Читать онлайн "The Penguin History of the World [6th edition]" - Roberts J. M. - RuLit

It is quite possible that ideas and technologies created mainly by Europeans will find their future global form at the hands and minds of people from other cultures. Indeed, much of the information we now have at our disposal indicates that this is likely, at least in some fields. The big story of the last fifty years seems to be the gradual transfer of wealth and power from the western to the eastern hemisphere, accentuated by the most recent economic crisis. This is not something new in human history. In many ways it is a return to the situation prior to the nineteenth century, when Asia was by far the most productive continent on earth, though not always the most technically advanced one. And of course this does not mean that Europe and its various offshoots will be irrelevant to history as it continues to unfold. But it does mean, perhaps, that significant elements of future global civilization will be centred on Beijing and Delhi, rather than Washington, Paris and London.

Such developments will ask all kinds of questions about how humanity will cope with change. Though continuing to shape it, humankind can no more than in the past control the course of history for long. Even in the most tightly controlled essays in modernization, new and unexpected needs and directions erupt from time to time. Perhaps there now also looms up the spectre that modernization’s success may have communicated to mankind goals which are materially and psychologically unachievable, limitlessly expanding and unsatisfiable in principle as they are.

This can hardly be a prospect to be lightly regarded but prophecy is not the historian’s business, even if disguised as extrapolation. Guesses, though, are permissible if they throw light on the scale of present facts or serve as pedagogic aids. Perhaps fossil fuels will go the way that the larger prehistoric mammals went at the hands of human hunters – or perhaps they will not. The historian’s subject-matter remains the past. It is all he has to talk about. When it is the recent past, what he can try to do is to see consistency or inconsistency, continuity or discontinuity with what has gone before, and to face honestly the difficulties posed by the mass of facts that crowd in on us, in recent history in particular. The very confusion they present suggests a much more revolutionary period than any earlier one and all that has been said so far about the continuing acceleration of change confirms this. This does not, on the other hand, imply that these more violent and sweeping changes do not emerge from the past in a way that is explicable and for the most part understandable.

Awareness of such problems is part of the reason why there now seem to be so many fewer plausible ways of seeing the world than in former times. For centuries, the Chinese could think untroubledly and unquestioningly in terms of a world order normally centred on a universal monarchy in Beijing, sustained by divine mandate. Many Muslims did not, and some still do not, find much place in their thinking for the abstract idea of the state; for some, the distinction of believer and non-believer is more significant. Many millions of Africans long found no difficulty in doing without any conception of science. Meanwhile, those who lived in ‘western’ countries could divide the world in their minds into ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, just as Englishmen could once distinguish ‘Gentlemen’ from ‘Players’ on the cricket field.

That such sharp disparities are now so much eroded marks the degree to which we are ‘one world’ at last. The Chinese intellectual now speaks the language of liberalism or Marxism. In Jeddah and Tehran, thoughtful Muslims have to confront a tension between the pull of religion and the need to have at least some intellectual acquaintance with the dangerous temptations of an alien modernism. India at times seems schizophrenically torn between the values of the secular democracy its leaders envisaged in 1947 and the pull of its past. But the past is with all of us, for good and ill. History, we must recognize, still clutters up our present and there is no sign that that will come to an end.

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ALLEN LANE

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Great Britain as The Hutchinson History of the World by Hutchinson 1976

First published in the USA as History of the World by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1976

Revised edition published as The Pelican History of the World in Pelican Books 1980

Third revised edition published as History of the World by Helicon Publishing 1992

Fourth revised edition published as The New Penguin History of the World by Allen Lane 2002

Fifth revised edition published in Penguin Books 2004

Sixth revised edition published under the present title by Allen Lane 2013

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-14-196872-8