European Mastery
The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume X. The Zenith of European Power: 1830-
1870. Edited by J. P. T. Bury. (C.U.P., 40s.) THIS is not only the best volume of the New Cambridge Modern History which has so far appeared but also a very good book in its own right. Perhaps its editor and publisher have learnt from the disappointment caused by the earlier volumes of the series which were patchy, ill co-ordinated and of little value as works of reference. After the meagreness of some of them even the bulk of this .book is a recommendation. It easily meets the first requirement of good comprehensive history: that it should contain a lot of accurate information. This is the first of its departures from the announced purposes of the series which meets the eye. It is also a
well-organised book. The chapters on cultural and social history do not stick out uneasily, but form meaningful settings for the chapters of narrative. The contributors have greatly helped the editor by not riding off at tangents in pur- suit of their own enthusiasms and by writing rounded essays which keep the European per- spectives of their special interests firmly in sight. Mr. Hall's chapter on the history of science, Mr. Foot on the origins of the Franco- Prussian War and Professor Potter on the United States show a specially noteworthy combination of freshness and sound scholarship. Finally, most of the book is unusually well written.
It is obvious from this that Mr. Bury has been a very good editor. He was undoubtedly helped by the shape of the period which the book had to cover. There is an obvious unity in the four decades which span it and that unity is expressed in the European supremacy implied in the title. One of the giants which Tocqueville had descried in 1835 was looming larger over the Atlantic horizon by 1870, but Russia was still entangled in the unravelling of a serf economy. Europe's mastery of the world was unchallenged. Nor was her supremacy a simple static exercise in the architecture of power. It was dynamic, still evolving technologically and geographically in its relations with the rest of the globe and shuddering under the pace of its own internal transformations. Force was never wore truly the midwife of history than in these years.: about a quarter of the chapters in this book are about war and the means of war. (Yet the first truly industrial war was fought on the other side of the Atlantic.) The book's drama is derived from these changes. Eighteen forty- eight was only the beginning of the upheavals which shattered a Europe whose hierarchies had their roots in the Middle Ages. New divisions were now to cut across the traditional struc- ture; nationalism opened new fissures at one level and industrialisation at another. It was in these years that people began to talk of the `masses.'
It was also an age of confidence, although funda- mental dogma was crumbling on every side. The pessimists were less heeded than they had been after 1815. Science fed this confidence and the ex- tension of science to more and more fields affected philosophical systems and the popular mind alike. Comte was evidence of it and so were the novels of Jules Verne. Such influences, thanks to steamship and telegraph, were now world-wide influences; education and the press, too, were beginning to adapt their structure to mass industrial society. This seems modern, but it is really very remote. The age includes not only the Communist Manifesto but the Syllabus of Errors. In these decades Europe's technical supremacy still rested on iron, not steel, and crowned heads were commoner than republics. The tensions bred by these paradoxes are the subject-matter of this book. It achieves the rare success of explaining the paradoxes without ex- plaining them away; it is the analysis of a civilisation.
JOHN ROBERTS
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