Biological old regime definition

The Origins of the Modern World

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WORLD SOCIAL CHANGE Series Editor: Mark Selden

Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendance of Capital by Amiya Kumar Bagchi

Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civil Humanity by Mohammed Bamyeh

Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880

edited by Nola Cooke and Li Tana Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World

edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800

by Geoffrey C. Gunn Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local

edited by Caglar Keyder China: Its Environment and History

by Robert B. Marks The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, 3rd edition

by Robert B. Marks The Politics of Greed: How Privatization Structured Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

by Andrew Schwartz Leaving China: Media, Mobility, and Transnational Imagination

by Wanning Sun Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor

edited by Richard Tanter, Gerry van Klinken, and Desmond Ball Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy

by Dale W. Tomich Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices

edited by John Torpey The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery

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by Eric Williams, edited by Dale W. Tomich, introduction by William Darity Jr.

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The Origins of the Modern World

A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century

THIRD EDITION

Robert B. Marks

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield First edition 2002. Second edition 2007.

Map 1.1 reprinted from Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 34.

Map 2.2 reprinted from Philippe Beaujard, ‘‘The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World Systems before the Sixteenth Century,’’ Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (December 2005), map 5, p. 429.

Figure 3.1 reprinted from Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 176–77.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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http://www.rowman.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-4422-1239-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-1240-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-1241-1 (electronic : alk. paper)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

List of Figures and Maps

Preface to the Third Edition

Introduction: The Rise of the West?

Chapter 1 The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400

Chapter 2 Starting with China

Chapter 3 Empires, States, and the New World, 1500–1775

Chapter 4 The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750– 1850

Chapter 5 The Gap

Chapter 6 The Great Departure

Conclusion: Changes, Continuities, and the Shape of the Future

Notes

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About the Author

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Figures and Maps

Figure 3.1

Joint Involvement of European States in Great Power Wars, 1496–1514 and 1656–1674

Figure 5.1

Share of World GDP, 1700–1890

Figure 5.2

Share of World Manufacturing Output, 1750–1900

Figure 5.3

Population of India, China, and Europe, 1400–2000

Figure 5.4

Factory Smokestacks, Nineteenth-Century England

Figure 6.1

Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2010

Map 1.1 The Eight Circuits of the Thirteenth-Century World System

Map 2.1 The World circa 1400–1500 Map 2.2 The Fifteenth-Century Eurasian and African Trading

Worlds Map 3.1 The World circa 1760

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Map 5.1 The World circa 1900 Map 6.1 The World’s Poorest Countries by Region

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Preface to the Third Edition

As I was working on the first edition of this book in the year 2000, environmental historian J. R. McNeill published Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. In that book, McNeill observed that he thought that a hundred years hence, at the end of the twenty-first century, historians and others looking back at the twentieth century would be struck by the significance, not of the two massive world wars, the rise and fall of fascism and communism, the explosive growth of the human population, or the women’s movement, but of the changed relationship of humans to Earth’s natural environment. As an environmental historian myself, I found that observation compelling and incorporated an ecological theme in my narrative. The world holds many surprises, but one has to be how much faster McNeill’s prediction has arrived. It hasn’t taken a century, but just a few years, for the importance of the change in our relationship to the environment to thrust itself to the forefront of our understanding of the recent past, and to give the epoch in Earth history we are now in a new name—the Anthropocene.

When I first wrote this book, I did so because a new body of scholarship on Asia had made it possible to question the usual answer to the question of the origins of the modern world: ‘‘The Rise of the West.’’ The new scholarship on Asia—which Jack Goldstone dubbed ‘‘The

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California School’’ because so many of us lived, worked, or published in California—raised questions about how and why the modern world came to have its essential characteristics: politically organized into nation-states and economically centered around industrial capitalism. Our findings that Asian societies had many of the characteristics others had seen as exclusively European and thus ‘‘causes’’ of the ‘‘European miracle’’ led us to argue that similarities cannot cause differences and so to look for alternative explanations for how and why the world came to be the way it is. Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz pulled this scholarship into two important books that changed the way we now understand how the world works, decentering Eurocentric explanations of history. One of the contributions of the first two editions of this book (2002 and 2007) was to bring to students and teachers a fresh narrative of the origins of the modern world that incorporated this new body of scholarship.

That continues to be the case with the third edition (2015), but now in addition the environmental changes we have wrought, and our consciousness of them, have forced the environmental storyline into an ever more prominent position in the book’s narrative. It was only in the 1980s that climatologists had begun to understand El Niño events, and in the 1990s that rising levels of carbon dioxide coming from industry and tailpipes might cause the global climate to warm. From that initial realization that humans are forcing global climate change, we have now come to understand that humans are changing, overwhelming, or displacing other global processes of Nature as well on scales never before seen in human history. Readers or instructors familiar with earlier editions will notice new sections on environmental issues throughout the book, as well as others highlighting Africa and income inequality. Those additions, combined with the placement of all notes at the end of the book, have necessitated new pagination and a new index. Instructors will find more detail on these changes in a revised online study guide (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442212404).

My reason for recounting this story of the changing circumstances of this book is not to provide a rationale for another edition. Rather, it is to point out that history is living and relevant to current concerns, not the ‘‘dead hand of the past’’ as some might see it. Both new scholarship and new issues and problems can prompt us to reexamine the past and to rewrite history to take account of the changes in both. That way the stories we tell about the past continue to be relevant and helpful to us in the present. For if they weren’t, what would be the point? We need all the help we can get, and historical perspective is an essential aid to living in and through the present to a better future.

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https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442212404

In addition to the intellectual debt I owe to Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and John R. McNeill, I want to thank them for their personal involvement with the first edition of this book. Others who were instrumental in conceptualizing that project include Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, whose work following the silver trail around the world opened new vistas for me and other scholars and who organized the 1998 Pacific Centuries Conference at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where we thrashed out ideas over lunches and dinners, and where the idea for this book originated. Others who read and commented on the first edition include my Whittier College colleagues José Orozco and Dick Archer; Steve Davidson, professor of history at Southwestern University; and the editor of the Rowman & Littlefield series World Social Change, Mark Selden. For their response to the ideas in the book and the book itself, I want to acknowledge the first- and second-year students who have taken History 101, Introduction to World History, and read and commented on the first and second editions of Origins, and to thank my colleagues, Professors José Orozco, Elizabeth Sage, and José Ortega, who team-taught the course with me and from whom I learned much about the history of Latin America, Europe, and the Atlantic world. Like their predecessors, the history majors in History 480, Capstone Seminar, read widely and deeply on topics that found their way into this book, most recently exploring environmental history (Spring 2010), the early modern world (Spring 2012), Eric Hobsbawm (Spring 2013), and ‘‘the seventeenth-century crisis’’ (Spring 2014). Whittier College supported this revision with a sabbatical leave in the fall semester of 2014, and the Richard and Billie Deihl Professorship supported travel to China. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (FB-36592) supported composition of the first edition. Philippe Beaujard kindly (and promptly) gave me permission to use one of his maps (see map 2.2). At Rowman & Littlefield, Susan McEachern was instrumental in bringing the first and second editions to print, kept me apprised of feedback from students and faculty who read and used Origins, and encouraged me to get working on this third edition. For their attention to detail, I want to thank Professor Robert Entenman and Yuhin Ng for pointing out errors in the second edition that needed correction. Any that remain in this edition are mine. Joyce Kaufman continues to offer companionship, love, and support, knowing what it means to be a publishing scholar at a college that values teaching effectiveness first and foremost. And as did Budd and Rembrandt, Stanton reminds me to look forward to each new day.