Short history of international affairs 1920-1939

Sixteen years have now passed since the first appearance of this 'Short History'; in the meantime the infant has grown epithet in the title was any longer appropriate, and, measured by a book's average expectation of life, I suppose that this one should now have reached maturity. Indeed, it may be said to have come of age with the publication of the third edition in 1942, when its scope was extended to include the whole inter war period. Up to that date, however, the rapid progress of events which it was necessary to cover afforded little opportu nity for reflexion, or for consulting fresh sources of knowledge to supplement or correct the earlier portions of the narrative. In these circumstances, the time now seems ripe for a much more thorough revision of the whole work than has hitherto been undertaken. The lapse of more than ten years since the end of the period covered has brought it into a truer historical per spective. Up to now, the greater part of the work has neces sarily been no more than an attempt to record contemporary and extremely fluid events, and even the earlier portions have been mainly of that character. When the book was originally published, in 1934, the First World War was a living memory to practically all its readers, and a very recent memory to a large proportion of them. But I have come to realize, with a certain sense of shock, that to the present generation of students 1914 is a date as far antecedent to the birth of most of them as 1863 is to my own. When I think how abysmal would be my ignorance of the events and personalities of that year without the assistance of historians, it is clear to me that very little knowledge of the pre-war world can any longer be taken for granted and that even the events of somewhat later years, such as the rise of Italian Fascism, call for considerably fuller explanation than was originally felt necessary.