Origins of the modern world 4th edition pdf

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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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.

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INTRODUCTION

The Rise of the West?

350 ppm. Within the past decade, climate scientists tell us, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed a tipping point of 350 parts per million (ppm), and is now around 400 ppm. Because carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas, projections are that Earth is heading for warmer global temperatures and serious challenges. In the view of James Hansen, until 2013 head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, this is a matter of concern because most of what we have called human civilization has developed in a temperate global climate with atmospheric carbon dioxide around 280 ppm. More than that, though, Hansen and other climatologists have concluded that the cause of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is human action arising from industrialization over the past two centuries, and especially in just the past sixty years since the middle of the twentieth century.1

Certainly, the question of global warming is an important one that the world needs to face, but it is not the only one. The story of how the world got to the point where human actions could affect global environmental processes is complex, but not mysterious. The tools of history can help us understand how and why the world we live in—the modern world—got to be the way it is. That understanding can be helpful as we search for ways to make the world a better, safer, more sustainable, and more equitable place for all people.

Mostly, the story of the modern world revolves around the historical unfolding of four interrelated themes. The first involves the question of

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when, how, and why some parts of the world first industrialized, and how those processes were then picked up and used by people in other parts of the world. That story line is still unfolding, and gets intertwined with another, that of the emergence of nation-states as the principal way people over the past two centuries have organized themselves politically. Industry initially gave some states in western Europe and North America increasing wealth and power, so much so that a large and growing gap emerged between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world. The story of that ‘‘gap’’ and its consequences is the third of the themes taken up in this book.

The fourth theme explores the interrelationship between the environmental context in which those elements of the modern world emerged and the ways people and their actions in turn changed and continue to change the environment. The imprint of humans on our Earth’s ecosystems has become so great that some scholars argue that we are entering a new geologic era—the Anthropocene—in which ‘‘humankind . . . has become so large and active that it now rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.’’2

Just 250 years ago, the human population of the world was less than one billion people, and two Asian countries—India and China—accounted for two-thirds of the world’s economic output, and they are not European. In the brief span of history since then, global population has grown to over seven billion people (on our way to nine billion plus by 2050), and the world saw a great reversal of fortune: where once Asians held most of the economic cards, today it is still primarily Western countries and Japan, although China and India once again are rising rapidly. The question centers on how this happened. How did industry and European-style countries called nation-states—rather than highly developed agrarian empires like China and India—come to define our world?

Thus, to understand our world, we have to understand not just how nation-states and industry came to shape the modern world, but how and why those European ways of organizing the world came to dominate the globe. Explanations abound, but for most of the past two centuries, the predominant explanation in the West, the United States included, has been ‘‘the rise of the West.’’ As we will see, recent research has shown that that explanation is no longer persuasive, but because it is probably the one most readers may be familiar with, I will take some time exploring it and providing the basis for constructing an alternative explanation.

The Rise of the West

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The concept of the rise of the West provides both a rationale and a story line that purports to explain not just the modern world, but why it is defined by primarily European features. The idea behind it is fairly simple and began to emerge shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Europeans were quite astounded to see hundreds of Spanish conquistadors vanquish huge and very wealthy American civilizations, in particular the Aztecs and the Incas. Being ignorant of the germ theory of disease and the cause of the ‘‘Great Dying’’ in Mexico, where nearly 90 percent of the central Mexican population of twenty-five million succumbed to European diseases such as smallpox and influenza, Europeans first attributed their superiority to their Christian religion. Later, during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they attributed their superiority to a Greek heritage of secular, rationalistic, and scientific thought.

In the late 1700s, this story line continues, the French Revolution of 1789 reinforced the awareness in European minds not just that Europeans were different from the rest of the world, but also that Europeans were ‘‘progressing’’ rapidly while the rest of the world appeared to be stagnating, that Europeans were somehow exceptional—better, even—than the rest. Nineteenth-century European historians, impressed with what many considered to be the universal appeal of the ideals of the French Revolution—egalité, liberté, fraternité (equality, liberty, and brotherhood) —looked back to the ancient Greeks, their institutions of democracy and republics, and their rationalistic bent toward understanding the natural world in scientific, not religious, terms. In this early telling of the ‘‘rise of the West,’’ the story is somewhat like a relay race, with the ideas of democracy that arose in Greece passed off to the Romans, who dropped the baton (the fall of the Roman empire followed by the so-called Dark Ages), but Christianity was then on the scene to pick it up and run with it, creating a distinctive European culture during feudal times. The ancient Greek heritage was rediscovered in the Renaissance (‘‘renewal’’), elaborated during the Enlightenment, and ultimately fulfilled in the French and American revolutions and ‘‘the rise of the West.’’

If the West was ‘‘rising’’ during the eighteenth century, during the nineteenth its ascent was completed. As the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was just beginning, the classical British political economists—Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo—developed another strand to be woven into the story of the rise of the West: the ideas of capitalist industrial development as ‘‘progress,’’ the West as ‘‘progressive,’’ and Asia (and by implication, Africa and Latin America, too) as ‘‘backward’’ and ‘‘despotic.’’ To be

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sure, contrasts between the virtues of the West and the flaws of the East— the Orient—may have dated back to the Greeks, but eighteenth-century Europeans had been impressed with the wealth and governance of Asian countries, especially China. As the pace of economic change accelerated in nineteenth-century Europe, while much of Asia was in internal decline, analysts like Smith and Malthus began to revert to a view of the West as dynamic, forward looking, progressive, and free, and Asia as stagnating, backward, and despotic.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the most powerful critics of the new capitalist world order, believed that nineteenth-century European expansionism was bringing ‘‘progress’’ to the rest of the world. As they wrote in The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848:

The [European] bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most backward, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the underdeveloped nations’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world in its own image.3

Of more importance for Western conceptualizations of their own history, though, has been Max Weber, a German sociologist who wrote around the turn of the twentieth century. Where Weber shared with Marx a fascination with explaining how and why capitalism developed in Europe —and only Europe—Weber parted with Marx in his explanation. Instead of focusing as Marx had on ‘‘materialist’’ explanations, Weber looked to those aspects of Western values and culture, in particular the rationalism and work ethic that he associated with Protestantism, as being crucial to the rise of capitalism. But rather than basing his ideas about the rise of the West solely on studies of the West, Weber actually investigated Chinese and Indian societies, compared them with Europe, and concluded that those two societies at least, and by implication all other non-European societies, lacked the cultural values necessary for capitalism. Nonetheless, they too could ‘‘modernize,’’ Weber thought, but only by going through a painful process of cultural change, getting rid of their cultural ‘‘obstacles’’ to capitalist development.

‘‘The Gap’’ and Its Explanations

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Since the mid-nineteenth century, then, European social theorists have been aware of a growing gap between the industrialized countries and the rest of the world. Believing both that western Europeans—and they alone —had unlocked the secret of modernization,4 and that others too could learn, twentieth-century followers of Smith, Marx, and Weber have propounded a ‘‘diffusionist’’ theory of how world history has unfolded. Europeans found out how to get rich first by industrializing, Japan and a few other places learned from the Europeans and have caught up, and eventually every other place on the globe will too (as the story of ‘‘China’s rise’’ over the past thirty years appears to show), as long as they identify and eliminate the local institutions and cultural traits that prevent them from becoming modern.

Viewed now from the beginning of the twenty-first century, these ideas appear to be quite unconvincing in light of the facts that the gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world continues to grow and the environmental consequences of industrialization are coming home to roost. However, the fact that these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European theorists—Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, and Weber—all accepted the idea of European exceptionalism and sought, as one of their primary intellectual goals, to explain it, is important. These men were the founders of modern social science theory, and in the twentieth century virtually all of the social sciences, in particular sociology and economics, have incorporated the idea of European exceptionalism into their basic assumptions. As historians sought to become more ‘‘scientific’’ in the twentieth century by adopting and adapting the insights of this social science to historical inquiry, they too became captivated by the search for the origins and causes of European exceptionalism. But as we will see, Europeans were not exceptional, and one of the most important points about the history of the world until about 1800 is the broad comparability of Asia with Europe, showing more surprising similarities than meaningful differences. Nevertheless, the search for answers to why Europeans were perceived as exceptional and hence ultimately superior continues among historians today, even though many now think it is the wrong question to be asking.

In the post–World War II era, this historical search has produced an impressive body of scholarship looking for the key to what one economic historian has called ‘‘the European miracle.’’5 These scholars begin with what they see as the fact of the rise of the West but propose differing solutions to the questions of when and why the ‘‘rise’’ or the ‘‘miracle’’ began. The question of when will be discussed first, since in many ways it is relevant to considerations of why.

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Adam Smith saw 1492 and 1498 (the voyages of Columbus to the Americas and of Vasco da Gama around Africa to India, respectively) as the most significant years in history. As Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776):‘‘The discovery of America, and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind.’’ Marx, too, saw these two years as crucial, as have several twentieth-century scholars working in a Marxist tradition who have pointed to the subsequent European colonialism, slavery, and exploitation of colonies in the Americas and Asia as the primary explanations for the rise of the West. Many non-Marxists have contested the idea that Europe’s rise was a result of the exploitation of others,6 an inconvenient and awkward fact if true, and instead have turned their attention to those aspects of European culture that predate European colonialism, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the New World.

To avoid the possible embarrassment of attributing the rise of the West to its colonial ventures, and not its inherent virtues, much post–World War II scholarship on the origins of the rise of the West has looked farther back in European history, in some cases as far back as the Middle Ages in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or yet earlier to the ancient Greeks, for factors that could be attributed only to Europe’s own exceptional development. Factors that have been identified, in addition to the cultural values discussed by Weber, include environmental ones (temperate climates promote hard work, or poor soils stimulate agricultural innovation), technological ones (plows, stirrups, or reading glasses), political–military ones (feudalism leading to absolute monarchs and then nation-states and the evolving technology of war), demographic ones (small families promote capital accumulation), and in the minds of several historians, combinations of all or some of these.7

The implication of this body of scholarship is that Europe possessed some unique characteristics that allowed it—and only it—to modernize first, and hence gave it the moral authority and the power to diffuse ‘‘modernity’’ around the globe where cultural, political, or economic ‘‘obstacles’’ prevented modern development from occurring indigenously. Hence, this story line purports to explain, justify, and defend the rise of the West to global dominance. Just how wrongheaded this theory is will become clearer as the industrial superiority of much of Asia to that of Europe, at least prior to about 1750, is revealed in the course of this book.

In addition to the recent scholarship on Asia that is changing our understanding of how and why the modern world developed, another perspective is changing our views of the consequences of that development —environmental history. Broadly conceived, environmental history looks

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at the mutual interactions of humans with our environment—the ways environments conditioned human societies, the ways humans in turn changed their environments to meet human needs, and then the ways those environmental impacts create new sets of problems for humans to confront. This new field emerged around 1970 as mounting environmental problems such as industrial pollution of the air, water, and soil in the United States and Europe prompted historians to ask how and why that had happened. More recently, as the impact of humans on global ecological processes such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles has become apparent, environmental historians have adopted increasingly global views.8

Before turning to the question of why all this matters, let me first say a few words about geographic units used in this book. Two paragraphs above, I mentioned a comparison between ‘‘Asia’’ and ‘‘Europe,’’ implying both that these units are comparable and that they have some kind of unity that distinguishes each one from the other. That assumption is problematic, mostly for Asia, because of the immense variety of societies it includes, ranging from China and Japan in East Asia, through the pastoral nomads of Central Asia, to India in the south and the Muslim- dominated West Asia (Middle East). Even Europe has little coherence if it is taken to include everything from Portugal to Russia. Moreover, until very late in our story (at least until 1850 or so), Asia contained about two- thirds of the world’s population and was larger than Europe in virtually every respect. To that extent, Europe and Asia were not comparable. Furthermore, one of the most important points I make in this book is that understanding the origins of the modern world requires taking a global view, first of how the vast continent of Eurasia, coupled with Africa, interrelated, and then after 1500, how the New World fit into the story. Finally, even the geographic terms ‘‘China,’’ ‘‘India,’’ and ‘‘England’’ or ‘‘France’’ conceal much variation within their borders—different peoples, many languages or dialects, and vast differences in wealth and power. Nevertheless, I will use these geographic terms to begin locating the story, but readers should be aware that generalizations based on large geographic units will not be true at all times and places within the places named, and that in reality what was truly comparable occurred in parts of China, parts of England or the Netherlands, and parts of India.

Readers may be wondering why the issue of the rise of the West matters. Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here —inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future. The ideas developed by the story of ‘‘the rise of the

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West’’ to explain the nature of the world we live in, especially the values of marketplace capitalism and democratic institutions, are thought to have originated uniquely within Western civilization, yet to have universal applicability—to be ‘‘good,’’ not just for the West, but for everybody. Following that assumption, the solution to virtually all problems in the world today, at least according to U.S. and European political leaders, is the adoption of private property and free markets.9 Thus, to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the communist leaders of China, to the leaders of Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia, Western leaders have said that the answer to any and all problems they face is ‘‘more democracy and free markets.’’ The idea is that the institutions and values that supposedly propelled the rise of the West are universal and can—indeed, must—be adopted throughout the world. That is a political agenda.

But what if this way of looking at the making of the modern world—the rise of the West and the spread of its system on the basis of its supposed cultural superiority to the rest of the world—is wrong? That is the possibility raised by a new body of scholarship, especially over the past thirty years.

No longer do all historians picture the world as merely a continuation of universal and necessary trends that began centuries ago in Europe. What many are seeing instead is a world in which population, industry, and agricultural productivity were centered in Asia until 1750 or 1800. The European world of industrial capitalism and nation-states is thus both quite recent and a reversal—for how long, though, remains a big question—of long-standing historical trends favoring Asia.10 Europeans may have painted a picture of the rise of the West over this original one, but the patterns of Asian strength and economic vitality are beginning to show through once again. Artists call this concept of one painting showing through an original painting or parts of it pentimento. As this book intends to show, the more we look at the world and its past through a new light, the more the pictures painted in our minds by the rise of the West will reveal another, and rather different pattern, underlying. To see it, though, we will have to begin shedding our Eurocentric perspectives.11

Eurocentrism One critic has said that the idea that ‘‘the West has some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gave this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities’’ is a myth—the myth of Eurocentrism.12 Another has seen Eurocentrism as an ideology, or a distortion of the truth, used by

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the West to mask its global dominance,13 and still another deems it a ‘‘theoretical model,’’ one explanation among several for how the world works.14 In this section, we will examine two aspects of what critics call Eurocentrism: first, what it is; and second, the extent to which it can be seen as wrong, a myth, an ideology, a theory, or a master narrative.

The essence of Eurocentrism, according to the critics, is not merely that it views history from a European point of view (the ‘‘centrism’’ part)—it is not just one of many ethnocentric views of the world. A merely ethnocentric perspective recognizes that there are many different peoples and cultures in the world, but that mine is better because it arises from my people and culture. They are mine, better, and not yours. Eurocentrism also emphasizes the superiority of Western culture—all that is good, progressive, and innovative starts only in Europe—but it also sees that package as having universal applicability: it is not peculiar and limited to Europe, but has spread to encompass much of the globe by the twentieth century.

Going a bit deeper, critics say, Eurocentric views of the world see Europe as being the only active shaper of world history, its ‘‘fountainhead,’’ if you will. Europe acts; the rest of the world responds. Europe has ‘‘agency’’; the rest of the world is passive. Europe makes history; the rest of the world has none until it is brought into contact with Europe. Europe is the center; the rest of the world is its periphery. Europeans alone are capable of initiating change or modernization; the rest of the world is not.

On a deeper level yet, according to critics, Eurocentrism is not just a belief in the past or present superiority of Europe, but is ‘‘a matter of . . . scholarship’’ (i.e., of established ‘‘fact’’).15 It is not a ‘‘bias,’’ but a way of establishing what is true and what is false. To that extent, Eurocentrism is a way of knowing that establishes the criteria for what its practitioners deem to be ‘‘the facts.’’ It is thus a paradigm, a set of assumptions about how the world works, that generates questions that can then be answered by ferreting out ‘‘the facts.’’16

Finally, Eurocentric ideas about the world and how it came to be the way it is are deeply held by Americans. Indeed, American history is often presented as the pinnacle, the purest and best expression, of Western civilization. European and even world history are most often presented from a Eurocentric point of view, whether or not students or teachers recognize it. Mostly, it is assumed to be ‘‘true.’’ Simply collecting more facts would not suffice to dispel the Eurocentric viewpoint, since all the facts on the inside tend to confirm the reality, the truth, of the matrix one is in. Some facts that are collected might not fit, but mostly those are simply

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discarded or ignored as being anomalous—accidents, if you will. The same is true of Eurocentrism. If Eurocentric ideas about the rise of the West are wrong, how would we know it? The way to know is by getting outside of that way of explaining how the world came to be the way it is and thinking about other ways of understanding the big changes that have shaped our world.

Readers may sense a paradox here. On the one hand, I started by pointing out that key features of the modern world are European in origin and that I think a historical approach can explain how and why industry, the nation-state, the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and mounting human impacts on the global environment came to define our world. On the other hand, I have just rejected the usual Eurocentric explanations of the origins of the modern world. How can there be a non-Eurocentric explanation of a world that has European features? In short, we can find that by broadening the story line to include parts of the world that have thus far been excluded or overlooked—we can begin and end the story elsewhere.17 When we do that, we will see that only a new, global story line—one not centered on Europe—will suffice to explain the origins of the modern world.

Stories and Historical Narratives For historians, constructing a narrative—a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—is central to how we know what we know, how we determine what is true about the past.18 The rise of the West is a story—to be sure, a story at the core of Eurocentrism—that provides the criteria for selecting what is and what is not relevant to that story. But because the rise of the West informs all the other historical scholarship mentioned above, it is more than just another story or narrative; it is a ‘‘master narrative,’’ ‘‘a grand schema for organizing the interpretation and writing of history,’’ ‘‘sweeping stories about origins,’’ as historians Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob put it.19

So the only way to determine if the story of ‘‘the rise of the West’’ is wrong is to construct an alternative narrative of how the world came to be the way it is: we have to get outside of the rise-of-the-West matrix. Doing so will accomplish three things. First, it will provide an independent way to tell which parts, if any, of the rise-of-the-West paradigm can be kept and which need to be rejected. Second, it will help readers to examine critically their own assumptions about how the world works. And third, it will raise the more general issue of how we know what we know about the world and its history. That is the task of this brief history. In the remainder

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of this introduction, I want to sketch out the elements of that alternative narrative.

I need first to introduce three additional concepts: those of historical contingency, of accident, and of conjuncture. We start with the idea of contingency. One very powerful implication of the story line of the rise of the West, though it is seldom made explicit, is that the way the world turned out was the only way possible. Because of the historical advantages enjoyed by Europeans, possibly since the fall of the Roman empire or even as far back as the Greeks or to the source of European genetics, this interpretation implies that the rise of the West was inevitable. It might have taken some twists and turns, had some fits and starts, but sooner or later the West would rise above all other parts of the world.

Although we will also have to deal with the political, economic, and military dominance of Europe and its offshoots (e.g., the United States) for the past 200 years, there is no reason to think that that dominance was inevitable or, for that matter, that it will continue. Indeed, it appears inevitable only because that story line was centered on Europe. But once a broader, global perspective is adopted, the dominance of the West not only happens later in time, probably as late as 1750–1800 and perhaps not until the early nineteenth century, but it also becomes clearer that it was contingent on other developments that happened independently elsewhere in the world.

Most important, the economic engine driving global trade—and with it exchanges of ideas, new food crops, and manufactured goods—was in Asia. Probably as early as 1000 CE, China’s economic and population growth stimulated the entire Eurasian continent; another surge came after about 1400 and lasted until 1800 or so. Asia was the source of a huge demand for silver to keep the economies of China and India growing and also the world’s greatest source of manufactured goods (especially textiles and porcelain) and spices. Also very significant in our narrative will be the beginning of Islam and the expansion, from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries, of Islamic empires westward into the Mediterranean Sea and eastward into the Indian Ocean as far as Indonesia. Where Asia attracted the attention and interest of traders from all over Eurasia, Islamic empires blocked direct European access to the riches of Asia, stimulating a desire among Europeans to find new sea routes to the Indian Ocean and China.

Even Columbus’s ‘‘discovery’’ of the Americas and Vasco da Gama’s sailing around Africa to get to the Indian Ocean would not have done much for European fortunes had they not found both vast quantities of silver in the New World with which to buy Asian goods and a supply of African slaves to work New World plantations after European diseases

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killed off most of the Native American population. As we will see, the creation of the institutions and sources of wealth and power in a few advanced parts of Europe, enabling these areas to establish dominance over the rest of the world, was contingent upon these, and other, developments.

As late as 1750, as parts of Europe approached the levels of development reached in key areas of Asia, all of these most developed parts of Eurasia—Europe as well as Asia—began butting up against environmental limits to further growth, except in England, where easily accessible coal deposits enabled the British to escape these constraints by industrialization based on the new source of steam power. In the early 1800s this new power source was put to military use, and then—and only then—did the scale tip against Asians, and did Europeans, led first by the British, move toward establishing clear global dominance. The point is that the rise of the West was not inevitable but was highly contingent. The world we live in might have been different; there is nothing in the past— unless you adopt the rise-of-the-West construct—that indicates that the world had to become one dominated by Western institutions.

Moreover, if the rise of the West were not inevitable but instead contingent, that would mean that the future too is contingent, and that is why it matters what our view of the past is. If nothing anybody could have done would have changed the outcome of history, then nothing we can do now can shape our future: we are trapped in a further elaboration and extension of that which exists in the present, unless some huge accident of history pushes us in a different direction. On the one hand, if history—and our view of it—is contingent, then the actions that we take in the here and now do indeed have the possibility of changing the world. We are not trapped, but rather we (and I take that to mean all the peoples in the world, not just Americans or those in the West) can have agency. If the past could have been different, then so too can the future. Being ‘‘contingent,’’ on the other hand, does not mean that European dominance of the world for the past 200 years was an accident, for there were causes for that development, as this book will make clear.20

That does not mean that historical accidents do not happen, for they do. Let me give two examples that will be discussed later in the book. In agricultural societies, which is what most of the world was until very recently, climate changes could have a major impact on the size of the harvest, not just in one year but over decades. More favorable conditions could produce larger harvests, lowering the price of food for everyone and stimulating the growth of the economy. Poor climatic conditions, such as happened in large parts ofthe world during the seventeenth-century ‘‘Little

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Ice Age,’’ put whole economies under severe pressure and led to serious, worldwide crises, as we will see in chapter 3. Although our current climate problems have human causes and thus, in principle, are amenable to amelioration by human action, past climate shifts were accidents in the dual sense of being unpredictable and beyond human control.

Another ‘‘accident’’ is important to the story of coal and its relationship to industrialization. Coal deposits were laid down hundreds of millions of years ago by geologic processes, and where they were in terms of where people lived is purely accidental, as is the case with the main fossil fuel used over the last hundred years, petroleum (and with all other minerals too). Some coal deposits turned out to be near to where people both needed and knew how to use them, and some were far away and hence unusable. The Dutch, for example, had peat, but not coal. This was one reason that their economic growth in the eighteenth century slowed while that of Britain, which just happened to be sitting on huge, close, easily worked coal deposits, accelerated. The distribution of coal deposits thus is accidental as far as human history is concerned, but it certainly had a dramatic impact on which countries industrialized and which did not.

Next is the idea of conjuncture. A conjuncture happens when several otherwise independent developments come together in ways that interact with one another, creating a unique historical moment. For our purposes, one way to think about this is to consider the world as having had several regions that were more or less independent of one another, thus having their own histories. In China, for example, the decision in the early 1400s by the government to use silver as the basis for their monetary system arose out of circumstances particular to Chinese history. But this Chinese decision had a global impact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans discovered both huge supplies of silver in the New World and an even larger Chinese demand for it. As a result, silver flowed into China (and India), and Asian silks, spices, and porcelains flowed into Europe and the New World, inaugurating the first age of globalization. That was a conjuncture: things happening in different parts of the world for reasons having to do with local circumstances that then became globally important.

Conjunctures can also occur within a given region when several otherwise independent developments reach critical points and interact with one another. For instance, the development of nation-states as the dominant form of political organization in Europe happened for reasons quite independent of those leading to industrialization. Nonetheless, when the two converged in the nineteenth century—came together to produce a conjuncture—a very powerful global force developed, particularly when

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the two provided the basis for European military preeminence. The attention we give to contingency, accident, and conjuncture means

that our explanation of major developments in the making of the modern world will involve several causes, not just one. Monocausal explanations are too simple to take account of the complexity of people, societies, and historical change. We should thus not look for ‘‘the’’ cause of the Industrial Revolution, for it will not be there. Instead, we will find a complex of factors that go a long way toward explaining the Industrial Revolution. I say ‘‘a long way’’ because we have to leave open the possibility that as we learn more or as our perspective changes, we might see the shortcomings of the explanation offered here.

So the narrative in this book about how the modern world came to be— the world of industrial capitalism, a system of nation-states and interstate wars, a growing gap between the richest and the poorest in our world, and mounting human impacts on the environment—will be one that has contingency, accidents, and conjunctures. The world could have been a very different place. Until about 200 years ago, the most successful way people found to organize themselves and to promote the growth of their numbers was in large land-based empires in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. But if not for a series of contingencies, accidents, and conjunctures, we might still be living in a world of agrarian empires.