Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

Preface

1. Interest in world history has grown enormously in recent years. Jet travel has shrunk the globe. People are now less confined to their own part of the world than ever before. Migrations have resulted in multicultural societies on every continent; different ethnic groups have a desire to learn more about each offer. Another major reason for the growth of interest is that events and developments in any part of the world – wars, revolutions, movement of trade, changes in economic conditions – impact on the rest of the world.
2. To write a world history is a formidable task. I began sixteen years ago, adding to the islands of knowledge I had researched in the previous twenty-five years of academic study. In 1980 the first part the Collins History of the World in the Twentieth Century, covering mainly Europe, Asia and the United States from 1900 to 1945, was published by Fontana Press and has since been widely used. Twelve years later I reached the 1990s and widened the scope of the history to Africa, Latin America and Australasia. I am grateful to Stuart Proffitt for his encouragement and for suggesting that the first volume should be revised and that the work should now cover the twentieth century in one volume. His support has made the realisation of my original concept possible.
3. One way of writing world history is to concentrate on general movements affecting the world as a whole, to describe the underlying forces of history – population growth, increasing literacy, the technological revolution, for instance – to reveal how the twentieth century became the ‘age of the masses’. A number of excellent books have appeared based on this approach. But if we ignore the fact that our world in the twentieth century is a world of nations we leave out of account one of the mainsprings of historical change in this century.
4. Clearly we have to deal with the enormous impact made by social and economic changes in the twentieth century across national frontiers, the consequences of industrialisation, the clashes of cultures as the West came to dominate Africa and Asia, reactions and counter-reactions making themselves felt to the present day. The varied responses to conflict, change and maladjustments were not confined in the twentieth century to national borders: the appeals of socialism and communism, of totalitarian state organisation, of Western parliamentary government, of fascism and Nazism, all crossed land frontiers and the oceans and continents of the world.
5. What a writer of world history cannot do without seriously distorting its understanding is simply to ignore and discard national frontiers and national influences beyond a country’s frontiers. International co-operation was and still is too weak to reduce national frontiers to no more than historical and cultural boundaries. On the other hand, though world trade has made nations more dependent on each other for their prosperity and perhaps even survival, this interdependence is not a relationship of free equals, great and small! The moment we analyse more closely the actual nature of that interdependence we come back to questions of national power. That is why a world history cannot make ‘interdependence’ the central theme.
6. In this century technological and scientific advances have resulted in startling transformations: journeys have been made to the moon by lone astronauts; more usefully the masses can be carried by air from one continent to another in a few hours; communication by the single political leader with millions by means of radio, and later television too, has profoundly affected the conduct of politics; from artillery projectiles capable of killing a hundred people at once we have moved to the capability of obliterating several millions with a barrage of nuclear missiles. And yet, accepting the twentieth century in its way as a revolutionary stage of historical change, it was not the first nor is it likely to be the last such stage. Historical change has not in the past come about by gradual steps; the pace quickens and slackens.
7. The first half of the twentieth century was a period during which intercontinental rivalries frequently played a role in world history, but we have to be precise in showing the interrelationships. Industrial power ceased to be a virtual European monopoly. Two devastating wars occurred in Europe and the first furthered the partial triumph of the new revolutionary ideology of communism. The problems of eastern Asia were both a consequence of Western impact and the result of Asian conflicts. They are too frequently viewed through Western eyes alone. After 1945, the part played by Western Europe, important though it remains, shrinks when viewed within a global perspective. The significance in world affairs of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America increased. The nations of these continents asserted their national rights and imposed on the most powerful nations of the world a sense of the limits of their own power.
8. I have put forward no startling new theories or hypotheses about world history. Space limits what can be written on any one topic: some have had to be omitted altogether, since only by means of a degree of selectivity can anything be written in depth and I have preferred to do this rather than to provide an encyclopaedic account of many more subjects. On the subjects I have written about I have endeavoured to keep abreast of present research so far as this is humanly possible.
9. …. Technical Note, Acknowledgements, Etc.