A long period of steady and almost uninterrupted growth was cut short in 1914 by the “guns of August,” and when these fell silent in November, 1918, Europe was a very different continent, socially, economically, and politically, from what it had been only five years earlier. In the course of the previous century population had more than doubled; gross national product had increased many times, and a continent which had on balance been self-sufficing in foodstuffs had become dependent on the rest of the world, with which it was linked in a trading network of growing complexity. Urban population, no more than 15 percent of the total when the century began, had increased to 45 percent of a much larger total. At the beginning of the century nationalism was an emotion new to many parts of the continent and unknown in others. By 1914 it was felt intensely everywhere; it sparked the most disastrous war known, and the peace settlement which followed was dominated by it.

POPULATION

In 1913 a belt of very dense population stretched from northern Britain to eastern Germany and was matched by another which covered most of Italy. Around and between these regions and dense population were others of lower density, which merged into the sparsely settled areas of “peripheral” Europe. This pattern differed only in detail from that of a century earlier.