An old-fashioned American – and almost everyone who has passed a certain age finds moments when he claims to be one – contained, as an Hegelian would suspect, an internal contradiction. He liked things big and done in a big way. But this was a nineteenth-century vice shared with the entire elite of Europe in that period, in politics, in business enterprise, even, according to one modern critic, in literature. What else was the unification of Italy and Germany but a tidying up of the history of those peoples into national states, the sweeping away of ridiculous, fussy, “petty” principalities, of lesser and impotent local sovereignties? How else to explain the death-grip of the Hapsburg monarchy on southeastern Europe, the determined, ruthless power of the tsarist army and bureaucracy over the peoples of Eurasia, the imperialism, cultural and political, of a centralized French Republic, and of course, Britain:

sang the British hymn, as law, Christianity, morality, and free trade were carried by the British navy and regiments to the five continents and most of the intervening islands (except, significantly, the Japanese archipelago).

A contribution to the discussion at a conference on the Gerschenkron hypothesis in the light of recent research and thought, held at Bellagio, Italy, in October 1988, under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, Gianni Toniolo (University of Venice) and Richard Sylla (New York University), organizers.