Cultura

When did the twentieth century begin? If we refer strictly to the Gregorian calendar, the response is clear, but as Charles S. Maier demonstrates in the first chapter of this volume, the period from 1901 to 1914 was, in many respects, a continuation of the nineteenth century. In the few industrialized countries of that period, social stratification continued and was intensified by technological progress. The majority of the world’s population, which did not have access to the advances of that era, was still engaged in agriculture or traditional production activities. The imperialist world order, which took the form of colonialism in Africa and Asia, was consolidated by this division. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian empire of the tsars were multi-ethnic formations that survived in this political context and led to competition, crises and alliances in which colonial rivalries also played a part. If there is a break with the nineteenth century, it coincides with the First World War, which marks the beginning of what historian Eric J. Hobsbawm calls ‘the short twentieth
century’.
The post-war period
If we agree that the final battles of the absurd war that lasted from 1914 to 1918 marked the end of the nineteenth century, we must also acknowledge that in 1919, as soon as the treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, Trianon, Neuilly and Sèvres had been signed, many of the economic and social problems that were to beset the twentieth century emerged, as did the new century’s chosen political orientations. Having bled itself dry for more than four years, resorting to loans after using up all of its reserves to pay for weaponry, Europe forfeited the control of the world’s economy that it had exercised for centuries. It was no longer a creditor but a debtor, owing money in particular to the United States, which supplanted it as the world’s economic
leader.

Each volume of the new UNESCO History of Humanity covers a period which can claim to have witnessed momentous change in the evolution of human society. The evolving panorama of humankind on the planet is manifest throughout, and who can say, sub specie aeternitatis, which phases of change will have proved the most portentous for the long-term future of humanity? It is the primary role of a history such as this to document the story of change within its period, to understand the pattern of evolution in its manifold manifestations and to assess its wider meaning, rather than to cast moral judgements or to make facile comparisons. But change has evolved at a different pace in different millennia and over different centuries. Change has been more pervasive in some societies than in others – affecting a wider or narrower range of human activities and the human consciousness, impacting upon different levels of society; diffused over greater or more limited regions of the world; influencing different ranges of cultures and social groups within cultures. Stability, or slow evolution, rather than dramatic change characterized many societies in this period but it is right, in an introduction, to concentrate on the forces of change rather than those of inertia if we are to understand how the world differed in 1914 from what it had been in 1789 or 1800.

The ‘chronological’ nineteenth century – or, even more, the ‘long’ nineteenth century between the French Revolution of 1789, followed by world-wide wars, and the First World War of 1914, which engulfed the globe on an even more pervasive and lethal scale – must surely rank as one of the great pivotal epochs in the evolution of economies, societies and cultures. No region of the world proved to be beyond the influence of major forces of change; no culture was immune, directly or indirectly. Where some indigenous cultures did not themselves originate any major impetus for change beyond their own regions, virtually all economies and cultures reacted and responded to the thrust of change derived from beyond their boundaries, in turn influencing the process of cultural interaction which was never unidirectional (as was also the case with economic and political interactions). In many places, in regions of Asia and Africa in particular, such inf luences came with conquest and colonization in the nineteenth century; in others such influences were already the heritage of and evolution from previous centuries (as in Latin America). But formal subjugation was perhaps the lesser means whereby what was loosely termed ‘Westernization’ spread across much the world from Europe, North America and their outposts of settlement in Australasia, South Africa and North Africa.

This third volume in a series of seven produced by UNESCO on the history of the human race divides the world by large geographical areas, then presents information on every aspect of the peoples there, including technology, art, literature, agriculture, and politics. The dozens of scholars from around the world who contribute to this work are all specialists, as are the editorial staff. The text itself, while it features many technical terms, is never pedantic, making the book suitable for general history readers as well as students. The illustrations, which include maps, support the text well. In its depths of scholarship and clarity, History of Humanity compares favorably with such works as Chronicle of the World (DK, 1995), The New Encyclopedia of World History (Oxford Univ., 1993), and The Timetables of History (S.L.S., 1987). It contains more information on, for example, Japan than the comparable entry in The New Encyclopedia Britannica. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.?Norman Malwitz, Queensborough P.L., Queens,, N.Y. ​

Towards 3100 bc, at the start of the period dealt with in this volume, humanity already had a past which stretched back to some two and a half million years, and it had gone through 99.5 per cent of its existence from the emergence of the first being who can be classified under the genus Homo to the present day.
We shall not return here to the distinction usually drawn between the prehistoric age – the period before the appearance of writing – and the historical period in the strict sense of the word, or to the vast, almost unimaginable, duration of this most ancient of human adventures. The reader will find further details on this subject in the General Introduction to Volume I. It should nevertheless be pointed out that Volume I, in spite of the length of time it covers, restricts itself to the period when all populations were still ignorant of writing, and prehistory was still far from nearing its end. In the two and a half thousand years covered by this volume, the knowledge of writing was in fact limited to a handful of regions, and the great majority of populations were still in the prehistoric stage.