The era of empires is full of contradictions. It was a time of unprecedented peace in the Western world, which led to a period of equally unprecedented global wars. It was a time, despite appearances, of increasing social stability within the zone of developed industrial economies, from which small groups of men emerged who managed, with almost arrogant ease, to conquer and rule vast empires; at the same time, however, this developed industrial world created in its periphery the combined forces of rebellion and revolution that would engulf it.
This book examines the moment when it became clear that the society and culture created by the Western liberal bourgeoisie and for its sake did not represent the permanent form of the modern industrial world but only a phase of its early development. The economic structures that constitute the world of the 20th century, even when they are capitalist, are no longer the structures of the "private enterprise" in the sense that entrepreneurs would have given to the term in 1870. The revolution that dominates the memory of the world after the First World War is no longer the French Revolution of 1789. The culture that permeates it is no longer the bourgeois culture as it was before 1914. The continent that was then overwhelmingly superior in economic, intellectual, and military power no longer has the same role. In one way or another, the era of empires prepared a world of a different texture - and this was confirmed after 1914.
The world of the liberal bourgeois society has passed irreversibly. The very calls for the revival of the spirit of 19th-century capitalism made in the late 20th century testify to how impossible such a thing is. Fortunately or unfortunately, from 1914 onwards, the century of the bourgeois class belongs to history.

E. J. Hobsbawm