The Protocols is a chronicle of modernity's promises and betrayals. It begins in the late eighteenth century, when machines remade the world, and ends in the early 1930s, as a new age of tyranny emerges from the ruins of an old order. Volume I, From the Industrial Revolution to the Night of the Long Knives (c. 1780-1934), follows the arc of an age that believed in progress yet sowed the seeds of its own undoing. It traces how industrialization transformed societies, how new ideologies-nationalism, socialism, and racial myth-rose to fill the vacuum left by crumbling monarchies and fading faith, and how fear and prejudice were given a voice in the form of a forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This volume closes as Adolf Hitler secures his power through murder on the Night of the Long Knives, a signal to the world that Germany's fragile democracy had been extinguished. The stage is set for the catastrophe that will define the next decade-a descent to which the second volume will bear witness.