ABSTRACT
Europeans entered the twentieth century, it did indeed seem as if they were history's chosen peoples. The history of modern Europe can be said, rather arbitrarily, to have begun approximately seven centuries ago with the gradual emergence of Europe from a period that historians have called the Medieval or Middle Ages into a new era labeled, equally arbitrarily, the Renaissance. Out of the medieval world that had dominated Europe for centuries there emerged in the fourteenth through early seventeenth centuries a new, vitalized Europe, in which the process of change accelerated with ever increasing rapidity. The basis of medieval life was rural and agricultural. Society and politics were dominated by a feudal, aristocratic, landholding class, whose members waged constant internecine warfare within an ever more fragmented and decentralized political system. If indeed "modernization" or the "drive toward modernization" constitutes the single most inclusive theme of modern European history, it deserves at least some basic explanation and definition.
