What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
the future, to stay the advance of new discoveries and inventions. What we have learned of
the techniques and potentialities of mass propaganda cannot be simply obliterated. It is no
more possible to return to the small-scale individualist democracy of Lockeian or liberal
theory, partially realised in Great Britain in the middle years of the nineteenth century,
than it is possible to return to the horse and buggy or to early laissez-faire capitalism. But
the true answer is that these evils also carry with them their own corrective. The remedy
lies not in a cult of irrationalism or a renunciation of the extended role of reason in modern
society, but in a growing consciousness from below as well as from above of the role
which reason can play. This is not a utopian dream, at a time when the increasing use of
reason at all levels of society is being forced on us by our technological and scientific
revolution. Like every other great advance in history, this advance has its costs and its
losses, which have to be paid, and its dangers, which have to be faced. Yet, in spite of
sceptics, and cynics, and prophets of disaster, especially among the intellectuals of
countries whose former privileged position has been undermined, I shall not be ashamed
to treat it as a signal example of progress in history. It is perhaps the most striking and
revolutionary phenomenon of our time.
The second aspect of the progressive revolution through which we are passing is the
changed shape of the world. The great period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
which the medieval world finally broke up in ruins and the foundations of the modern
world were laid, was marked by the discovery of new continents and by the passing of the
world centre of gravity hem the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the Atlantic. Even
the lesser upheaval of the French revolution had its geographical sequel in the calling in of
the new world to redress the balance of the old. But the changes wrought by the twentiethcentury
revolution are far more sweeping than anything that has happened since the
sixteenth century. After some 400 years the world centre of gravity has definitely shifted
away from western Europe. Western Europe, together with the out- ,lying parts of the
English-speaking world, has become an appenage of the North American continent, or, if
you like, an agglomeration in which the United States serves both as power- house and as
control-tower. Nor is this the only, or perhaps the most significant, change. It is by no
means clear that the world centre of gravity now resides, or will continue for long to
reside, in the English-speaking world with its western European annex. It appears to be the
great land-mass of eastern Europe and Asia, with its extensions into Africa, which today
calls the tune in world affairs. The 'unchanging east' is nowadays a singularly - worn-out
cliché.
Let us take a quick look at what has happened to Asia in the present century. The story
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