Page 103 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

this fleeting world / our world: the modern era tfw-43

Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of
the past how to make new ones. • A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990)

slaves and to ship them to plantations in the Americas. stages of the modern revolution allowed it and the North
For better or worse, such global exchanges stimulated American region to put their distinctive stamp on the
commerce throughout the world. modern revolution and to achieve a global hegemony
that has so far lasted almost two centuries. Because of
Western Europe’s Emergence Europe’s primacy English is the universal language of
as a Global Hub modern diplomacy and business rather than Persian or
Although change was rapid, it did not transform all Chinese, and suits and ties rather than kaftans are worn
parts of the world at once, and the order in which dif- in the United Nations.
ferent regions were transformed had a profound effect on
the course of modern history. This fact is the fourth fac- Other Factors
tor contributing to the modern revolution. The societies Fifth, more particular factors must enter into any detailed
of western Europe had been at the margins of the great explanation of the modern revolution. The peculiarly
trading systems of the agrarian era, but they were at the commercialized nature of European states undoubtedly
center of the global networks of exchange created during helps explain their receptiveness to innovation, but geo-
the sixteenth century because they controlled the ocean- graphical factors, such as climatic changes, or the pres-
going fleets that knit the world into a single system.West- ence of large, relatively accessible seams of coal in Britain
ern Europe was better placed than any other region to and northwestern Europe, may also have shaped the tim-
profit from the vast flows of goods and ideas within the ing and geography of the modern revolution.
emerging global system of exchange. The European sci-
entific revolution was, in part, a response to the torrent Industrial Revolution:
of new ideas pouring into Europe as a result of its ex- 1750–1914
panded contacts with the rest of the world.Awareness of These arguments suggest that the ingredients of the mod-
new ideas, crops, religions, and commodities under- ern revolution were present in all parts of the world, even
mined traditional behaviors, cosmologies, and beliefs and though its full impact first became apparent in north-
posed sharply the question of how to distinguish between western Europe and the eastern seaboard of what became
false and true knowledge of the world. The reinvention the United States. In this region technological change
and spread of printing with movable type ensured that accelerated from the late eighteenth century. Familiar
new information would circulate more easily in Europe markers of change include the introduction and spread of
than elsewhere. more productive agricultural techniques, more efficient
At the same time European states, in an environment machines for spinning and processing cotton, the im-
of almost continuous warfare, desperately needed new proved steam engine of the Scottish inventor James Watt,
sources of revenue; thus, they were keen to exploit the and the first locomotive. By the early nineteenth century
commercial opportunities created within the global eco- contemporaries saw that something exceptional was hap-
nomic system.They did so partly by seizing the resources pening. In 1837 the French revolutionary Auguste Blan-
of the Americas and using American commodities such as qui (1805–1881) declared that an “industrial revolution”
silver to buy their way into the markets of southern and was under way in Britain and that it was as significant as
eastern Asia, the largest in the world.The increasing scale
For more on these topics, please see the following articles:
of commercial and intellectual exchanges within Europe
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias p. 528 (v2)
created an environment that was particularly open to
Energy p. 646 (v2)
innovation because European innovators could draw on
Enlightenment,The p. 660 (v2)
the intellectual and commercial resources of the entire
Industrial Technologies p. 981 (v3)
world. The primacy of western Europe during the early