But, of course, with the decline of the real communities to which people had been used – village and kin, parish and barrio, gild, confraternity or whatever – a decline which occurred because they clearly no longer encompassed, as they once had done, most contingencies of people’s lives, their members felt a need for something to take their place. The imaginary community of ‘the nation’ could fill this void.

It found itself attached, and inevitably so, to that characteristic phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the ‘nation-state’. For as a matter of politics, Pilsudski was right. The state not only made the nation, but needed to make the nation. Governments now reached down directly to each citizen on their territory in everyday life, through modest but omnipresent agents, from postmen and policemen to teachers and (in many countries) railway employees. They might require his, and eventually even her, active personal commitment to the state: in fact their ‘patriotism’. Authorities in an increasingly democratic age, who could no longer rely on the social orders submitting spontaneously to their social superiors in the traditional manner, or on traditional religion as an effective guarantee of social obedience, needed a way of welding together the state’s subjects against subversion and dissidence. ‘The nation’ was the new civic religion of states. It provided a cement which bonded all citizens to their state, a way to bring the nation-state directly to each citizen, and a counterweight to those who appealed to other loyalties over state loyalty – to religion, to nationality or ethnicity not identified with the state, perhaps above all to class. In constitutional states, the more the masses were drawn into politics by elections, the more scope there was for such appeals to be heard.

The half-century before 1914 was a classic era of xenophobia, and therefore of nationalist reaction to it, because – even leaving aside global colonialism – it was an era of massive mobility and migration and, especially during the Depression decades, of open or concealed social tension. To take a single example: by 1914 something like 3.6 millions (or almost 15 per cent of the population) had permanently left the territory of inter-war Poland, not counting another half-million a year of seasonal migrants. The consequent xenophobia did not only come from below. Its most unexpected manifestations, which reflected the crisis of bourgeois liberalism, came from the established middle classes, who were not likely actually ever to meet the sort of people who settled on New York’s Lower East Side or who lived in the harvest-labourers’ barracks in Saxony. Max Weber, glory of open-minded German bourgeois scholarship, developed so passionate an animus against the Poles (whom he, correctly, accused German landowners of importing en masse as cheap labour) that he actually joined the ultra-nationalist Pan-German League in the 1890s. The real systematization of race-prejudice against ‘Slavs, Mediterraneans and Semites’ in the USA is to be found among the native white, preferably Protestant anglophone-born middle and upper classes, which even, in this period, invented their own heroic nativist myth of the white Anglo-Saxon (and fortunately non-unionized ) cowboy of the wide open spaces, so different from the dangerous antheaps of the swelling great cities.

In fact, for this bourgeoisie the influx of the alien poor dramatized and symbolized the problems raised by the expanding urban proletariat, combining as they did the characteristics of internal and external ‘barbarians’, which threatened to swamp civilization as respectable men knew it…. They also dramatized, nowhere more than in the USA, the apparent inability of society to cope with the problems of headlong change, and the unpardonable failure of the new masses to accept the superior position of the old elites. It was in Boston, the centre of the traditional white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant bourgeoisie, both educated and wealthy, that the Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1893. Politically the xenophobia of the middle classes was almost certainly more effective than the xenophobia of the labouring classes, which reflected cultural frictions between neighbours and the of low-wage competition for jobs. Except in one respect. It was sectional working-class pressure which actually excluded foreigners from labour markets, since for employers the incentive to import cheap labour was almost irresistible. Where exclusion kept the stranger out entirely, as did the bans on non-white immigrants in California and Australia, which triumphed in the 1880s and 1890s, this produced no national or communal friction, but where it discriminated against a group already on the spot, such as Africans in white South Africa or Catholics in Northern Ireland, it was naturally apt to do so. However, working-class xenophobia was rarely very effective before 1914. All things considered, the greatest international migration of people in history produced surprisingly little by way of anti-foreign labour agitations even in the USA, and sometimes virtually none, as in Argentina and Brazil.

But nationalism was linked to the middle strata in another way, which gave both it and them a twist towards the political right. Xenophobia appealed readily to traders, independent craftsmen and some farmers threatened by the progress of the industrial economy, especially, once again, during the hard-pressed years of the Depression. The foreigner came to symbolize the disruption of old ways and the capitalist system which disrupted them. Thus the virulent political anti-Semitism which we have observed spreading across the western world from the 1880s had little to do with the actual number of Jews against whom it was directed: it was as effective in France, where there were 60,000 among 40 millions, in Germany where there were half a million among 65 millions, as in Vienna where they formed 15 per cent of the population. (It was not a political factor in Budapest, where they formed a quarter of it). This anti-Semitism took aim rather against the bankers, entrepreneurs and others who were identified with the ravages of capitalism among the ‘little men’. The typical cartoon image of the capitalist in the belle époque was not just a fat man in a top hat smoking a cigar, but one with a Jewish nose — because the fields of enterprise in which Jews were prominent competed with small shopkeepers and gave or refused credit to farmers and small artisans.

Anti-Semitism, the German socialist leader Bebel therefore felt, was ‘the socialism of idiots’. Yet what strikes us about the rise of political anti-Semitism at the end of the century is not so much the equation ‘Jew=capitalist’, which was not implausible in large parts of east-central Europe, but its association with right-wing nationalism. This was not only due to the rise of socialist movements which systematically combated the latent or overt xenophobia of their supporters, so that a deeply rooted dislike of foreigners and Jews in those quarters tended to be rather more shamefaced than in the past. It marked a distinct shift of the nationalist ideology to the right in the major states, especially in the 1890s, when we can see, for instance, the old mass organizations of German nationalism, the Turner (gymnastic associations), veer from the liberalism inherited from the 1848 revolution to an aggressive, militalist and anti-Semitic posture. This is when the banners of patriotism became so much a property of the political right that the left found trouble in grasping them, even where patriotism was as firmly identified with revolution and the cause of the people as was the French tricolour. To brandish the national name and flag, they felt, risked contamination from the ultra-right. Not until the days of Hitler did the French left recover the full use of jacobin patriotism.

Patriotism shifted to the political right, not only because its former ideological stablemate, bourgeois liberalism, was in disarray, but because the international situation which had apparently made liberalism and nationalism compatible no longer held good. Up to the 1870s – perhaps even up to the Congress of Berlin of 1878 – it could be claimed that one nation-state’s gain was not necessarily another’s loss. Indeed, the map of Europe had been transformed by the creation of two major new nation-states (Germany and Italy) and the formation of several minor ones in the Balkans, without either war or intolerable disruption of the international state system. Until the Great Depression something very like global free trade, while perhaps benefiting Britain rather more than others, had been in the interest of all. Yet from the 1870s on such claims ceased to ring true, and as a global conflict came, once more, to be considered as a serious, if not an impending possibility, the sort of nationalism which saw other nations frankly as menace or victims gained ground.

It both bred and was encouraged by the movements of the political right which emerged out of the crisis of liberalism. Indeed the men who first called themselves by the novel name of ‘nationalists’ were frequently stimulated into political action by the experience of their state’s defeat in war, like Maurice Barres (1862–1923) and Paul Derouléde (1846–1914) after the German victory over France in 1870–1, and Enrico Corradini (1865–1931) after Italy’s even more galling defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in 1896. And the movements they founded, which brought the word ‘nationalism’ into the general dictionaries, were quite deliberately set up ‘in reaction against the democracy then in government’, i.e. against parliamentary politics. The French movements of this kind remained marginal, like the Action Francaise (est. 1898) which lost itself in a politically irrelevant monarchism and in vituperative prose. The Italian ones eventually merged with fascism after the First World War. They were characteristic of a new breed of political movements built on chauvinism, xenophobia and, increasingly, the idealization of national expansion, conquest and the very act of war.

Such nationalism lent itself exceptionally well to expressing the collective resentments of people who could not explain their discontents precisely. It was the foreigners’ fault. The Dreyfus case gave French anti-Semitism a special edge, not only because the accused was a Jew (what business had an alien in the French general staff?) but because his alleged crime was espionage on behalf of Germany. Conversely, the blood of ‘good’ Germans curdled at the thought that their country was being systematically 'encircled' by the alliance of its enemies, as their leaders frequently reminded them. Meanwhile the English were getting ready to celebrate the outbreak of the world war (like other belligerent peoples) by an outburst of anti-alien hysteria which made it advisable to change the German family name of the royal dynasty to the Anglo-Saxon ‘Windsor’. No doubt every native citizen, apart from a minority of internationalist socialists, a few intellectuals, cosmopolitan businessmen and the members of the international club of aristocrats and royals, felt the appeal of chauvinism to some extent. No doubt almost all, including even many socialists and intellectuals, were so deeply imbued with the fundamental racism of nineteenth-century civilization … that they were also indirectly vulnerable to the temptations which come from believing one’s own class or people to have a built-in natural superiority over others. Imperialism could not but reinforce these temptations among members of imperial states. Yet there is little doubt that those who responded most eagerly to the nationalist bugles were to be found somewhere between the established upper classes of society and the peasants and proletarians at the bottom.

For this widening body of middle strata, nationalism also had a wider and less instrumental appeal. It provided them with a collective identity as the ‘true defenders’ of the nation which eluded them as a class, or as aspirants to the full bourgeois status they so much coveted. Patriotism compensated for social inferiority. Thus in Britain, where there was no compulsory military service, the curve of volunteer recruitment of working-class soldiers in the imperialist South African War (1899–1902) simply reflects the economic situation. It rose and fell with unemployment. But the curve of recruitment for lower-middle-class and white-collar youths clearly reflected the appeals of patriotic propaganda. And, in a sense, patriotism in uniform could bring its social rewards. In Germany it provided the potential status as reserve officer for boys who had undergone secondary education to the age of sixteen, even if they went no further. In Britain, as the war was to show, even clerks and salesmen in the service of the nation could become officers and – in the brutally frank terminology of the British upper class ‘temporary gentlemen’.

More surprisingly, as we have already suggested, parties whose original and primary object was international class and social liberation found themselves becoming the vehicles of national liberation also. The re-establishment of an independent Poland was achieved, not under the leadership of any of the numerous nineteenth-century parties devoted exclusively to independence, but under leadership coming from the Second International’s Polish Socialist Party. Armenian nationalism shows the same pattern, as indeed does Jewish territorial nationalism. What made Israel was not Herzl or Weizmann, but (Russian-inspired) labour Zionism. And while some such parties were, justifiably, criticized within international socialism because they put nationalism a long way before social liberation, this cannot be said of other socialist, or even Marxist, parties which found themselves to their surprise to be the representative of particular nations: the Finnish Socialist Party, the Mensheviks in Georgia, the Jewish Bund in large areas of eastern Europe – in fact, even the rigidly non-nationalist Bolsheviks in Latvia. Conversely, nationalist movements became aware of the desirability of spelling out, if not a specific social programme, then at least a concern with economic and social questions. Characteristically it was in industrialized Bohemia, torn between Czechs and Germans both drawn to labour movements, that movements specifically describing themselves as ‘national socialist’ emerged. The Czech national socialists eventually became the characteristic party of independent Czechoslovakia, and provided its last President (Beneš). The German national socialists inspired a young Austrian who took their name and their combination of anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism with a vague populist social demagogy into post-war Germany: Adolf Hitler.

As for the western belligerents, in the course of the war anti-war feeling and social discontent increasingly overlaid, but without destroying, the patriotism of the mass armies. The extraordinary international impact of the Russian revolutions of 1917 is comprehensible only if we bear in mind that those who had gone to war willingly, even enthusiastically, in 1914 were moved by the idea of patriotism which could not be confined within nationalist slogans: for it included a sense of what was due to citizens. These armies had not gone to war out of a taste for fighting, for violence and heroism, or to pursue the unconditional national egoism and expansionism of the nationalism of the right. And still less out of hostility to liberalism and democracy.

On the contrary. The domestic propaganda of all belligerents with mass politics demonstrates, in 1914, that the point to stress was not glory and conquest, but that ‘we’ were the victims of aggression, or of a policy of aggression, that ‘they’ represented a mortal threat to the values of freedom and civilization which ‘we’ embodied. What is more, men and women would not be successfully mobilized for the war unless they felt that the war was more than a plain armed combat: that in some sense the world would be better for ‘our’ victory and ‘our’ country would be – to use Lloyd George’s phrase – ‘a land fit for heroes live in’. The British and French governments thus claimed to defend democracy and freedom against monarchical power, militarism and barbarism (‘the Huns’), while the German government claimed to defend the values of order, law and culture against Russian autocracy and barbarism. The prospects of conquest and imperial aggrandizement could be advertised in colonial wars, but not in the major conflicts even if they occupied foreign ministries behind the scenes.

The German, French and British masses who marched to war in 1914 did so, not as warriors or adventurers, but as citizens and civilians. Yet this very fact demonstrates both the necessity of patriotism for governments operating in democratic societies and its force. For only the sense that the cause of the state was genuinely their own could mobilize the masses effectively: and in 1914 the British, French and Germans had it. They were so mobilized, until three years of unparalleled massacre and the example of revolution in Russia taught them that they had been mistaken.

The main bread-winner had to aim at earning an income sufficient to maintain all his dependants. His earnings (for he was typically a male) ought therefore ideally to be fixed at a level which did not require any other contribution to produce a family wage sufficient to keep all. Conversely, the income of other family members was conceived of as at best complementary, and this reinforced the traditional belief that women’s (and of course children’s) work was inferior and low-paid. After all, the woman needed to be paid less since she did not have to earn the family income. Since better-paid men would have their wages reduced by the competition of low-paid women, the logical strategy for them was to exclude such competition if possible, thus pressing women further into economic dependence or permanent low-wage occupations. At the same time, from the woman's point of view, dependence became the optimum economic strategy. By far her best chance of getting a good income lay in attaching herself to a man who was capable of bringing it home, since her own chance of earning such a living was usually minimal. Apart from the higher reaches of prostitution, which were no easier to reach than Hollywood stardom in later days, her most promising career was marriage. But marriage made it exceedingly difficult for her to go out to earn a living even had she wanted to, partly because domestic work and looking after children and husband tied her to the household, partly because the very assumption that a good husband was by definition a good bread-winner intensified the conventional resistance, by both men and women, to the wife’s work. The fact that she could be seen not to need to work was the visible proof, before society, that the family was not pauperized. Everything conspired to keep the married woman a dependant. Women habitually went to work until they married. They were very often obliged to go to work when widowed or abandoned by their husbands. But they did not usually do so when married. In the 1890s only 12.8 per cent of German married women had a recognized occupation. In Britain (1911) only about 10 per cent had one.

Since a great many adult male bread-winners could plainly not bring home an adequate family income by themselves, the paid labour of women and children was, in fact, only too often essential to the family budget. Moreover, since women and children were notoriously cheap labour and easy to brow-beat, especially since most female labour consisted of young girls, the economy of capitalism encouraged their employment wherever possible i.e. where not prevented by the resistance of the men, by law, by convention, or by the nature of certain physically taxing jobs. There was thus a great deal of women’s work even according to the narrow criteria of the censuses, which in any case almost certainly substantially understated the amount of ‘occupied’ married women, since much of their paid work would not be reported as such or would not be distinguished from the domestic tasks with which it overlapped: the taking in of lodgers, part-time work as domestic cleaners, laundresses and the like. In Britain 34 per cent of women over the age often were ‘occupied’ in the 1880s and 1890s – compared with 83 per cent of the men, and in ‘industry’ the proportion of women ranged from 18 per cent in Germany to 31 per cent in France. Women’s work in industry was at the beginning of our period still overwhelmingly concentrated in a few typically ‘female’ branches, notably textiles and clothing but increasingly also food manufacture. However, the majority of women earning an income as individuals did so in the service sector. The number and proportion of domestic servants, curiously enough, varied very greatly. It was probably larger in Britain than anywhere else – probably nearly twice as high as in France or Germany – but from the end of the century it began to fall quite notably. In the extreme case of Britain, where the number had doubled between 1851 and 1891 (from 1.1 to 2 millions) it remained stable for the rest of the period.

Taking it all in all, we can see nineteenth-century industrialization – using the word in its widest sense – as a process which tended to extrude women, and particularly married women, from the economy officially defined as such, namely that in which only those who received an individual cash income counted as ‘occupied’: the sort of economics which included the earnings of prostitutes in the ‘national income’, at least in theory, but not the equivalent but unpaid conjugal or extraconjugal activities of other women, or which counted paid servants as ‘occupied’ but unpaid domestic work as ‘unoccupied’. It produced a certain masculinization of what economics recognized as ‘labour’, just as in the bourgeois world where the prejudice against women working was far greater and more easily applied … it produced a masculinization of business. In pre-industrial times women who themselves looked after estate or enterprise were recognized, though not common. In the nineteenth century they were increasingly considered as freaks of nature, except at the inferior social levels where poverty and the general lowness of the lower orders made it impossible to regard the large numbers of female shopkeepers and market-women, inn- and lodging-house-keepers, small traders and moneylenders as quite so ‘unnatural’.

In spite of the fact that theoretical physicists and even mathematicians are also human beings, these links are not obvious in their case. Conscious or unconscious political influences may be read into their debates, but not with much profit. Imperialism and the rise of mass labour movements may help to elucidate developments in biology, but hardly in symbolic logic or quantum theory. Events in the world outside their studies in the years from 1875 and 1914 were not so cataclysmic as to intervene directly in their labours – as they were to do after 1914, and as they may have done in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Revolutions in the world of the intellect in this period can hardly be derived by analogy from revolutions in the outside world. And yet every historian is struck by the fact that the revolutionary transformation of the scientific world view in these years forms part of a more general, and dramatic, abandonment of established and often long-accepted values, truths and ways of looking at the world and structuring it conceptually. It may be pure accident or arbitrary selection that Planck’s quantum theory, the rediscovery of Mendel, Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Cézanne's Still Life with Onions can all be dated 1900 – it would be equally possible to open the new century with Ostwald’s Inorganic Chemistry, Puccini's Tosca, Colette's first ‘Claudine’ novel and Rostand’s L’Aiglon – but the coincidence of dramatic innovation in several fields remains striking.

One clue to the transformation has already been suggested. It was negative rather than positive, insofar as it replaced what had been regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a coherent, potentially comprehensive scientific view of the world in which reason was not at odds with intuition, with no equivalent alternative. As we have seen, the theorists themselves were puzzled and disoriented. Neither Planck nor Einstein was prepared to give up the rational, causal, determinist universe which their work did so much to destroy. Planck was as hostile as Lenin to Ernst Mach’s neo-positivism. Mach, in turn, though one of the rare early sceptics about the physical universe of late-nineteenth-century scientists, was to be equally sceptical of the theory of relativity. The small world of mathematics, as we have seen, was split by battles about whether mathematical truth could be more than formal. At least the natural numbers and time were ‘real’, thought Brouwer. The truth is that theorists found themselves faced with contradictions which they could not resolve, for even the ‘paradoxes’ (a euphemism for contradictions) which the symbolic logicians tried so hard to overcome were not satisfactorily eliminated – not even, as Russell was to admit, by the monumental labours of his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910—13). The least troublesome solution was a retreat into that neo-positivism which was to become the nearest thing to an accepted philosophy of science in the twentieth century. The neo-positivist current which emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, with writers like Duhern, Mach, Pearson and the chemist Ostwald, is not to be confused with the positivism which dominated the natural and social sciences before the new scientific revolution. That positivism believed that it could found the coherent view of the world which was about to be challenged on true theories based on the tested and systematized experience of the (ideally experimental) sciences, i.e. on ‘the facts’ of nature as discovered by scientific method. In turn these ‘positive’ sciences, as distinct from the undisciplined speculation of theology and metaphysics, would provide the firm foundation for law, politics, morality and religion – in short, for the ways in which human beings lived together in society and articulated their hopes for the future.

Non-scientific critics like Husserl pointed out that ‘the exclusiveness with which the total world view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the “prosperity” which they produced, meant an indifferent turning away from the questions which were decisive for a genuine humanity.’ Neo-positivists concentrated on the conceptual defects of the positive sciences themselves. Faced with scientific theories which, now seen to be inadequate, could also be seen to be ‘a forcing of language and a straining of definitions’ and with pictorial models (like the ‘billiard-ball atom’) which were unsatisfactory, they chose two linked ways out of the difficulty. On the one hand they proposed a reconstruction of science on a ruthlessly empiricist and even phenomenalist basis, on the other a rigorous formalization and axiomatization of the bases of science. This eliminated speculations about the relations between the ‘real world’ and our interpretations of it, i.e. about the ‘truth’ as distinct from the internal consistency and usefulness of propositions, without interfering with the actual practice of science. Scientific theories, as Henri Poincaré said flatly, were ‘neither true nor false’ but merely useful.

It has been suggested that the rise of neo-positivism at the end of the century made possible the scientific revolution by allowing physical ideas to be transformed without bothering about prior preconceptions about the universe, causality and natural laws. This, in spite of Einstein’s admiration for Mach, is both to give too much credit to philosophers of science – even those who tell scientists not to bother about philosophy and to underestimate the very general crisis of accepted nineteenth-century ideas in this period, of which neo-positivist agnosticism and the rethinking of mathematics and physics were only some aspects. For if we are to see this transformation in its historical context at all, it must be as part of this general crisis. And if we are to find a common denominator for the multiple aspects of this crisis, which affected virtually all branches of intellectual activity in varying degrees, it must be that all were confronted after the 1870s with the unexpected, unpredicted and often incomprehensible results of Progress. Or, to be more precise, with the contradictions it generated.

To use a metaphor suited to the confident Age of Capital, the railway lines constructed by humanity were expected to lead to destinations which the travellers might not know, having not yet arrived there, but about whose existence and general nature they had no real doubt. Just so Jules Verne’s travellers to the moon had no doubt about the existence of that satellite, or about what, having got there, they would already know and what remained to be discovered by closer inspection on the ground. The twentieth century could be predicted, by extrapolation, as an improved and more splendid version of the mid-nineteenth. And yet, as the travellers looked out of the window of humanity’s train while it moved steadily forward into the future, could the landscape they saw, unanticipated, enigmatic and troubling, really be on the way to the destination indicated on their tickets? Had they entered the wrong train? Worse: had they entered the right train which was somehow taking them in a direction they neither wanted nor liked? If so, how had this nightmare situation arisen?

Perhaps another form of confronting the intellectual crisis should be mentioned here. For one way of thinking the then unthinkable was to reject reason and science altogether. It is difficult to measure the strength of this reaction against the intellect in the last years of the old century, or even, in retrospect, to appreciate its strength. Many of its more vocal champions belonged to the underworld or demimonde of the intelligence, and are today forgotten. We are apt to overlook the vogue for occultism, necromancy, magic, parapsychology (which preoccupied some leading British intellectuals) and various versions of eastern mysticism and religiosity, which swept along the fringes of western culture. The unknown and incomprehensible became more popular than they had been since the early romantic era … We may note in passing that the fashion for such matters, which had once been located largely on the self-educated left, now tended to move sharply to the political right. For the heterodox disciplines were no longer, as they had once been, would-be sciences like phrenology, homeopathy, spiritualism and other forms of parapsychology, favoured by those who were sceptical of the conventional learning of the establishment, but rejections of science and all its methods. However, while these forms of obscurantism made some contributions of substance to the avant garde arts (as, for instance, via the painter Kandinsky and the poet W. B. Yeats), their impact on the natural sciences was negligible.

Have you heard of Sinn Fein in Ireland?. . . It is a most interesting movement and resembles very closely the so-called Extremist movement in India. Their policy is not to beg for favours but to wrest them.
                Jawaharlal Nehru (aged eighteen) to his father, 12 September 1907

In Russia the sovereign and the people are both of the Slav race, but simply because the people cannot bear the poison of autocracy, they are willing to sacrifice millions of lives to buy freedom. . . .But when I look at my country I cannot control my feelings. For not only has it the same autocracy as Russia but for 200 years we have been trampled upon by foreign barbarians.
                 A Chinese revolutionary, c. 1903–4

You are not alone, workers and peasants of Russia! If you succeed in overthrowing, crushing and destroying the tyrants of feudal, police-ridden landlord and tsarist Russia your victory will serve as a signal for a world struggle against the tyranny of capital.
                 V. I. Lenin, 1905

After 1914 mass catastrophe, and increasingly the methods of barbarism, became an integral and expected part of the civilized world, so much so that it masked the continued and striking advances of technology and the human capacity to produce, and even the undeniable improvements in human social organization in many parts of the world, until these became quite impossible to overlook during the huge forward leap of the world economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. In terms of the material improvement of the lot of humanity, not to mention of the human understanding and control over nature, the case for seeing the history of the twentieth century as progress is actually rather more compelling than it was in the nineteenth. For even as Europeans died and fled in their millions, the survivors were becoming more numerous, taller, healthier, longer-lived. And most of them lived better. But the reasons why we have got out of the habit of thinking of our history as progress are obvious. For even when twentieth-century progress is most undeniable, prediction suggests not a continued ascent, but the possibility, perhaps even the imminence, of some catastrophe: another and more lethal world war, an ecological disaster, a technology whose triumphs may make the world uninhabitable by the human species, or whatever current shape the nightmare may take. We have been taught by the experience of our century to live in the expectation of apocalypse.

But for the educated and comfortable members of the bourgeois world who lived through this era of catastrophe and social convulsion, it seemed to be, in the first instance, not a fortuitous cataclysm, something like a global hurricane which impartially devastated everything in its path. It seemed to be directed specifically at their social, political and moral order. Its probable outcome, which bourgeois liberalism was powerless to prevent, was the social revolution of the masses. In Europe the war produced not only the collapse or crisis of every state and regime east of the Rhine and the western edge of the Alps, but also the first regime which set out, deliberately and systematically, to turn this collapse into the global overthrow of capitalism, the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a socialist society. This was the Bolshevik regime brought to power in Russia by the collapse of tsarism. As we have seen, mass movements of the proletariat dedicated to this aim in theory were already in existence in most parts of the developed world, although politicians in parliamentary countries had concluded that they provided no real threat to the status quo. But the combination of war, collapse and the Russian Revolution made the danger immediate and, almost, overwhelming.

The danger of “Bolshevism” dominates not only the history of the years immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917, but the entire history of the world since that date. It has given even its international conflicts for long periods the appearance of civil and ideological war. In the late twentieth century it still dominated the rhetoric of super-power confrontation, at least unilaterally, even though the most cursory look at the world of the 1980s showed that it simply did not fit into the image of a single global revolution about to overwhelm what international jargon called the “developed market economies”, still less one orchestrated from a single centre and aiming at the construction of a single monolithic socialist system unwilling to coexist with capitalism or incapable of doing so. The history of the world since the First World War took shape in the shadow of Lenin, imagined or real, as the history of the western world in the nineteenth century took shape in the shadow of the French Revolution. In both cases it eventually moved out of that shadow, but not entirely. Just as politicians even in 1914, speculated about whether the mood of the pre-war years had recalled 1848, so in the 1980s every overthrow of some regime anywhere in the west or the Third World evokes hopes or fears of ‘Marxist power’.

The world did not turn socialist, even though in 1917–20 this was regarded as possible, even in the long run as inevitable, not only by Lenin but, at least for a moment, by those who represented and governed bourgeois regimes. For a few months even European capitalists, or at least their intellectual spokesmen and administrators, seemed resigned to euthanasia, as they faced socialist working-class movements enormously strengthened since 1914, and indeed, in some countries like Germany and Austria, constituting the only organized and potentially state-sustaining forces left in being by the collapse of the old regimes. Anything was better than Bolshevism, even peaceful abdication. The extensive debates (mainly in 1919) on how much of the economies were to be socialized, how they were to be socialized, and how much was to be conceded to the new powers of the proletariats were not purely tactical manoeuvres to gain time. They merely turned out to have been such when the period of serious danger to the system, real or imagined, proved to have been so brief that nothing drastic needed to be done after all.

In retrospect we can see that the alarm was exaggerated. The moment of potential world revolution left behind nothing but a single communist regime in an extraordinarily weakened and backward country whose main asset lay in the vast size and resources that were to make her into a political super-power. It also left behind the considerable potential of anti-imperialist, modernizing and peasant revolution, at that time mainly in Asia, which recognized its affinities with the Russian Revolution, and those parts of the now divided pre-1914 socialist and labour movements which threw in their lot with Lenin. In industrial countries these communist movements generally represented a minority of the labour movements until the Second World War. As the future was to demonstrate, the economies and societies of the ‘developed market economies’ were remarkably tough. Had they not been, they could hardly have emerged without social revolution from some thirty years of historical gales which might have been expected to wreck unseaworthy vessels. The twentieth century has been full of social revolutions, and there may well be more of them before it ends; but the developed industrial societies have been more immune to them than any others, except when revolution came to them as the by-product of military defeat or conquest.

Revolution thus left the main bastions of world capitalism standing, though for a while even their defenders thought they were about to crumble. The old order fought off the challenge. But it did so – it had to do so – by turning itself into something very different from what it had been in 1914. For after 1914, faced with what an eminent liberal historian called ‘the world crisis’ (Elie Halévy), bourgeois liberalism was entirely at a loss. It could abdicate or be swept away. Alternatively, it could assimilate itself to something like the non-Bolshevik, non-revolutionary, ‘reformist’ social democratic parties which actually emerged in western Europe as the chief guarantors of social and political continuity after 1917, and consequently turned from parties of opposition into parties of potential or actual government. In short, it could disappear or make itself unrecognizable. But in its old form it could no longer cope.

Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) of Italy … is an example of the first fate. As we have seen, he had been brilliantly successful at ‘managing’ the Italian politics of the early 1900s: conciliating and taming labour, buying political support, wheeling and dealing, conceding, avoiding confrontations. In the socially revolutionary post-war situation of his country these tactics utterly failed him. The stability of bourgeois society was re-established by means of the armed middle-class gangs of ‘nationalists’ and fascists, literally waging the class war against a labour movement incapable of itself making a revolution. The (liberal) politicians supported them, vainly hoping to be able to integrate them into their system. In 1922 the fascists took over as government, after which democracy, parliament, parties and the old liberal politicians were eliminated. The Italian case was merely one among many. Between 1920 and 1939 parliamentary democratic systems virtually disappeared from most European states, non-communist as well as communist. The fact speaks for itself. For a generation liberalism in Europe seemed doomed.

John Maynard Keynes, also discussed above …, is an example of the second choice, all the more interesting because he actually remained all his life a supporter of the British Liberal Party and a class-conscious member of what he called his class, ‘the educated bourgeoisie’. As a young economist Keynes had been almost quintessentially orthodox. He believed, rightly, that the First World War was both pointless and incompatible with a liberal economy, not to mention with bourgeois civilization. As a professional adviser to wartime governments after 1914, he favoured the least possible interruption of ‘business as usual’. Again, quite logically, he saw the great (Liberal) war-leader Lloyd George as leading Britain to economic perdition by subordinating everything else to the achievement of military victory. He was horrified but not surprised to see large parts of Europe and what he regarded as European civilization collapse in defeat and revolution. Once again correctly, he concluded that an irresponsible politicking peace treaty imposed by the victors would jeopardize what chances of restoring German, and therefore European, capitalist stability on a liberal basis. However, faced with the irrevocable disappearance of the pre-war belle époque which he had so much enjoyed with his friends from Cambridge and Bloomsbury, Keynes henceforth devoted all his considerable intellectual brilliance, ingenuity and gifts of style and propaganda to finding a way of saving capitalism from itself.

He consequently found himself revolutionizing economics, the social science most wedded to the market economy in the Age of Empire, and which had avoided feeling that sense of crisis so evident in other social sciences … Crisis, first political and then economic, was the foundation of the Keynesian rethinking of liberal orthodoxies. He became a champion of an economy managed and controlled by the state such as would, in spite of Keynes’ evident dedication to capitalism, have been regarded as the ante-chamber of socialism by every ministry of finance in every developed industrial economy before 1914.

Keynes is worth singling out because he formulated what was to be the most intellectually and politically influential way of saying that capitalist society could only survive if capitalist states controlled, managed and even planned much of the general shape of their economies, if necessary turning themselves into mixed public/private economies. The lesson was congenial after 1944 to reformist, social democratic and radical-democratic ideologists and governments, who took it up with enthusiasm, insofar as they had not, as in Scandinavia, pioneered such ideas independently. For the lesson that capitalism on the pre-1914 liberal terms was dead was learned almost universally in the period of the two world wars and the world slump, even by those who refused to give it new theoretical labels. For forty years after the early 1930s the intellectual supporters of pure free-market economics were an isolated minority, apart from businessmen whose perspective always makes it difficult to recognize the best interests of their system as a whole, in proportion as it concentrates their minds on the best interests of their particular firm or industry.

And yet the world of the late twentieth century is still shaped by the bourgeois century, and in particular by the Age of Empire, which has been the subject of this volume. Shaped in the literal sense. Thus, for instance, the world financial arrangements which were to provide the international framework for the global boom of the third quarter of this century were negotiated in the middle 1940s by men who had been adult in 1914, and who were utterly dominated by the past twenty-five years’ experience of the Age of Empire’s disintegration. The last important statesmen or national leaders who had been adults in 1914 died in the 1970s (e.g. Mao, Tito, Franco, de Gaulle). But, more significantly, today’s world was shaped by what one might call the historical landscape left behind by the Age of Empire and its collapse.

The most obvious piece of this heritage is the division of the world into socialist countries (or countries claiming to be such) and the rest. The shadow of Karl Marx presides over a third of the human race… Whatever one might have predicted about the future of the land-mass stretching from the China seas to the middle of Germany, plus a few areas in Africa and in the Americas, it is quite certain that regimes claiming to realize the prognoses of Karl Marx could not possibly have been among the futures envisaged for them until the emergence of mass socialist labour movements, whose example and ideology would in turn inspire the revolutionary movements of backward and dependent or colonial regions.

An equally obvious piece of the heritage is the very globalization of the world’s political pattern. If the United Nations of the late twentieth century contain a considerable numerical majority of states from what came to be called the ‘Third World’ (and incidentally states out of sympathy with the ‘western’ powers), it is because they are, overwhelmingly, the relics of the division of the world among the imperial powers in the Age of Empire. Thus the decolonization of the French Empire has produced about twenty new states, that of the British Empire many more; and, at least in Africa (which at the time of writing consists of over fifty nominally independent and sovereign entities), all of them reproduce the frontiers drawn by conquest and inter-imperialist negotiation. Again, but for the developments of that period, it was hardly to be expected that the great bulk of them would at the end of this century conduct the affairs of their educated strata and governments in English and French.

Somewhat less obvious an inheritance from the Age of Empire is that all these states should be described, and often describe themselves, as ‘nations’. This is not only because, as I have tried to show, the ideology of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, a nineteenth-century European product, could be used as an ideology of colonial liberation, and was imported as such by members of westernized elites of colonial peoples, but also because…the concept of the ‘nation-state’ in this period became available to groups of any size which chose so to describe themselves, and not only, as the mid-nineteenth-century pioneers of ‘the principle of nationality’ took for granted, to medium or large peoples. For most of the states that have emerged to the world since the end of the nineteenth century (and which have, since President Wilson, been given the status of ‘nations’) were of modest size and/or population, and, since the onset of decolonization, often of tiny size. Insofar as nationalism has penetrated outside the old ‘developed’ world, or insofar as non-European politics have become assimilated to nationalism, the heritage of the Age of Empire is still present.