The Penguin History of the World

Book Seven

THE END OF THE EUROPEAN AGE

In 1900 Europeans could look back on two, perhaps three, centuries of astonishing growth. Most of them would have said that it was growth for the better – that is, progress. Their history since the Middle Ages looked very much like a continuing advance to evidently worthwhile goals questioned by few. Whether the criteria were intellectual and scientific, or material and economic (or even if they were moral and aesthetic, some said, so persuasive was the gospel of progress), a look at their own past assured them that they were set on a progressive course – which meant that the world was set on a progressive course, for their civilization was now spread worldwide. What was more, limitless advance seemed to lie ahead. Europeans showed in 1900 much the same confidence in the continuing success of their culture as the Chinese élite had shown in theirs a century earlier. The past, they were sure, proved them right.

Even so, a few did not feel so confident. They felt that the evidence could equally well imply a pessimistic conclusion. Though there were far fewer pessimists than optimists, they numbered in their ranks men of acknowledged standing and powerful minds. Some of them argued that the civilization in which they lived had yet to reveal its full self-destructive potential and sensed that the time when it would do so might not be far away. Some of them saw a civilization more and more obviously drifting away from its moorings in religion and moral absolutes, carried along by the tides of materialism and barbarity – probably to complete disaster.

As it turned out, neither the optimists nor the pessimists were wholly right, perhaps because their eyes were glued too firmly on what they thought were the characteristics of European civilization, and on the location of it in Europe. They looked to its own inherent powers, tendencies or weaknesses for guidance about the future; not many of them paid much attention to the way European ideas were changing the world in which her own ascendancy had been built. Few looked further than Europe and Europe beyond the seas; they had no sense of how the whole world was changing as a result of the global expansion of trade, empire and thought in the nineteenth century. A few unbalanced cranks fussed about the ‘Yellow Peril’ rising in the East, but that is about as far as the sense of deeper change went.

In looking at the twentieth century, it is of course tempting to say in retrospect that the pessimists have had the best of the argument. It may even be true. But hindsight is sometimes a disadvantage to the historian; in this instance it makes it difficult to see how the European optimists could once have felt so sure of themselves. Yet we should try to do so. For one thing, there were men of vision and insight among them; for another, optimism was for so long an obstacle to the solution of certain problems in the twentieth century that it deserves to be understood as a historical force in its own right. And some of what the pessimists said was wrong too. Appalling though the disasters of the twentieth century were, they fell on societies more resilient than those shattered by lesser troubles in earlier times, and they were not always those feared over a century ago. In 1900, optimists and pessimists alike had to work with data which could be read in more than one way. It is not reprehensible, merely tragic, that they found it so hard to judge exactly what lay ahead. With better information available to us, we have not been so successful in shorter-term prediction that we are in a position to condemn them.