The Penguin History of the World

Book Six

THE GREAT ACCELERATION

In the middle of the eighteenth century most people in the world (and probably most Europeans) could still believe that history would go on much as it had always done. The weight of the past was everywhere enormous and often it was immovable: some of the efforts going on in Europe to shake it off have been touched upon, but nowhere outside Europe was even the possibility of doing so grasped. Though in many parts of the world a few people’s lives had begun to be revolutionized by contact with Europeans, most of it was unaffected and much of it was untouched by such contamination of other cultures.

It is very important to grasp that in this process it was Europe – and to begin with very small parts of it – that was fundamentally different from elsewhere. There were no crises in other parts of the world that set off change; change came when Europeans – driven by innovation, greed, religious zeal or scarcity at home – began to conquer the world. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, the consciousness of historical change (and their own role in it) was spreading fast among thinking Europeans. In the next century and a half change was to come thick and fast almost everywhere and to ignore the fact was to be very hard if not impossible. By 1900 it was obvious that in Europe and the European world of settlement it had irreversibly cut off many of the links to its own past. A fundamentally progressive view of history became more widely shared. If never unquestioned, the myth of progress more and more gave meaning to events.

Just as important, impulses from northern Europe and the Atlantic countries also radiated outwards to transform both Europe’s relations with the rest of the world and the very foundations of their lives for many of its peoples, however much some of them regretted and resisted it. By the end of the nineteenth century (though this is only an approximate and convenient marker) a world once regulated by specific separate cultures was on a new course. Its destiny was now to be continuing and accelerating transformation and the second adjective was as important as the first. A man born in 1800, who lived out the psalmist’s span of three-score years and ten, could have seen the world more changed in his lifetime than it had been in the previous thousand years. History was speeding up.

The consolidation of the European world hegemony was central to these changes and one of the great motors propelling them. By 1900 European civilization had shown itself to be the most materially successful that had ever existed. They might not always agree on what was most important about it but few Europeans could deny that it had produced wealth on an unprecedented scale and that it dominated the rest of the globe by power and influence as no previous civilization had ever done. Europeans (or their descendants) ran the world. Much of their domination was political, a matter of direct rule. Large areas of the world had been peopled by European stocks. As for the non-European countries still formally and politically independent of Europe, most of them had in practice to defer to European wishes and accept European interference in their affairs. Few indigenous peoples could resist, and if they did, Europe often won its subtlest victory of all, for successful resistance required the adoption of European practices and, therefore, Europeanization in another form.