Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from An Essay on Western Civilization: In Its Economic Aspects
It has been my endeavour in this essay to bring out the main economic features in the growth and diffusion of the Civilized Life in Western Europe, to which so many peoples and countries have contributed; I have not aimed at portraying the development of each of the separate polities to which reference is made.
Some of the difficulties that have to be faced, in engaging in such a task, have been obvious from the first, and others have been felt more clearly as the work progressed. The chief of these is due to the lack of information. The social and economic side of life was so familiar to their contemporaries, and was often so uneventful, that chroniclers have rarely thought it worth while to describe it particularly. We have to depend on incidental remark, rather than on detailed and deliberate description. This silence is especially perplexing in early times, and renders it very difficult for us to trace the precise connection between one primitive civilization and another.
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