in the Caucasus, or to that of Sher Ali in Kabul, of the Bey in Tunis, or of Ahmed Arabi in Egypt, although there have been causes worse.

The summer of the year 1870 in China saw two events which taken together have been recognised as marking the failure of the movement known to Chinese historians as the T'ung Chih Restoration, the rally of the dynasty which followed the successful suppression of the great T'ai P'ing Rebellion (1850–64). On 7 July 1870 the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs announced in the House of Commons that the government had decided not to ratify the Alcock Convention, an instrument which the British Minister to China, Sir Rutherford Alcock, and the Chinese plenipotentiaries had signed in Peking on 23 October of the previous year. On 21 June there had occurred in the treaty port of Tientsin a violent anti-foreign outbreak, in which several lives were lost, known as the ‘Tientsin Massacre’. The rejection of the Alcock Convention marked the failure of the foreign policy associated with the T'ung Chih Restoration; the Tientsin massacre equally emphasised the triumph of reactionary forces opposed to the cautious programme of modernisation which the Restoration statesmen had pursued. Both events were the product of popular ill-informed chauvinism, in the one case inspired by the pretensions and greed of the European merchant community in China, in the other by the ignorance, pride and xenophobia of the Chinese people.

The British government had yielded against their better judgement to the clamour raised by the merchants of Shanghai and other ports in China, an agitation directed not merely against the fact that the stillborn Alcock Convention made some modest changes in the treaty relations between the two countries in favour of China, but even more against the policy which inspired the author of this diplomatic initiative.

The literature of the late nineteenth century shows unmistakable symptoms of decadence. What is decaying is a literary tradition which dates back to the Renaissance, when its basic genres, its conventions for representing the world and giving a valid picture of human experience, were laid down anew. The tradition was largely founded on a belief that the artistic imagination truly mirrors nature, and this belief persisted through all later changes in theme and expression. The great distinction between realism and romanticism, which accounts for most of the major variations in the literature of the earlier nineteenth century, still did not break the tradition. It rather enriched it with a subtler sense of the difference between the world as mirrored in poetry and the world as mirrored in prose, and indicated a fuller awareness of the interesting role played by specifically subjective adventures in thought and feeling. Confidence in the power of art to reflect the true sense and shape of these richer possibilities remained unshaken. Towards the end of the century, however, the reliability, indeed the responsibility, of the imagination in discovering the way things ‘really’ are and in knowing what they mean began to be seriously questioned. It seemed possible to write about anything in almost any way, to enjoy literally almost any number of views, but this gain in literary scope and freedom was accompanied by a loss of creative certainty about the true image and status of man. Amidst the bewildering assortment of styles and schools, which sprang up at this period, it is possible to find only one common feature; the search for an authentic form of expression.

Since the nineteenth century began, the Europeans had been strengthening their hold over those parts of the world selected during the era of mercantilism. Australasia, India, South-east Asia, above all the Americas—they were either temperate regions peopled with white immigrants or tropical countries already under white rule. Step by step the mode of white expansion had altered: liberalism and industrial growth shifted the emphasis away from colonies of formal empire to regions of informal influence. But whatever the form it had taken, the groundwork of European imperialism had been truly laid long before the cartographical exercises in partition at the end of the century. Africa was the last continent to win the interest of the strategists of expansion; it seemed to them that here they were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Dividing Africa was easy enough for the Europeans. They did it at that moment in history when their lead over the other continents was at its longest. Economic growth and technical innovation gave them invincible assurance and force. Their culture and political organisation gave them a carrying power to match their iron ships and high-velocity guns. That Europe had the capacity to subjugate Africa was self-evident; but had her rulers any firm wish to do so?

Twenty years were enough to see the continent carved into symmetries devised by the geometers of diplomacy. By the end of the century only Morocco and Ethiopia were still independent, and their turn was coming. But the statesmen who drew the new frontier lines did not do so because they wanted to rule and develop these countries. Bismarck and Ferry, Gladstone and Salisbury, had no solid belief in African empire; indeed they sneered at the movement as something of a farce.