'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to seve… - Eric Hobsbawm

The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial proletariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest.

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.

We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the period of this book. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological. In this respect our world is more massively standardized than Phileas Fogg’s, but only because there are more machines, productive installations and businesses.