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each event in the full complexity of its historical context. The result is a unique work, notable in several ways. It gives a picture of the world in terms of the influence of different cultures and outlooks upon each other; it shows, more completely than in any similar work, the influence of science and technology on human life; and it explains, with unprecedented clarity, how the intricate financial and commercial patterns of the West prior to 1914 influenced the development of today's world. Carroll Quigley, professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, formerly taught at Princeton and at Harvard. He has done research in the archives of France, Italy and England, and is the author of the widely praised "Evolution of Civilizations." A member of the editorial board of the monthly Current History, he is a frequent lecturer and consultant for public and semipublic agencies. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Economic Association, as well as various historical associations. He has been lecturer on Russian history at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces since 1951 and on Africa at the Brookings Institution since 1961, and has lectured at many other other places including the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College at Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, he was a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee which set up the present national space agency. He was collaborator in history to the Smithsonian Institution after 1957, in connection with the establishment of its new Museum of History and Technology. In the summer of 1964 he went to the Navy Post-Graduate School, Monterey, California, as a consultant to project Seabed, which tried to visualize what American weapons systems would be like in twelve years. CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING Page 3 Each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion and, after a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power, both internally and at the expense of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of organization appears... It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise. At this point, there appears for the first time, a moral and physical weakness. Page 5 The passage from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict is the most complex, most interesting and most critical of all periods of the life cycle of a civilization. It is marked by four chief characteristics: it is a period: a) of declining rate of expansion; b) of growing tensions and class conflicts; c) of increasingly frequent and violent imperialist wars; d) of growing irrationality. Page 8 When we consider the untold numbers of other societies, simpler than civilizations, which Western Civilization has destroyed or is now destroying, the full frightening power of Western Civilization becomes obvious. This shift from an Age of Conflict to an Age of Expansion is marked by a resumption of the investment of capital and the accumulation of capital on a large scale. In the new Western civilization, a small number of men, equipped and trained to fight, received dues and services from the overwhelming
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