Перевод J. M. Rоberts Twentieth Century

J. M. ROBERTS Twentieth Century
THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, 1901 to 2000

BOOK I. THE WORLD OF 1 9 0 1 :
INHERITANCES OUR CENTURY
THE DIFFERENT PASTS OF I9OI
One of the most important ways in which the world was different in 1901 was in the ways its societies saw the past, and the ways
that shaped their perception of their present. Historians face an infinite number of past worlds. Few experiences except the most
elemental are shared by all men and women in all parts of the world, even if there are more shared today than in 1901 (thanks to some of the biggest changes the century has brought about). Societies still have highly differentiated pasts, but they have shared
shaping experiences to a greater degree in this century than ever in earlier times. The ancien regime of 1901 which has now
disappeared was not the same thing in Europe as in the United States, nor was that of the Chinese the same as that of the peoples
of India. It would only be a mild exaggeration to say that all those and many other societies in 1901 had in common as going concerns
was that they were doomed to disappear within the next 100 years. The simplicities of rural North America, the still untouched
traditional ways of Tibet, the life of the Berlin tenement-dweller - all these, and many more, have vanished beyond recall, except by
historians and nostalgic novelists. No earlier century has ever brought about such complete, often swift and accelerating, change to
humanity as has this one, nor change that has left it sharing so much common experience.
Just as today, what most people thought in 1901 was largely shaped by what they took for granted. That it was so unlike what we now
take for granted may now be seen an obvious enough point, but perhaps it is still worth a moment's further consideration. Of the
hundreds of millions of human beings that lived in Asia when the century began, for example, few except European expatriates ever
thought about the continent where they lived as 'Asia'. That there was an entity corresponding to the word 'Asia' was a European idea, adopted only by a minority of Asians, not yet an idea most of them
would have grasped. The slogan 'Asia for the Asians' had only just been coined by the Japanese in the 1890s; within 'Asia', that word
was hardly known outside Japan, which had adopted European geographical nomenclature along with much else.4 Of the inhabitants
of the Indian sub-continent few ever thought of India as a whole, either, or as a geographical reality, let alone a social or political one; only a tiny minority of Indians had the idea that India might one day
become the name of a country. Similarly, it was unlikely that many native-born Africans except those who were white would have had
any notion that there existed an entity called 'Africa', the name given to the whole continent first by Europeans (who, of course, thereby also created the category 'African'). Europeans and North Americans, on the other hand, tended to be much more aware of the continents in which they lived. They had named them, too, after all. Nationhood
or nationality was another European idea, even if there were non-European peoples - Han Chinese or Japanese for example - with
strongly developed senses of their own ethnic and cultural distinction. Given such ontrasts, as well as others in the distribution of power
and wealth, in habit and behaviour, our loseness in time to the men and women of 1901 can too easily deceive us; they took for granted much that we do not and could not conceive much that is commonplace
to us. They felt the weight of pasts peculiar to them, and which are not ours, though parts of the landscape they laid out can still look
familiar to us. They saw past time with the eyes of the nineteenth century in which they had been born (and they had experienced, of
course, many different nineteenth centuries, according to where they lived).
The only futures that shape people's lives are imaginary ones that can stir them to action. For the most part, it is the past, real or
mythological, which does most to shape — sometimes overwhelmingly - a present. Our ancestors on 1 January 1901 were heirs to hundreds of vastly different inheritances, varying in their detail according to when
and where they were born: the world on the first day of the twentieth century was, as it is now, a complication of hundreds of millions of individual contexts set by hundreds of millions of pasts. Some of the contexts thus formed were much more influential than others. It is not easy to grasp just what the world's peoples could in fact choose to
assimilate or reject in the past history that confronted them. Once away fr om the microscopic level, which can never be studied
in its entirety, where each man and woman confronts his or her own destiny, it is nonetheless possible to make a start at a high level of generalization by recognizing the distinct pasts which belong to a few
large collectivities. These provide the peaks and great mountain ranges of the historical landscape. One can distinguish, for instance, a number of historical cultures and civilizations that made up the world of 1901.
They were as diverse in their essence as in their superficial appearance.
In the Kalahari desert or in New Guinea there lived Stone Age peoples still untouched by civilization at a moment when Europeans were
planning railways to span Africa fr om Cape to Cairo and link Berlin and Baghdad, or dreaming of a future in which air travel (by hydrogenfilled 'dirigibles' which were already beginning to appear in the skies
of some countries) would be possible between the world's capital cities. Within the world historically shaped by Christianity, Russians
were then just beginning to undergo the experience of industrialization that had come to western Europe from fifty to 100 years earlier, but were still following the pre-Christian Julian calendar which had been
abandoned centuries earlier in western Europe. Buddhist Tibet was a country that only a handful of Europeans had yet even visited. Muslim Arabs from the Persian Gulf had only recently been forced to curtail
a huge trade in slaves from east Africa; foot-binding was still normal for women in upper-class Chinese households. The Ottoman sultan,
ruler of many peoples, Europeans among them, still maintained an official harem. Many more such oddities then existed which have long
since ceased to be. They reflected age-old differentiation and global variety as this century began. Our own world, of course, is also a very varied and highly differentiated
place, but in the next 100 years such exotic variety was to be much reduced, if only at the level of superficial appearances and
material circumstance. Huge mental and moral differences remain between peoples, but nowadays we sometimes find them surprising,
as our predecessors would not have done in 1901.6 Such differences can suddenly erupt to complicate and sometimes poison our affairs
after superficial similarities have misled us. People accepted in 1901 more readily than we always do that a shared humanity should not
be trusted very far as a guide to behaviour, and said so more frequently than we are brave enough to do. Whether or not intuition and experience seem to bear this out, it
may at any rate be quickly agreed that as this century began the superficial differences between human societies around the world
would at least have been even more obvious than they would be today. A traveller now punctuates his travel by sitting in identical airport 'lounges', takes similar taxis on emerging from them to travel along
roads marked, wh erever he or she may be, by traffic-lights sending the same messages as elsewhere and policed by public officials ostensibly intended to enforce similar driving behaviour, and does so in order to reach 'international hotels' aspiring to provide just what has been left behind in the last one. Fundamental and important differences in
such trivial circumstances and even in the way people behaved were more apparent in daily life when this century began. Perhaps, too,
they were more firmly anchored in identifiable public institutions than they are today; but this is harder to be sure about, and is perhaps
better left for reflexion as the story unrolls. Different cultures and countries, we know, still differ profoundly about the way people should be treated; thoughts about the individual's proper relations with authority, social and economic behaviour in, say, Great Britain  and Saudi Arabia, India and Australia, or France and Japan, can still
clash even though more people in all countries now talk as if they believed in universal human rights than was the case in 1901.
Nonetheless, the past weighs a little less obviously on most of the world than once it did. The inheritances that people drew upon in
their thinking and behaviour in 1901 often expressed the weight of centuries of virtually unquestioned authority. This was obvious in the
way religions could then still be thought of as major categorizations of humanity. Most human beings still lived in the rich, complicated settings of ancient faiths - the main ones were Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Christian and Islamic - and adhered to them in practice, though what they believed is harder to say. It seems likely, though, that most human beings then still believed in some sort of supernatural world, and often in a two-tier model of a present, material sphere
and another in which dwelt a god or gods, exercising real power and uttering authoritative commands. Within acceptance of some such theistic framework, though, different zones of religious observance
had long somewhat overlapped and run untidily in and out of one another. Though people within its sphere still often used the word,
Christendom was not so clearly defined in 1901 as it had been five or six centuries earlier. Its divisions had grown sharper and more plentiful in the last two or three centuries, too. Even in 1799, a German writer
had been able to say that Christendom was no longer the same as Europe:8 by 1901, the word indicated less a sphere of a particular faith
than the world occupied by European stocks, who were assumed to be Christian. All round the world, too, Europeans had made converts
to their historic religion (conversion rather than settlement had made South and Central America part of the Christian world), and even
wh ere they had not been very successful (as in India, or China), they had left many institutional and physical marks of Christianity in the form of churches, colleges, schools and hospitals. Europe itself, the Americas and the white settler lands of Australasia and South Africa,
though, still thought of themselves as, above all, the heartlands of a Christian world. That notion would undergo radical change in the
next 100 years, in which Christianity became predominantly a religion of non-European peoples.
Of the two other great monotheistic religions, Judaism was the best defined. It was also the most widespread; its adherents could be found
worldwide, though their numbers were not very great. In 1901 most of the world's Jews lived in the relatively small part of Europe made
up by the Russian Pale (which included much of what is now Poland) and adjacent central and east Europe. Islam, the other faith of believers in the God of Abraham shared by Jews and Christians, was (as it remains) as far flung as either Judaism or Christianity and had the allegiance of hundreds of millions.
Unlike Christendom, the world of Islam had not been defined by historic institutions like state or church: it was and is essentially what
Muslims do and the way they live. They are united by a common attitude to God, this world and the next. Islam's footing in Europe
had been dwindling in recent times; by 1901 Muslim minorities remained only in places that had been for two or three centuries parts
of the Ottoman Turkish empire. They were few, too, in the Americas. The heartlands of Islam were the Arabic-speaking lands of the Near
and Middle East.9 But from them the Faith had spread, at first by conquest, west into Africa and Mediterranean Europe, east and north
into Central Asia, India and as far as China. Then, in the nineteenth century, large Muslim communities had grown up in Bengal, Indonesia
and Malaysia, to which Islam had been carried by Arab merchants favoured by the current and winds of the Indian Ocean. The outcome was a world of great social variety and numerous splinter groups and sects. The classical Arabic of the Koran is taught to many peoples with very different native languages, and even in the Arab lands to some who only speak very colloquial and regional forms of Arabic.10 In China and India, Islam encountered the more ancient cultural zones of Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucian civilization. The last still dominated China at the beginning of this century and lay also at the roots of Japanese culture, though in both countries it lived beside Buddhism, a more transcendentally orientated body of belief and practice, but associating more easily with Confucianism or Hinduism than the monotheistic beliefs of Islam. Buddhism sprawled across two distinct cultural zones in south and south-east Asia, the sphere culturally dominated by the Hindu influences emanating from the Indian sub-continent, and the Sinic sphere of the Confucian heritage.