The Penguin History of the World

Book Five

THE MAKING OF THE EUROPEAN AGE

Around about 1500, there were many signs that a new age of world history was beginning. Some of them have already been mentioned; the discoveries in the Americas and the first shoots of European enterprise in Asia are among them. At the outset they provide hints about the dual nature of this new age – that it is increasingly an age of truly world history and that it is one whose story is dominated by the astonishing expansion of one civilization among many, that of Europe. These are two aspects of the same process; there is a more and more continuous and organic interconnection between events in all countries, but it is largely to be explained by the actions of Europeans. They eventually became masters of the globe and they used their mastery – sometimes without knowing it – to make the world one. As a result, world history has for the last two or three centuries a growing identity and unity of theme.

In a famous passage, the English historian Macaulay once spoke of red men scalping one another on the shores of the Great Lakes so that a European king could rob his neighbour of a province he coveted. This was one striking side of the story we must now embark upon – the gradual entanglement of struggles with one another the world over in greater and greater wars – but politics, empire-building and military expansion were only a tiny part of what was going on. The economic integration of the globe was another part of the process; more important still was the spreading of common assumptions and ideas, of technologies and medicine. The result was to be, in one of our cant phrases, ‘One World’ – of sorts. The age of independent or nearly independent civilizations has come to a close.

Given our world’s immense variety, this may seem at first sight a wildly misleading exaggeration. National, cultural and ethnic differences have not ceased to produce and inspire appalling conflicts; the history of the centuries since 1500 can be (and often is) written mainly as a series of wars and violent struggles, and those who live in different countries obviously do not feel much more like one another than did their predecessors centuries ago. Yet they are much more alike than their ancestors of, say, the tenth century and show it in hundreds of ways ranging from the superficialities of dress to the forms in which they get their living and organize their societies.

The origins, extent and limits of this change make up most of the story which follows. It is the outcome of something still going on in many places, which we sometimes call modernization. For centuries it has been grinding away at differences between cultures and it is the deepest and most fundamental expression of the growing integration of world history. Another way of describing the process is to say that the world is becoming Europeanized, for modernization is above all a matter of ideas and techniques which are European in origin. Whether ‘modernization’ is the same as ‘Europeanization’ (or, as it is now often put, ‘westernization’), though, can be left for discussion elsewhere; sometimes it is only a matter of verbal preferences. What is obvious is that, chronologically, it is with European modernity that the unification of world history begins. A great change in Europe was the starting point of modern history.