Page 244 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

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tain chronological boundaries, and in part from the un- imply world to mean, in an indefinite way, immediate
considered way in which both phrases entered historical rather than global surroundings; because this historical
scholarship. scholarship dealt with European subjects, the “early mod-
ern world” was in fact “early modern Europe.” The early
Origins of the Concept modern world became global only with C. F. Strong’s
Although conceptually the phrase early modern world is grammar school textbook The Early Modern World (1955)
an extension of the phrase early modern Europe, the ini- and S. Harrison Thomson’s 1964 review of J. H. Parry’s
tial histories of both phrases have some surprises. The The Age of Reconnaissance, in which Thomson uses the
earliest known appearance of the phrase early modern phrase to describe the “story of the successive expansion
world occurs in Willard Fisher’s “Money and Credit Paper of European venture, from Africa to the reaches of the
in the Modern Market” from The Journal of Political Indian Ocean by Arabs and Portuguese by sea, the move-
Economy (1895). Although Fisher writes, “We all know ment westward to the Americas and the early transition
that the system of bank credits and bank money, which from discovery to fishing, trading, and exploitation”
was introduced into the great commercial centers of the (1964, 188).
early modern world, has now attained a quite marvelous The first considered analysis of the early modern
development” (1895, 391), the geographical sense of his world came after the posthumous publication of Joseph
statement is strictly, if implicitly, European. On the other Fletcher’s article “Integrative History” in 1985. Such
hand, the phrase early modern Europe first shows up analysis has tended to adopt either a deductive or an in-
twenty years later, in Dixon Ryan Fox’s “Foundations of ductive approach.
West India Policy” in Political Science Quarterly (1915).
Fox remarks,“It was now realized by students of colonial Deductive Approach
history that in the Caribbean [the “West India” of the arti- A deductive approach to the early modern world com-
cle’s title] might best be traced the application of those pares premodernity and late modernity, devises the char-
principles which formed the working basis for the old acteristics necessary to bridge the two stages, and only
empires of early modern Europe” (1915, 663). Ironically, then seeks confirmation in the historical record. This
the phrase early modern Europe first appeared in the approach assumes the existence of a modernizing trajec-
Caribbean, in the global context of colonialism, in an arti- tory, which the early modern world shared with (and per-
cle advocating trans-Atlantic history. In their debuts each haps inherited from) early modern Europe.
phrase bore something of the other’s sense. Informed by a Marxist perspective, the essentials of the
Fox’s usage was an anomaly, and when the phrase early early modern world would highlight transitions from feu-
modern Europe arrived in Europe, it had come to stay.The dal to bourgeois, from serfdom to wage-earning prole-
phrase early modern world, however, for decades would tariat, and from local subsistence to regional market

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