The story told in this book has no clear end. However dramatic and disrupted, a history of the world cannot pull up short and come to a halt at a neat chronological boundary. To close with the year in which the author ceases to write is merely formal; it says nothing about the future of the historical processes then under way and thus severed in mid-life. As history is what one age thinks worth noting about another, recent events will acquire new meanings and present patterns will lose their clear outlines as people reflect again and again on what made the world in which they live. Even in a few months, present judgements about what is important will begin to look eccentric, so fast can events now move. Perspective is harder and harder to maintain.
This does not mean that the record is no more than a collection of facts or just a succession of events constantly reshuffled like the images of a kaleidoscope. Discernible trends and forces have operated over long periods and wide areas. In the longest run of all three such interconnected trends stand out: the growing acceleration of change, a growing unity of human experience and the growth of human capacity to control the environment. In our day, for the first time, they have made visible a truly unified world history. Blatantly, the expression ‘one world’ remains little more than a cant term, for all the idealism of those who first used it. There is just too much conflict and quarrelling about and no earlier century ever saw so much violence as the twentieth. Its politics were expensive and dangerous even when they did not break out in overt fighting, as the Cold War showed only too clearly. And now, just into a new century, new divisions are appearing still. The United Nations is still based, ironically (even if a little less firmly than fifty years ago), on the theory that the whole surface of the globe is divided into territories belonging to nearly 200 sovereign states. The bitter struggles of the former Yugoslavia may yet reopen and the simplicity upon which many would like to insist of an Islamic-Western clash of civilizations is cut across in a half-dozen ways by the tribal divisions of even so Islamic a country as Afghanistan.
Much, much more could be said along the same lines. Yet that does not mean that humanity does not now share more than it has ever done in the past. A creeping unity has seized mankind. An originally Christian calendar (now often ideologically sanitized by the substitution of bp and ce for BC and ad) is now the basis of governmental activity around most of the world. Modernization implies a growing commonality of goals. Clashes of culture are frequent, but were more evidently so in the past. What is now shared is at the humdrum level of the personal experience of millions; if society is a sharing of references, our world shares more than ever before, even if, paradoxically, people feel most acutely the distinctions between them in their daily experience. Yet when those who lived in neighbouring villages spoke significantly different dialects, when in the whole of their lives most of them would only exceptionally travel ten miles from their homes, when even their clothes and tools might provide in their shape and workmanship evidence of big differences of technology, style and custom, that experience was in important ways much more differentiated than it is now. The great physical, racial and linguistic divisions of the past were much harder to overcome than are their equivalents today. This is because of improved communication, the spread of English as a global lingua franca among the educated, mass education, mass production of commonly required artefacts, and so on. A traveller can still see exotic or unfamiliar clothes in some countries, but more people over most of the globe now dress alike than ever before. Kilts, kaftans, kimonos are becoming tourist souvenirs, or the carefully preserved relics of a sentimentalized past, while traditional clothing is more and more the sign of poverty and backwardness. The efforts of a few self-consciously conservative and nationalist regimes to cling to the symbols of their past only bear this out. Iranian revolutionaries put women back into the chador because they felt the experience pouring in from the world outside to be corrosive of morality and tradition. Peter the Great ordered his courtiers into western European clothes, and Ataturk forbade Turks to wear the fez, to announce a reorientation towards a progressive, advancing culture and a symbolic step towards a new future.
However, the basis of shared experience now available is only secondarily a consequence of any conscious commitment. Perhaps that is one reason why it has been so neglected by historians, and has tended to lie below their horizon of interest. Yet in a relatively short time, millions of men and women of different cultures have been in some degree liberated from, for example, many effects of climatic differences by electricity, air-conditioning and medicine. Cities all over the world now take street lighting and traffic signals for granted, have policemen on point duty, transact business in similar ways in banks and supermarkets. Much the same goods can be bought in them as are available in most other countries (in season, the Japanese now sell Christmas cakes). Men who do not understand one another’s languages service the same machines in different countries. Motor cars are everywhere a nuisance. Rural districts still escape some of these concomitants of modern life in some places, but big cities, which now contain a larger share of humanity than ever before, do not. Yet for millions of their inhabitants the experiences they share are also ones of squalor, economic precariousness and comparative deprivation. Whatever the differences in their Muslim, Hindu and Christian origins, and whether they shelter mosques, temples or churches, Cairo, Calcutta and Rio offer much the same misery (and, for a few, a similar opulence). Other misfortunes, too, are now more easily shared. The mingling of peoples made possible by modern transport means that diseases are shared as never before, thanks to the wiping out of old immunities. Aids has now appeared in every continent (except, possibly, Antarctica), and we are told it is killing 6000 people a day.
Even a few centuries ago a traveller from imperial Rome to imperial Loyang, the Han capital, would have found many more contrasts than a modern successor. Rich and poor would have worn clothes cut differently and made from different materials than those he knew, the food he was offered would be unusual, he would have seen animals of unfamiliar breeds in the streets, soldiers whose weapons and armour looked quite unlike what he had left behind. Even wheelbarrows had a different shape. A modern American or European in Beijing or Shanghai need see little that is surprising even in a country that is still in many ways deeply conservative; if he chooses Chinese cuisine (he will not need to) it will seem distinctive, but a Chinese airliner looks like any other and Chinese girls wear fishnet tights. It is only a little while ago that junks were China’s ocean-going ships, and looked wholly unlike contemporary European cogs or caravels.
Shared material realities advance the sharing of mental signposts and assumptions. Information and popular entertainment are now produced for global consumption. Popular groups of musicians tour the world like (though more easily and prosperously than) the troubadours who wandered about medieval Europe, presenting their songs and spectacles in different countries. Young people in particular cheerfully abandon their distinctive local ways in the indulgence of tastes binding them to other young people far away who have spare cash in their pockets - and there are now millions of them. The same movies, dubbed and subtitled, are shown worldwide on television to audiences that take away from them similar fantasies and dreams. At a different and more consciously intended level, the language of democracy and human rights is now enlisted more widely than ever to pay at least lip-service to western notions of what public life should be. Whatever governments and the media actually intend, they feel they must say increasingly that they believe in a version of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, equality of the sexes and much else. Only now and then does there occur a nasty jolt, an exposure of hypocrisies in practice, the revelation of unacknowledged moral disagreement or of blunt rejection by cultures still resistant to contamination of their traditions and sensibilities.
True, millions of human beings still inhabit villages, struggling to get a living within highly conservative communities with traditional tools and methods, while all-too-visible inequalities between life in rich and poor countries dwarf any differences that existed in the past. The rich are now richer than ever, and there are more of them, while a thousand years ago all societies were by modern standards poor. Thus, in that way at least, they were closer to one another in their daily lives than they are today. The difficulty of winning one’s daily bread and the fragility of human life before the mysterious, implacable forces which cut them down like grass, were things all men and women had in common whatever language they spoke or creed they followed. Now, a large minority of mankind live in countries with an average per capita annual income of over $3000, and millions of others in countries where the corresponding figure is less than one-tenth of this sum and there are colossal distinctions even among the poor. Such disparities are relatively recent creations of a brief historical era; we should no more assume they will endure for long than that they will easily or swiftly disappear.
The leading classes and elites, even in the poorest countries, have for at least a century looked to some version of modernization as a way out of their troubles. Their aspirations appear to confirm the pervasive influence of a civilization originally European. Some have said that modernization is only a matter of technology and that more fundamental matters of belief, institutions and attitudes remain stronger determinants of social behaviour, but this side-steps questions about the way material experience shapes culture. The evidence is growing that certain master ideas and institutions, too, as well as material artefacts and techniques, have already spread generally among mankind. Whatever the practical effect of such documents as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the interest shown in drawing them up and signing them has symptomatically been intense, even when some signatories have little intention of respecting them. Such principles always turn out to be derived from the western European tradition, and whether we regard that tradition as greedy, oppressive, brutal and exploitative, or as objectively improving, beneficent and humane, is neither here nor there. Aztec and Inca civilizations could not stand up to the Spanish; Hindu and Chinese civilizations were only slightly more successful against later ‘Franks’. Such statements can be true or untrue: but the facts are neither admirable nor repugnant. They register the fact that Europe reshaped an old, and made the modern, world.
Some ‘western’ ideas and institutions derived ultimately from Europe have often been deeply resented and resisted. Women are still not treated in the same way - whether for good or ill is here irrelevant - in Islamic and Christian societies, but neither are they treated in the same way in all Islamic societies which now exist, or within all of what we might call ‘western’ societies. Indians still take into account astrology in fixing the day of a wedding, while English people may find train timetables (if they are able get accurate information about them) or imperfect weather information, which they believe to be ‘scientific’, more relevant. Differing traditions make even the use of shared technology and ideas different. Japanese capitalism has not worked in the same way as British, and any explanation must lie deep in the different histories of two peoples similar in other respects (as invasion-free islanders, for example). Yet no other tradition has shown the same vigour and attractiveness in alien settings as the European: it has had no competitors as a world-shaper.
Even its grossest manifestations - its material greed and rapacity - show this. Societies once rooted in changeless acceptance of things as they are have taken up the belief that limitless improvement in material well-being is a proper goal for them. The very idea that willed change is possible is itself deeply subversive, as is the notion that it may be a road to happiness. Large numbers of people now know that things have changed in their own lifetimes, and sense that there can and probably will be still further change for the better. A spreading attitude of unquestioning, not very reflective, acceptance that human problems are in principle manageable or at least remediable is a major psychological transformation; it was hardly foreseeable, let alone established, even among Europeans only a couple of centuries ago. Although for most of their lives millions of human beings still rarely contemplate the future except with deep unhappiness and misgiving - and that is when they can summon up the energy to consider it at all, for they are often still going hungry - in the normal course of events more millions than ever before do not go hungry, nor do they seem in any obvious danger of doing so. More people than ever now take it for granted that they will never know real need. A smaller, but still huge, number find it easy to believe that their lives will improve, and many more feel they ought to.
This change in outlook is of course most obvious in rich societies which now consume much more of the earth’s resources than the rich could do even a few decades ago. In the western world, for all its comparatively deprived minorities and underclasses, most people are now in this sense rich. Only about 200 years ago a typical Englishman would have been unlikely in the whole of his life to have been able to travel more than a few miles from the place where he was born except on his own two feet. Only 150 years ago he would not have had assured supplies of clean water. A hundred years ago, he still faced a good chance of being crippled or even killed by a casual accident, or by disease for which no remedy was known or existed, and for which no nursing care would be available to him, while many like him and his family ate meagre meals so lacking in balance and nourishment (to say nothing of being dull and unappetizing) that their like is now eaten only by the poorest in this country; and they could expect in their fifties and sixties (if they survived so long) the onset of a painful and penurious old age. Much the same could be said of other Europeans, and of North Americans, Australasians, Japanese and many others. Now millions of even the poorest worldwide can glimpse possibilities of changes in their lot for the better.
More important still are those who have come to believe that such change can be sought, promoted and actually brought about. Their politicians tell them so; it is now evident that peoples and governments implicitly believe it to be a matter of fact that many specific problems in their lives and the lives of their societies can be solved. Many go further and feel that, therefore, they will be. This cannot, of course, logically be taken for granted. We may well be at the end of cheap fossil fuel and plentiful water supplies. We may well also feel sceptical about rearranging the world to increase the sum of human happiness when we remember some of the twentieth century’s attempts at social engineering, or the superstition and sectarianism, intransigent moralisms and tribal loyalties that still cost so much in misery and blood. Nevertheless, more people than ever now behave as if most of their problems are in principle soluble or remediable. This is a revolution in human attitudes. No doubt its deepest origins lie far, far back in those prehistoric millennia of slowly growing capacity to manipulate nature, when pre-human beings learned to manage fire or to put an edge on a convenient piece of flint. The abstract idea that such manipulation might be possible took shape only much more recently, and at first as the insight of only a few in certain crucial eras and cultural zones. But the idea is now commonplace; it has triumphed worldwide. We now take it for granted that people everywhere should and will begin to ask themselves why things remain as they are when they evidently might be made better. It is one of the greatest of changes in all history.