Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Victoria still ruled over the British Empire, the imperial Manchu dynasty over China, and the Romanov Tsars over Russia. The cinema was in its infancy, with radio and television still to be developed. The earliest cars were on the road, but air travel was yet to come. Before antibiotics and effective vaccines against many common diseases, death rates were high. Over the course of the twentieth century, the human population of the world has tripled, space travel has left the realms of science fiction and become reality, two cataclysmic world wars and a host of other conflicts have been fought, the internal combustion engine has replaced the horse as the basic means of transport, computer technology has revolutionized communications. In this ambitious book, some of the most distinguished historians in the world survey the momentous events and the significant themes of recent and contemporary times, with a look forward to what the future might bring. They trace the continuities which have persisted over a hundred years and analyse the changes which have marked the century's progress. Early chapters take a global overview of the century as a whole, from a variety of perspectives -- demographic, scientific, economic, and cultural. Further chapters chart the century's course continent by continent and region by region, all written by acknowledged experts. Beautifully illustrated with both colour and black and white plates, and with a detailed chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a full index, The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century is a valuable repository of information, offering unparalleled insights into the century we live in.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 The Dawn of the Century
• 2 Communications, Disease, and Demography
• 3 Understanding the Universe
• 4 The Expansion of Knowledge
• 5 The Growth of a World Economy
• 6 The Growth of a Global Culture
• 7 The Visual Arts
• 8 European Empires and Emerging Nationalism
• 9 Europe in the Age of Two World Wars
• 10 The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
• 11 The United States 1900-1945
• 12 East Asia and the Emergence of Japan
• 13 The Confrontation of the Superpowers
• 14 The United States since 1945
• 15 The Soviet Union and Beyond
• 16 The Remaking of Europe
• 17 East Asia
• 18 China
• 19 South-East Asia
• 20 South Asia
• 21 North Africa and the Middle East
• 22 Africa
• 23 Latin America
• 24 The Old Commonwealth: The First Four Dominions
• 25 Towards an International Community? The United Nations and International Law
• 26 The Close of the Century
• 27 Towards the Twenty-first Century: New Problems, New Opportunities
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• Index

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One The peoples of Western Europe and North America seemed to have every reason to greet the twentieth century as the dawn of a new and happier age in the history of mankind. Science and technology were already improving their standard of living almost beyond recognition, and they dominated the world with their trade, their finance, and their military power. Most of the Western hemisphere, the continent of Africa, the Indian subcontinent and much of Asia outside China had been either directly colonized by Europeans or deeply penetrated by European culture; and it seemed self-evident that such societies as still maintained their independence would be able to do so in future only if, like the Japanese, they successfully imitated the European model.     That model has since become known as `liberal capitalism'. Those who benefited from its material advantages were conscious primarily of its political framework: freedom of speech, freedom of commercial interchange, freedom of scientific enquiry, mobility of labour, and democratic self-government on an ever-extending franchise. But underlying this liberal ideology was an economic process that Karl Marx had correctly identified fifty years earlier as the most revolutionary that the world had ever seen. Basic to this process was the accumulation of financial resources and their investment in industry and communications. This investment had made possible the development of mechanization, initially by the application of steam power but now increasingly by that of electricity, on a scale that had already transformed Western European society, and was in the course of the coming century to do the same for the rest of the world.     This transformation consisted in the transition from agrarian-based, hierarchically governed, and largely self-sufficient communities whose social structure had been legitimized by a millennium of tradition and reinforced by ecclesiastical authorities claiming supra-natural sanction, to highly mobile, globally interlinked urban or urbanized societies in which political authority was legitimized by at least the appearance of popular consent and public life was increasingly secularized. Meanwhile religious beliefs which had hitherto been socially mandatory were marginalized (where they survived at all) as largely private matters. This process, generally known as `modernization', appeared for better or worse ineluctable; but it was to create frequent and often ferocious backlashes throughout the world, both religious and secular, as the century wore on.     By 1900 the forces of science, reason, and progress associated with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century appeared to have won the battle in Europe itself. The advent of railways and steamships had destroyed the self-sufficiency of the old agrarian communities. By linking them with a continent-wide economy, they had not only compelled farmers to modernize traditional means of production, but made possible a mobility of population that resulted in the huge expansion of cities and, as trans-oceanic transport improved, of mass overseas emigration--a movement that reached its peak in the early years of the twentieth century. The extension of transcontinental rail links in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, in Euro-Asia, made this economy global.     The latter development, the completion of the trans-Siberian railway in 1901, led to gloomy forecasts by West European geopoliticians about the forthcoming dominance over the world by an ill-defined `Heartland' of Central Asia--warnings that were to surface again during the Cold War but which, even a century later, appear at best premature. The former, however, by opening up the prairies of North and the pampas of South America, made available to Europe grain and meat in quantities, and at a price, that both fed the growing cities and tested the capacity of European cereal producers to compete, often to destruction.     The prospects for European agrarian producers at the beginning of the century thus appeared bleak. They agitated for the imposition of high tariffs, which everywhere created friction with the interests of city-dwellers who needed cheap food. In any case, the standard of living of the new urban populations in Europe and North America was rapidly being improved. Medical advances and good sanitation were bringing disease under control and improving life expectancy. With the growth of representative government and the extension of the suffrage, which by 1900 was on the way to becoming universal, the urban masses were increasingly seen, even by elements within the traditional ruling classes, not so much as a revolutionary menace to be feared but as votes to be won. The advent of electricity in the 1880s had perhaps done more than anything else to improve the standard of life in cities, although decades would pass before its benefits were extended to the countryside. In general there seemed every reason to suppose, as the new century dawned, that these improvements would indefinitely increase.     The most revolutionary scientific discoveries were the slowest to take effect. The discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in 1897 and of radium by the Curies a year later, the development by Max Planck of the quantum theory in 1900 and by Albert Einstein of the theory of relativity five years later were to transform man's understanding and control of the universe, but it was to be a further half-century before the application of that understanding, through electronics and nuclear physics, was to have a serious impact on society as a whole. Of more immediate relevance to `the man in the street' (a phrase in itself indicative of the urbanization of society) were developments in communication. The cinema had already shown its potential for mass entertainment before the new century opened, as had the gramophone for private enjoyment. Further, Guglielmo Marconi had transmitted wireless messages across the Channel in 1899, and these were to cross the Atlantic two years later. In the field of transport, the internal combustion engine was already providing automobiles for the rich. Within a decade Henry Ford was to make them far more generally available; while the bicycle had already extended the range of mobility of all save the very poor.     Even more significant, the internal combustion engine made it possible for the Wright brothers to carry out the first powered flight at Kittyhawk, Ohio, in 1903, and for Louis Bleriot to cross the Channel in 1909. The central role which the horse had played for a millennium as mankind's principal means of transport and traction was fast disappearing, and an entire social universe vanished with it. Everywhere stables were being replaced by garages. In consequence a further dimension was added to the expanding world economy; the dependence of industrial societies upon oil supplies that few of them were able to produce in the increasing quantities in which they would be needed.     These changes were reflected in the development of European high culture. The term `modern' had previously been used to distinguish the post-Enlightenment period from that which had looked back to the classics for its authorities. Now it came to signify a yet more total break with the past--the rejection of a cultural tradition reaching back to the Renaissance and beyond. In music the work of Webern, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky; in painting, that of Mondrian and Picasso; in architecture and decoration, the pioneering work of the Bauhaus in Europe and of Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States; in literature, the experiments with new forms conducted by Ezra Pound and James Joyce; in general culture, the deliberate shock administered by Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy, followed elsewhere by vorticism, Dadaism, and surrealism; all indicated a contemptuous rejection of the past and a search for modes of expression appropriate to an age of science and secularism. For some this meant hope and liberation. For others it was anathema. In most lay observers it evoked a degree of bewilderment and incomprehension that was long to outlive the artists who created it. It was these advances in science and technology that had made possible European world-dominance, and created, on both sides of the Atlantic, an almost unquestioned belief in the cultural and indeed racial superiority of the `white' races over the rest of mankind. This belief was usually combined with a sense of obligation to bring the blessings of `civilization' to `backward' peoples; an obligation combined with one very much older, to spread the Christian gospel among the heathen. The impact of that civilization on the non-European world, for better or worse, is discussed elsewhere in this volume. In 1900 it would have been almost impossible to find a voice in Europe or the United States to suggest that it was anything other than beneficial. The only difference lay between those who believed that the more `backward' races could in due course be raised up to the level of the `advanced', and those who were convinced that this `backwardness' was genetically ineradicable, leaving the white races with the responsibility of governing their inferiors in perpetuity.     The impact of these attitudes on non-Western peoples varied. In China the century opened with the Boxer Uprising, an ethnic upheaval against Western cultural penetration that evoked one of the few cooperative efforts of the Western world to crush it. Elsewhere indigenous elites sought security by cooperating with their conquerors, as they did in India; or by grafting Western technology on to their own culture, which the Japanese did with such success that, after their victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, doubts were expressed as to whether the coming century would be that of the white man at all. But even where Western imperialism seemed most triumphant, indigenous cultures remained largely intact, making no more concessions to the conqueror than was strictly necessary until, as the twentieth century progressed, the penetration of Western communications, trade, and technology undermined their traditional life-styles as irresistibly as it had that of the Europeans themselves. Yet in Europe at the turn of the century this belief in the peaceful inevitability of progress was already rather dated. The inevitability was still widely taken for granted, but the peacefulness was not. Instead there was a growing belief that progress would take the form of conflict--a belief rooted in the thought of those two mid-nineteenth-century giants, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin.     For Marx and his followers the conflict was one between social classes that would result in a revolution of the industrial proletariat to overthrow the entire capitalist system and usher in a classless society in which all contradictions had been eliminated and mankind would find total fulfilment. It was a creed that appealed not only to the leaders of an industrial working class whose wages had been kept at near subsistence level by the competition of their employers, but also to intellectuals who could no longer look for explanations of the world to traditional religion, and who welcomed the prospect of an earthly paradise promised, not by divine revelation, but by the rigorous scientific analysis of social dynamics.     By the end of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, such expectations of violent revolution had markedly ebbed as the physical conditions of the working classes improved, suffrage became more widespread, and the leaders of working-class movements were assimilated into the parliamentary system. But the class struggle was no less intense for being waged by votes, propaganda, and, above all, strikes. In Russia, the most backward of the `capitalist' economies, such agitation resulted only in more ferocious repression. There revolution--or the threat of it--remained firmly on the agenda of a hard core of Marxist leaders, especially those living in exile in the West. The spectre of communism may not have haunted Europe as Marx had claimed before 1848, but it had not yet been exorcised.     The work of Charles Darwin was if anything even more influential than that of Marx. Darwin's view, that species survive by adapting themselves to the changes in their environment and only those survive that prove themselves fittest to do so, had led by the end of the century to a widespread belief, on both sides of the Atlantic, that this applied as much to social organisms as it did to the natural world. This Social Darwinism was a creed that suited the increasingly competitive economic atmosphere, as Germany and the United States surpassed Britain with their more up-to-date technology. It suited an age of imperial rivalries. It lent an edge to the dialectical struggle of the class war; and it reinforced some of the deepest fears held about the long-term implications of urbanization by those whose ideas were still rooted in values derived from agrarian societies.     The basic fear was that of decadence. If cities were no longer seen as hotbeds of revolution, they were feared yet more as seedbeds of degeneracy and anomie, where not only would the social framework that provided meaning and purpose for individual lives be lost, but where peoples who no longer had to face the challenges and hardships that had moulded their ancestors in the countryside would deteriorate both physically and morally. The fear of overpopulation, bringing with it the dominance of the physically and morally `unfit', was becoming a nightmare for some political leaders especially in the most urbanized European societies, Britain and Germany. For the British, a solution seemed ready to hand in the colonies of settlement, and emigration was encouraged to Canada, South Africa, and the Antipodes. From Germany, as indeed Italy, there was a constant haemorrhage to the United States. But the Italians had their own dreams of an empire of settlement beyond the Mediterranean, which would also give them the status of a Great Power. As for the Germans, the vision of a Greater Germany colonizing the half-empty lands of western Russia, which was to crystallize so horribly during the middle years of the coming century, were already being formulated within the minds of a few fanatics. Behind these fears and reinforcing them there lay a yet deeper social cleavage: that between those who welcomed the dawn of a new age, even if it brought with it new problems and conflicts, and those who dreaded the destruction of a society and of values rooted in centuries of tradition. Those who had flourished best in the old soil, the great landowners (and, even more, the not-so-great landowners) and their dependents, were naturally those who dreaded it most, and they remained socially and politically powerful everywhere east of the Rhine. The resistance of these old ruling classes was everywhere reinforced by the enormous power of the Roman Catholic Church; and, though that Church under Pope Leo XIII was slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the new age, it would be decades before that adjustment penetrated into the rural parishes of Italy, France, and Spain. In those countries a cultural civil war had long been waged between the forces of progress and those of tradition; a conflict that was brought to a head at the turn of the century by the efforts of their governments to control and laicize national education. It was a struggle that was already tearing France apart over the Dreyfus Affair. In Italy the refusal of the Vatican to recognize the legitimacy of the secular Kingdom of Italy was to make much of that country virtually ungovernable from Rome until the advent of Mussolini in the 1920s; while in Spain the conflict was to erupt four decades later into bloody civil war.     Nor was it only the revolutionary survivors of the old order who looked on the developments of the new age with deep apprehension. They were joined, especially in Central Europe, by many who had hitherto benefited from the economic developments of the previous century--a whole mass of petty bourgeoisie employed in the service industries and government administration, as well as small shopkeepers who were finding themselves squeezed between the forces of international capitalism on the one hand, and the growing power of the organized working classes on the other.     These groups, fearful of losing the status and the benefits they had acquired during the happier years of economic expansion, were especially prone to anti-Semitism, as indeed were the landowners, great and small, in the countryside. For the poorer elements, both in town and country, the Jews represented the moneylenders to whom they were becoming indebted. For the possessing classes, they embodied the forces of international capital that seemed to be accumulating more and more power. For all, they were an alien and easily identifiable element that could be cast as a scapegoat for all manner of social ills. It was a tendency that the Catholic Church did little to discourage. Throughout Europe, from St Petersburg to Paris, demagogues found the Jews an easy target. It was in this atmosphere that Theodore Herzl, the creator of Zionism, came to the conclusion that Judaism could survive only if the Jews could found a nation of their own. By far the most powerful force binding together the disrupted societies of Europe as they moved into the new century was that of nationalism. In 1900 the nation state had reached its apogee. For a century past the power and reach of state authorities had become increasingly intrusive as improved communications enabled them to increase their control over the administration, welfare, and education of their citizens, and to conscript them to serve in their armies. That control would hardly have been feasible unless the old personal loyalties and sense of obligation to a ruling dynasty that had held European societies together since the sixteenth century had not been powerfully reinforced by a broader sense of belonging to a `nation'--a country, a Vaterland , a pattie . As the power of the state increased, so did this sense of nationhood. It found expression throughout Europe in military parades and ceremonies, in monumental neo-Baroque architecture, in anthems and flags and patriotic symbols. Historians created patriotic myths and lexicographers nurtured distinctive languages. The person of the hereditary ruler was converted into a quasi-religious icon. Pride in country created a sense of common dignity and purpose. Its appeal reconciled all but the bitterest reactionaries and the most dogmatic socialists. Nationalism, in short, was one of the most powerful instruments of social mobilization that the world had yet seen.     But, like modernization itself, nationalism was subversive of older orders of society. It may have been a force for cohesion and stability in Western Europe, but in the less advanced societies further east, still ruled by traditional dynastic empires, its impact was deeply disruptive. The management of nascent nationalism within the multinational empire of the Habsburgs and the European possessions of the Ottoman Empire--`the Eastern Question'--had occupied European statesmen for the past quarter-century, and was still to trouble them a hundred years later. As for Europe's overseas empires, the British for one had already found in Ireland, and were beginning to discover in India, that it was difficult to proclaim the ideal of national self-government at home while denying it to those they ruled overseas.     Moreover the unity created by national sentiment within the states of Western Europe was bought at the cost of embittering relations between them. Great national ceremonies were explicitly celebrations of past military triumphs and implicitly preparations for new ones. The prospect of another war, fought with all the destructive weapons that technology now made possible, was indeed terrible--so terrible, indeed, that the leaders of Europe had met in conference at The Hague in 1899 to see what could be done to mitigate, if not prevent, it. But the result had not been encouraging. It did little to erode the widespread belief that, even if war was terrible, it still remained the ultimate test of the fitness of nations to survive.     If the peoples of Europe had been told in 1900 that fourteen years later they would enter on the greatest war in the history of mankind, few would have been surprised. Some would not have been ill-pleased. But only a tiny minority foresaw that it would destroy for ever the hopes and the self-confidence with which the century began.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

In 1900 the world was dominated by European powers; in 2000 a vaguely felt but undeniably real "globalization" will be the ruling paradigm. These Oxford volumes contain compact essays by eminent scholars analyzing the change. Besides global wars hot and cold, population explosion and urbanization impacted the entire century, as one of 27 articles in Twentieth Century underscores. Embracing nonpolitical topics in areas such as physics, modernism in art, and international economics, this work exposes the interested reader to developments that have affected most people. The talent to economically condense a subject as these authors do (each was allotted about 12 pages) does not grow on trees; some of them have written outstanding works recently, for example, physicist Steven Weinberg and U.S. historian James Patterson. This work, therefore, is a high-powered lecture series that if held at a university would cost big tuition bucks. Oxford's volume, less dear and just as rewarding, covers all regions of the globe. Arguably the most significant event of the century was World War I. Editor Strachan has commissioned 20 historians to summarize present thought about the July 1914 crisis, the military course of the war, the social and economic strains it exerted in all the belligerents, and its conclusion in revolutions and treaties. The war shattered illusions of every kind, starting with the belief that it would be brief; the accounts of why it was not are pithily rendered, reinforced by powerful illustrations of the western front's moonscapes, among other scenes of the war. Strachan's writers also assess the war outside Europe and the nascent nationalisms it unleashed. Readers will find this comprehensive work a captivating introduction to the Great War. --Gilbert Taylor

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Michael Howard was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford before becoming Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. His books include War in European History (OUP, 1976), Clausewitz (OUP, 1983), and The Lessons of History (OUP, 1991). Wm. Roger Louis is Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin and an Associate Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is Editor-in-Chief of the 5-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, and author of Imperialism at Bay (Clarendon Press, 1977), The British Empire in the Middle East (Clarendon Press, 1984), and Churchill (OUP, 1993).