World history as it is understood today is an entirely new subject. Sixty years ago, when Acton was planning the Cambridge Modern History, he conceived it as a universal history which would not be a mere combined history of modern states, but a study of the development of universal historical forces. Yet at the same time, he took for granted that this history would be a European one and that it was only, or primarily, in Europe and its colonies that the movement of world history was to be found. But the new conception of World History, as may be...

The period of modern history which extends from the Reformation to the French Revolution is a very difficult one to study and, I believe, there is a real danger that it may become increasingly neglected, especially by Catholic scholars. In the past and, indeed, until quite recently this period was regarded as “Modern History” and it was the main object of study not only by the popular literary historians, like Macaulay and Carlyle and Froude, but no less by the great men of learning, like Ranke and Acton, whose vast knowledge and powers of research have never been surpassed. But...

When one considers the progress of the Catholic revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the apparent strength of religious faith and practice both in Catholic and Protestant Europe at that time, it is difficult to understand how European culture ever became secularized. In the middle of the seventeenth century Europe, and America also, were divided between opposing forms of religion and culture, but both of them—the Baroque culture of the South and the Protestant culture of the North—were intensely religious and sincerely Christian. Yet in a century or a century and a half all this was...

The position of christianity in the world today has been rarely considered by modern historians. It is none the less a question of central importance for the understanding of modern civilization. For twelve centuries Christianity has been the religion of a culture—that is to say, it has had an organic relation with the social and moral structure of one particular society of peoples. It has held somewhat the same place in Europe that Islam has held in Western Asia, Hinduism in India, or Confucianism in China. It has been the official creed of Western man; it has moulded his...

The four great civilizations which constituted the world that we know were all spiritual communities that owed their unity to a common religion. In China, India, Islam and Christendom alike, political citizenship and racial origins were secondary to religious belief and practice. The Indian who ceased to observe the laws of caste and the worship of the gods and accepted the teaching of Mohammed ceased to be a Hindu and became a Moslem. And, in the same way, the western Moslem who became a Christian did not merely change his religion; he passed over from one civilization to another and...

The revolt of asia is not simply an insurrection against alien domination and the influence of foreign ideas. It is also—and even more—a political and moral revolution in the internal order of the oriental peoples. During the last generation, the oldest and the most fundamental institutions which seemed to be inseparable from Asiatic civilization have lost their sacred prestige and are threatened with change or destruction.

What we are witnessing is, in fact, the extension to Asia and to the whole world of the revolutionary movement of change which started in Western Europe and America in the eighteenth...

The change in the world position of Europe which has taken place during the last fifty years has inevitably caused a strong reaction against the spirit of nineteenth-century imperialism. The idea of empire has become identified with the oppression of subject peoples, and the whole colonial development is regarded as a form of economic exploitation. Yet the imperialist phase of Western culture is not confined to the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the culmination of a much wider movement which goes back to the close of the Middle Ages and which has been one of the main...

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of Western culture began to penetrate the inner continental areas of Asia and Africa, and the historic oriental empires underwent a rapid decline. The first step in this process was the Europeanization of Russia, which had remained for centuries a kind of intermediate zone between Europe and Asia. In the seventeenth century Russian power had expanded rapidly across northern Asia, reaching Okhotsk on the Pacific before the middle of the century, but Russia itself remained outside the sphere of Western culture. It was the revolutionary work of Peter the Great from 1689...

The development of the nationalist movements in Asia and Africa is one of the most momentous features of the present period. During the last ten years it has changed the face of the world and altered the balance of world power. Its consequences affect not only the powers like Britain and France and the Netherlands, whose political and colonial interests are directly threatened, but every Western power and not least the United States. It means nothing less than the sudden awakening to political consciousness of the greater part of the human race, both the peoples which have been for centuries...

At the end of the previous chapter I distinguished between the question of oriental nationalism and that of oriental culture. The two questions are apt to be confused, naturally enough under the present circumstances, when the conflict between East and West is always seen as an international political issue. But oriental nationalism is a very recent phenomenon, and from the historical point of view the great barrier between East and West has not been due to nationalist sentiment, but to religion and culture. In the East, as in the medieval West, man’s primary and fundamental allegiance was not to his...