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

WHAT IS HISTORY
begins with the Angle-Japanese alliance of I902 - the first admission of an Asiatic country
to the charmed circle of European Great Powers. It may perhaps be regarded as a
coincidence that Japan signalised her promotion by challenging and defeating Russia, and,
in so doing, kindled the first spark which ignited the great twentieth-century revolution.
The French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had found their imitators in Europe. The first
Russian revolution of 1905 awakened no echo in Europe, bur found its imitators in Asia:
in the next few years revolutions occurred in Persia, in Turkey, and in China. The First
World War was not precisely a world war, but a European civil war - assuming that such
an entity as Europe existed - with world-wide consequences; these included the
stimulation of industrial development in many Asian countries, of anti-foreign feeling in
China, and of Indian nationalism, and the birth of Arab nationalism. The Russian
revolution of 1917 provided a further and decisive impulse. What was significant here was
that its leaders looked persistently, but in vain, for imitators in Europe, and finally found
them in Asia. It was Europe that had become 'unchanging', Asia that was on the move. I
need not continue this familiar story down to the present time. The historian is hardly yet
in a position to assess the scope and significance of the Asian and African revolution. But
the spread of modern technological and industrial processes, and of the beginnings of
education and political consciousness, to millions of the population of Asia and Africa, is
changing the face of those continents; and, while I cannot peer into the future, I do not
know of any standard of judgement which would allow me to regard this as anything but a
progressive development in the perspective of world history. The changed shape of the
world resulting from these events has brought with it a relative decline in the weight,
certainly of this country, perhaps of the English-speaking countries as a whole, in world
affairs. But relative decline is not absolute decline; and what disturbs and alarms me is not
the march of progress in Asia and Africa, but the tendency of dominant groups in this
country - and perhaps elsewhere - to turn a blind or uncomprehending eye on these
developments, to adapt towards them an attitude oscillating between mistrustful disdain
and affable condescension, and to sink back into a paralysing nostalgia for the past.
What I have called the expansion of reason in out twentieth- century revolution has
particular consequences for the historian; far the expansion of reason means, in essence,
the emergence into history of groups and classes, of peoples and continents, that hitherto
lay outside it. In my first lecture I suggested that the tendency of medieval historians to
view medieval society through the spectacles of religion was due to the exclusive
character of their sources. I should like to pursue this explanation a little further. It has, I
think, correctly, though no doubt with some exaggeration, been said that the Christian
church was 'the one rational institution of the Middle Ages'. Being the one rational
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