GENERAL INTRODUCTION 



r T~ r [\'0 circumstances, quite different in nature, make the 

 1 present time particularly favourable for the writing of a 

 Universal History : on the one hand, the development of 

 historical studies, and, on the other, the growth of world-conditions 

 in which all countries share. 



For almost a century now an ever increasing number of 

 students — anthropologists, historians, archceologists — have been 

 extending, with commendable patience, their researches along all 

 lines and into the most remote corners of man's past. The 

 tremendous mass of detailed knowledge thus accumidated was 

 bound eventually to force upon scholars the necessity for some kind 

 of synthesis, and tJiis need has made itself felt most imperatively 

 in a desire for some co-ordinating point of view from which it 

 wovdd be possible to dominate Time. 



Yet the work of the historians, no matter how impartial it 

 may appear, does not merely respond to intetfftl laws but is 

 also subject to external influences to a certain extent. If, for 

 instance, any particular trait may be regarded as characteristic 

 of our present epoch it is the human solidarity encountered all 

 over the earth. Our planet seems to have shrunk in size through 

 the rapidity of communication and civilized nations have 

 developed such intimate relations either between one another or 

 through intensive colonization, with less developed peoples, that, 

 as in an organism, everything seems to be inter-connected. 

 To-day we have a world-politics, a world-economics, a world- 

 civilization. This visible spatial and temporal unity in human 

 groups invites us to reflect upon the role which the universal 

 factor has played from the beginnings of time. 



Thus, apart from the works devoted to facts and individuals, 

 to countries, peoples, and successive epochs, we have the Earth 

 and Humanity left as objects that must be studied. 



In Germany, during the years preceding the war, the study of 

 universal history flourished — under the name of " Weltge- 



