Читать книгу The History of the West. Through the Eyes of Bears and Balalaikas - - Страница 2

This book was written under the significant influence of another work – George Macaulay Trevelyan’s1 “A Social History of England,” where the author attempted to move away from detailed descriptions of political events and historical figures in favor of a deep analysis of the transformation of social relations. After all, what does a traditional history textbook represent? Kings, wars, revolutions, and again kings. Dates, dates, dates. Names and again dates. Which are impossible to remember and behind which the understanding of what really happened in the world at that time is erased.

You can’t completely get rid of kings and wars, after all, they were the ones who determined the course of the historical process, creating this or that reality over many centuries. And yet, in my deep conviction, the main thing is not the names and events; they are merely hooks, markers that allow us to tie together the chronological sequence of facts, but rather the changes that occurred in a particular historical era.

At first, I wanted to take a specific time period, for example, the mid-19th century or the early 16th century, and examine it in detail. But such an approach turned out to be practically impossible: every fact or trend has causes and consequences, without the analysis of which the fact itself is merely a meaningless line. Therefore, it was necessary to dig deeper and wider so that the events would at least hint at the interconnections that in reality permeate the entire socio-political process, regardless of the era.

There is very little specificity in this book, and the facts are mostly placed in the footnotes, of which there are, on the contrary, an enormous amount. This is done intentionally. Surely much of what is told is already familiar to the reader, and much else cannot be briefly stated. For any event and historical figure in our time, there is a huge layer, or as they say, corpus of materials that are not difficult to find. The task of this text is different: to provide a general overview of what has happened with Western civilization over the last five centuries, to sketch the general outline of events, and to provide enough information so that the reader can delve into the study of those details that seem interesting to them.