A Modern History, 1640-1870

A university textbook of modern European and world history covering the two centuries the Soviet syllabus treated as the age of bourgeois revolution: from the English revolution of 1640 to the eve of the Paris Commune.

Its span takes in the English civil war, the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars and the Restoration, industrialisation and the rise of the working-class movement, 1848 across Europe, the unifications of Italy and Germany, the American Civil War, and the colonial expansion of the period.

Edited by Ye. Yurovskaya, it is orderly, well proportioned and clear, and as a statement of how the period was actually taught - which events counted, in what sequence, and why - it is the standard text.

Its frame is the formational scheme that had been standard in Soviet historiography since the 1930s, announced in the opening sentence and sustained without deviation.

The date deserves a note. The imprint is of 1990, the last full year of the Soviet Union, and by then the press was full of perestroika and glasnost, the Congress of People's Deputies was televised, and the archives of the 1930s were beginning to open. None of it reaches this volume: across some 119,000 words those words do not occur, and the word Soviet itself appears twice. The footnotes cite editions from between 1976 and 1985, so the apparatus was assembled no earlier than the mid-1980s.

The old manual carried across the threshold with its doctrine intact.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.