Coutinuity and change: in a sense this is what all historians study all the time, and it is no surprise to find historical monographs on a wide variety of subjects appearing under this kind of title. Historians are professionally concerned with change, and therefore with the absence of change (which is one of the ways of defining continuity). If volumes I-XII of the New Cambridge Modern History have already dealt with these themes, the reader may well be asking what is the point of a thirteenth volume, which covers the same period as all the rest, from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The short answer to this question is that there is more than one way of being concerned with change, or more than one kind of change to be concerned with.

Historians have traditionally dealt with the narrative of events, especially political events; Thucydides, Tacitus, Guicciardini, Clarendon and Ranke are among the great masters of this genre in the West. This style of history involves a close study of changes over the short-term. The traditional historian may also be interested in changes over the long-term; he may choose his subject because he thinks it a ‘turning-point’ in history; but he is likely to assume rather than to argue that a break in continuity occurred at this point. Guicciardini began his History of Italy and Ranke began his Latin and Teutonic Nations with the turning-point of the 1490s, just like the old and the New Cambridge Modern History, but they did not justify their choice in any detail.