The Age of Empire: 1875–1914
This title is about the death of the 19th century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilization. It is about hopes realized which turned into fears: an era of unparalled peace engendering an era of unparalled war; revolt and revolution inevitably emerging on the outskirts of a stable and flourishing Western society; an era of profound identity crises for bourgeois classes whose traditional moral foundations crumbled under the pressure of their own accumulations of wealth and comfort, among a new and sudden mass labour movement which rejected capitalism, new middle classes which rejected liberalism. It is about world empires built and held with almost contemptuous ease by small bodies of Europeans, which were to last barely a human lifetime, and a European domination of world history never more confident than at the moment when it was about to disappear forever.