The copyright page of this textbook reads "© Progress Publishers 1990." That is the last full year of the Soviet Union. By the time a student opened A Modern History, 1640–1870 in Moscow or Delhi or Addis Ababa, the state that commissioned it was dismantling the censorship, the planned economy and the one-party monopoly on which the whole apparatus of books like this one rested. The press was full of the words perestroika and glasnost; the Congress of People's Deputies was televised; the archives of 1937 were beginning, cautiously, to open. None of this reaches the volume in your hands. Search its 119,000 words and the terms perestroika, glasnost and Gorbachev do not occur once. Neither does Soviet Union, except in the imprint; the word "Soviet" itself appears exactly twice, once inside the printer's line and once in the single phrase "considered by Soviet historians." A book issued in the year the system fell is, in its intellectual method, entirely untouched by the crisis around it.
That is worth dwelling on, because it decides what kind of object this is. Progress translations frequently postdate their Russian originals by years, and a 1990 imprint can conceal a manuscript a decade or two older. Here the front matter gives no printing history, so the manuscript's true age cannot be fixed from the page. But the internal evidence is unambiguous. The footnotes cite editions of the Marx–Engels Collected Works published between 1976 and 1985 and the Selected Correspondence of 1982, so the apparatus was assembled no earlier than the mid-1980s. And yet the frame is pure, undiluted formational orthodoxy of the kind that had been standard in Soviet historiography since the 1930s. Whatever hand assembled the citations in the Gorbachev years, the historical philosophy they serve is the one that was drilled into every Soviet undergraduate long before reform was thinkable. This is not a glasnost book in any sense but the calendar. It is the old manual, carried across the threshold of 1990 with its doctrine intact, and that steadiness — in a year when so much else was moving — is itself the first thing to notice.
The doctrine announces itself in the opening sentence. "Modern History is that period which saw the victory of capitalism over feudalism and the establishment of the capitalist formation throughout the world." The word formation is the load-bearing term of the whole edifice, and it recurs eighty-one times. In the classical Soviet scheme, history is a ladder of socio-economic formations — primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism — through which societies ascend by law, each rung prepared by the productive forces maturing inside the one below. Modern history, on this account, is simply the name for the rung on which feudalism gives way to capitalism, and the bourgeois revolutions are the mechanism of the passage. The book's thirty-one chapters, from the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 to the eve of the Paris Commune, are the story of that mechanism running: England first, then North America, then France, then the wave of 1848, then the unifications of Germany and Italy and the American Civil War, each an episode in a single law-governed process. The German Ideology, we are told in the chapter on socialism, disclosed "the objective laws which govern the development of productive forces and production relations" and "the laws that conditioned the revolutionary change from one mode of production to another, more progressive mode." History has laws; the revolutions obey them; the historian's task is to exhibit the obedience.
The teleology is explicit and it points forward, not back. The revolutions are rungs, and each rung is valued for what it prepares. "The bourgeois revolutions cleared the way for the industrial revolution," the socialism chapter begins, and the industrial revolution in turn produces the proletariat, and the proletariat produces the movement that will end all exploitation. This is why the survey, which nominally stops in 1870, is governed throughout by an event just past its own horizon. "The first revolution that set out to do away with all exploitation," the Introduction states, "was the revolution of March 18, 1871 in Paris." The Paris Commune is the vanishing point toward which every earlier chapter is arranged. The English Revolution "struck the first crushing blow to feudalism"; the American War of Independence "helped the formation of the first bourgeois-democratic republic in Modern History"; and all of it is prologue to the moment when the working class first moves as a class for itself. The bourgeoisie's own revolutions, in this reading, are magnificent and necessary precisely because they dig the grave the proletariat will later occupy. It is a coherent and, in its way, a grand conception. It is also a machine for reading history backward from a predetermined destination, and the closer one looks at how it handles particular revolutions, the more the destination distorts the reading.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the recurring insistence on the "bourgeois-democratic stage." The category is applied with great uniformity: the English Revolution has one ("In 1647 the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution began"), the German revolution of 1848 is "the first bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany," the American Civil War "was a bourgeois-democratic revolution," the Italian Risorgimento is an incomplete one. The stage is treated as a discrete and compulsory phase, a rung that cannot be skipped, and the book polices the boundary. Consider its verdict on Andreas Gottschalk, the Cologne physician who led that city's Workers' Association in 1848 and pressed for a workers' republic at once. The text convicts him of a category error: "Failing to understand that the objectives facing the German revolution were bourgeois-democratic and not socialist, he demanded the immediate formation of a 'workers' republic'." Gottschalk's crime is impatience with the timetable. He wanted to reach a rung before history had built it. The book's confidence that it can name the "objectives facing the German revolution" in advance — and grade a participant's tactics against them — is the teleology in its most operative form. The future is known; the actors are marked right or wrong by whether they marched toward it in step.
The pivot of the whole survey, and its most substantial single chapter, is the eleventh: "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science." The title is Engels's, borrowed from the 1880 pamphlet, and the choice is deliberate, because this chapter is where the bourgeois-revolutionary narrative hands off to the proletarian one. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are treated with real care and real respect — more on that below — but they are also arranged as a preparation, a lower stage superseded when "Marx and Engels turned communism from utopia into science." The utopians saw the injustice but not the agent; they appealed to enlightened capitalists because the proletariat was, in the chapter's phrase, still "too immature for the utopian socialists" to see it as the force of its own liberation; science arrives when the working class matures enough to be recognized as that force. The chapter closes on the founding of the Communist League and the Manifesto, and from there the book's centre of gravity shifts decisively from parliaments and dynasties to workers' movements, congresses and internationals. The last chapter before the coda on literature — chapter thirty, on the road from the Communist League to the International Working Men's Association — is effectively the survey's true conclusion, the moment the class that will inherit modern history takes organized shape.
It is in these late chapters, dealing with a workers' movement rather than with kings, that the book's reflexivity shows — the habit of reading the past through the categories of a much later present. The survey ends in 1870, decades before the state that published it existed, so it cannot legitimate the Soviet order directly; there is no October here to defend, no Stalin to exonerate, none of the flashpoints — the Terror, the Trials, the Pact — on which this series usually catches Progress volumes falsifying the record. What it does instead is quieter. It reads the nineteenth-century workers' movement as an anticipation of Bolshevism, and it certifies that reading by importing Lenin as the retrospective judge. When the book summarizes what Marx and Engels learned from 1848, it reaches past both men to quote Lenin's The State and Revolution on the matter: "In this remarkable argument Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto." The authority that settles the meaning of 1850 is a text of 1917. The same anachronism runs through the account of the First International, whose General Council is credited with having "proclaimed the right of all nations to self-determination" — a Leninist formula of the First World War era, retrojected onto a body of 1864 that spoke of the independence of Poland and Ireland in quite different terms. And the dissenters of the 1850s are labelled with the vocabulary of the twentieth-century faction fight: August Willich and Karl Schapper, who broke with Marx in 1850, are convicted of believing "that communism could be introduced directly as a result of the revolution... irrespective of objective conditions" and of trying to push the League "on the path of revolutionary adventurism." The charge sheet is drawn up in the idiom of a later orthodoxy and applied to men who could not have known they were being measured against it.
The handling of Bakunin belongs to the same pattern, though it is more restrained than one might fear. The Bakuninists are presented flatly — "Bakunin was against any form of state, calling for its destruction and the absolute freedom of the individual" — as one faction among several (bourgeois democrats, Proudhonists, trade unionists) that the "revolutionary proletarian nucleus of the International under the leadership of Marx" had to overcome. Because the survey stops in 1870, it never reaches the Hague Congress of 1872, the expulsion of Bakunin, or the split that killed the International; the great confrontation is foreshadowed as a struggle Marx's tendency is winning, and left there. This is tendentious in its framing — the International is read as a proto-party with a correct line and deviations from it — but it does not descend to the caricature or the character assassination that the later, Stalin-era literature reserved for anarchism. On this terrain the book is more a partisan than a falsifier.
The deep objection to the volume is not to its facts, most of which are sound, but to the stagism that organizes them — and that objection was made, from within Marxism, long before this book was written. The theory of permanent revolution, worked out by Trotsky from 1905 and restated in The Permanent Revolution (1930), is precisely a critique of the idea that the "bourgeois-democratic stage" is a discrete compulsory phase through which every society must pass in order. Trotsky's starting point was the very fact this textbook records and then explains away. Recounting the German defeat of 1848, the book observes that "the first bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany did not achieve its aims" because "there was no class capable of leading the movement," and that "from the very outset of the revolution the liberal bourgeoisie allied itself with the monarchy and the nobility against the people." That is not a minor detail; it is the central datum of the permanent-revolution thesis. Where the bourgeoisie arrives late on the historical stage, confronting an already organized proletariat below it and a world market above it, it dares not carry through its own revolution for fear of the class beneath — so the "bourgeois" tasks (the republic, the land, national unity) fall to the workers, who cannot stop at them. The book sees the bourgeoisie betray in 1848 and draws the conclusion that the proletariat was merely "immature." Trotsky drew the opposite conclusion: the bourgeoisie's incapacity is structural, not a matter of timing, and it means the neat sequence of stages will not hold.
Against Gottschalk's condemnation, set Trotsky's blunt answer to exactly this charge, in the chapter of The Permanent Revolution pointedly titled "On the Skipping of Historical Stages": "It is nonsense to say that stages cannot in general be skipped. The living historical process always makes leaps over isolated 'stages'." The stages of the textbook are, Trotsky argued, an abstraction — a theoretical decomposition of a process that in life runs together. Backward countries do not repeat the classical Western sequence at a slower pace; they telescope it. He put the same thought in his 1932 Copenhagen address, describing the law of combined development: "To jump over intermediate stages is the way of backward countries." And the positive programme he drew from it is the direct negation of this book's schema. In the closing postulates of The Permanent Revolution he wrote that for "countries with a belated bourgeois development... the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation." The democratic revolution, far from being a self-contained rung on which one halts, "grows over directly into the socialist revolution." This is not an eccentric heresy; it is a reading of the same nineteenth-century evidence the textbook surveys, and it is the reading that the twentieth century — Russia in 1917, China, the colonial revolutions — did more to confirm than to refute.
The point matters beyond scholarship. The doctrine of a compulsory bourgeois-democratic stage was not a neutral academic position in the Soviet canon; it was the theoretical warrant for the Comintern's insistence, from the 1920s on, that Communists in the colonial and semi-colonial world subordinate themselves to a "progressive national bourgeoisie" and defer the fight for their own power to some later phase. That policy produced catastrophes — most infamously in China in 1927, where the workers' movement of Shanghai was delivered to the executioners of the very bourgeois ally the stage theory prescribed. A textbook that teaches undergraduates to grade Gottschalk a fool for wanting a workers' republic "too early" is teaching, in miniature and at a safe historical distance, the habit of mind that had real victims. That is the stake in what looks like a dry quarrel over the periodization of 1848.
None of this is a reason to discard the book, and it would be a poor service to a reader to leave the impression that it is worthless. It is not. As a survey it is competent, wide and, on its own terms, honest, and its materialist attention to class forces is often genuinely illuminating. The opening chapter on the English Revolution is a good example: its account of the enclosures, the rise of the "monied people" — the gentry and the new urban bourgeoisie — and the forcible expropriation of the peasantry through which "a potential labour army was formed for the manufactories and mines" is exactly the sort of social-economic grounding that a purely constitutional history of the period leaves out, and it holds up. So does its unsentimental tracing of how the Independents' republic, "put to power by popular victories," hardened into "a self-seeking oligarchic clique," and its careful distinction between the political Levellers and the Diggers, whose demand for common ownership of the land the Levellers pointedly disowned — a class fracture inside the revolution that the book renders with real precision. The chapter on utopian socialism treats Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as serious thinkers wrestling with a real problem rather than as mere errors to be corrected, and it is generous about Owen's practical contribution to cooperation and trade unionism. The breadth is a virtue too: room is found for Portugal, Switzerland, the Balkans, Poland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, small countries that a Western textbook of comparable length would likely omit. A student who read this volume for its facts and its economic sense, and ignored the ladder it hangs them on, would come away genuinely informed.
The long chapter on "The Emergence and Development of the Colonial System of Capitalism" deserves a particular word, because it is both the doctrine at its most persuasive and the scholarship at its most useful. Here the formational frame actually earns its keep: the book refuses to treat European industrialization as a self-generated European miracle, insisting instead that "the rapid development of Western Europe and North America was in large measure due to the colonial enslavement of many of the peoples of Africa, America and Asia." It notes coolly that "colonial exploitation became an integral part of the Dutch economy," traces the English colonial empire back to state-sponsored piracy, and cites Nehru on the "little battle of Plassey" and the bribery that decided it. This is the materialist method doing honest work — following the gold and the slaves rather than the flags — and it is precisely the sort of account a Western textbook of the same vintage would have been more squeamish about. It is also, not incidentally, the empirical ground beneath the very theory this book cannot bring itself to state: that capitalism was a world system from the start, developing the metropolis and underdeveloping the colony in a single combined process. The book sees the combination. It simply files it under a ladder of separate national ascents instead of drawing the conclusion its own evidence invites.
That, in the end, is the way to read it. A Modern History, 1640–1870 is a real work of scholarship harnessed to a philosophy of history that its own best evidence contradicts. The scholarship is the enclosures and the New Model Army and the phalanstery and the St Martin's Hall meeting of 1864; the philosophy is the ladder of formations and the compulsory stages and the future known in advance. The two can be separated, and the reader who separates them gets the benefit of a diligent collective of Soviet historians without swallowing the teleology they were required to serve. The volume's most telling feature is the one with which we began: that in 1990, with the intellectual foundations of the whole system visibly cracking, this book records not a tremor. Its authors had, on the evidence of their own pages, the facts that would have unsettled their frame — the bourgeoisie's treachery in 1848 chief among them. They had, in Trotsky and in much else, the critique that had drawn the harder conclusion decades earlier. They set it all down and let none of it disturb the ladder. The survey ends, as it must, in 1871, on the threshold of the Commune it treats as history's forward gate. What it could not see was that the state issuing it was, in the year of its printing, standing on a threshold of its own.