Industrialization and its consequences
1750-1914 CE
This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions
The 165 years from 1750 to 1914 was the era of the Modern
Revolution, a pivotal moment
in human history. The heart of the Modern Revolution was that
global exchanges of ideas, goods, and peoples took place on
a scale not previously imagined. The result was that change
in the world became more and more autocatalytic. Scientists
use this term to describe a chemical process, but it is also
a useful historical concept. A catalyst is a person or thing
that precipitates a change. Autocatalysis occurs when one
kind of change precipitates by itself the need for other kinds
of changes. Since about 1750, changes in human life have not
only multiplied. More important than that, the dynamic interactions
among changes in many different areas—political, economic,
technological, cultural, environmental—have, by the
very process of interaction, generated the need for even more
changes. Once complex autocatalytic processes got going they
tended to speed up. Overall, change in the world has become
self-perpetuating and ever-accelerating.
The Modern Revolution involved numerous interacting developments.
Six spheres of change were particularly important in Big Era
Seven:
• Communication and transport. Crucial here were mechanized
printing, the railroad, the telegraph, and the steamship,
which decisively altered the framework for human interactions
everywhere. Only the polar regions and some remote areas of
tropical rainforest remained during that period outside the
global communications network.
• Population growth. The world’s population more
than doubled, and more people migrated long distances than
in any earlier era. These migrations and the revolution in
transport also stimulated continuing trans-oceanic exchange
of plant and animal species.
• Fossil fuel revolution. This was a revolution in
the use of coal, which transformed the world’s energy
regime from one based on biomass (wood) and animal muscle
to one increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. Early in the
era, the steam engine harnessed coal power, which vastly expanded
the amount of energy per capita available to humans.
• Industrialization. The industrial revolution was
a global process. It enormously increased the capacity of
some groups, mostly Europeans at first, to produce goods and
services. It greatly altered the distribution of wealth and
poverty around the world and also engendered new attitudes
towards nature and society.
• Democracy. The democratic revolution in the Atlantic
world dramatically reshaped human ideas about government and
political power. The ideas of this revolution proved contagious,
provoking movements for the abolition of slavery, representative
government, constitutions, universal suffrage, workers’
rights, and national self-determination, first in Europe and
the Americas, later all across Afroeurasia.
• Colonial empires. The expansion of colonial empires
using powerful new technologies of communication, transport,
and warfare was a major development of this era. The largest
of these empires were forged by Europeans, who adopted elaborate
racial justifications for dominance over other peoples. The
United States and, at the very end of the era, Japan also
became important players in the quest for empire.
Humans and the Environment
The fossil fuel revolution involved human ability to tap
ancient underground stores of energy from coal. This was a
fundamental breakthrough. It was as significant for our species
as the early transition to agriculture. Coal contains much
greater levels of energy than renewable biomass (wood). Exploiting
coal on a large scale, humans were able to burst through the
ceiling on economic growth that had been in place since around
5000 BCE.
At the start of Big Era Seven, world coal output per year
was less than 10 million metric tons. Then things began to
change, thanks mainly to steam-powered pump engines, which
allowed coal miners to drain the water that tended to accumulate
in mine shafts and tunnels. In 1860, the world produced about
130 million tons. In 1900, production rose to an astonishing
1 billion tons, and coal provided 90 percent of total world
energy consumption.
The second great force for environmental change was population
growth. In 1750, world population, according to one estimate,
was 771 million. By 1900, it had more than doubled to about
1.6 billion. The environmental impact of this demographic
upswing, combined with the surges in economic growth and energy
consumption, was colossal. Let's consider some major factors.
• At first, the population trend was disproportionately
concentrated in Europe, where (excluding Russia) numbers increased
from 111 million in 1750 to 295 million in 1900. Later in
the era the populations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa
also increased dramatically. Asia’s population, for
example, grew from 500 million in 1750 to 790 million in 1850,
an increase of 58 percent. In the next century, it rose to
1.376 billion, a gain of 74 percent. The table below summarizes
general trends:
Table: World Population Trends in
Millions
1750
1850
1900
Europe
111
209
295
Asia
500
790
903
Africa
104
102
138
Americas
18
59
165
World
771
1,241
1,634
Percentages of World Total
Europe
14.4
16.8
18
Asia
64.8
63.6
55.3
Africa
13.5
8.2
8.4
Americas
2.3
4.7
10.1
In some isolated regions, notably Siberia, many Pacific islands,
and some areas of tropical rainforest, indigenous populations
declined. This was mainly because outsiders introduced infectious
diseases to which the inhabits had weak immunities. Epidemics
were sometimes locally catastrophic, though the impact was
nowhere on the scale of the Great Dying in the Americas in
the sixteenth century.
Rapid urbanization accompanied population growth. In 1800,
only 9 cities in the world had a population of 1 million or
more. By 1900, 27 cities had more than 1 million people. The
proportion of the world’s people who lived in cities,
rather than in rural areas, increased from 2 percent in 1800
to 10 percent in 1900.
• Steamships and railroads made major migrations of
peoples possible in Big Era Seven. Three important patterns
can be distinguished.
o More than 50 million people emigrated from Europe (including
Russia) during the era, two-thirds of them permanently.
Their destinations were mainly the world's temperate zones:
Canada, the United States, Algeria, and Siberia in the Northern
Hemisphere; Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Australia,
and New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere. Indigenous peoples
resisted these newcomers, but in many places they were in
time demographically swamped by them. For example, the population
of the territory that now constitutes the United States
may have been as high as 10 million in 1500, and those people
were all American Indians. According to the 2000 census,
by contrast, the population classified as American Indian
or Native Alaskan numbered just over 2 million, a number
representing only about 0.75 percent of the total. These
overseas migrations of Europeans also had a significant
environmental impact. This is because Europeans and their
descendants possessed both sophisticated machine technology
and expectations of relatively high standards of living.
Therefore, they tended to exploit natural resources more
intensively than did the peoples they replaced.
o Another pattern of migration continued from the previous
Big Era. Between 1750 and 1870, about 1.7 million African
slaves were moved involuntarily to the Americas, most of
them destined to work on sugar plantations in Brazil or
the Caribbean. After 1800, however, the proportion of people
of African descent living in the Americas declined relative
to the number of people of European ancestry. This happened
because so many more Europeans migrated to the Americas
in the nineteenth century than did before 1800.
o A third pattern was the migration of Asian laborers.
Between 1830 and 1913, some 30 to 40 million Indians and
about 15 million Chinese left their countries to seek work
in mines and on plantations in European colonies and Latin
American countries. Many also migrated to the U.S., Canada,
and Australia to build railroads. Many of these immigrants
became permanent settlers, while others returned home.
By one estimate, more than 100 million people world-wide
were involved in long-distance migrations during Big Era Seven.
Finally, we must also mention the millions more who migrated
within the lands of their birth to seek work and opportunity
in cities or other regions of economic growth. Internal migrations
were an important aspect of change in India, China, Russia,
the Ottoman Empire, and Africa.
• The industrial revolution transformed the ability
of humans to affect the world's environment. Deforestation
greatly increased on a global scale. So did water pollution
from chemical and agricultural discharges into lakes and streams,
and atmospheric pollution from combustion of huge amounts
of coal. The advent of railroads and steamships also hastened
the diffusion of plants and animals to new parts of the world.
This was an extension of the “Colombian exchange”
of biota that occurred in the previous Big Era. These movements
often had significant environmental consequences. For example,
in 1859 a farmer in Australia introduced a few rabbits for
hunting. Within a few years rabbits were hopping across the
continent by the millions, ravaging crops as they went. By
1950, Australia’s rabbit population numbered 500 million
and continued to wreak havoc on agriculture.
• Despite the global economic advances of Big Era Seven,
several major famines occurred. In fact, famines intensified
as a result of increased global economic integration, which
sometimes devastated peasant societies and sharpened social
inequalities. In 1846-49, for example, a series of regional
blights ruined potato harvests in Ireland and Eastern Europe.
Although grain was available to feed the hungry, dominant
economic doctrines justified its export to other areas for
profit. The resulting food deficit provoked many deaths and
mass migrations. Even more distressing were the famines of
1880-1914, which historians have linked to El Niño
climatic conditions. Millions died in parts of Africa, Asia,
and Latin America, and countless millions more were reduced
to poverty.
A coal mine in the Rhondda Valley
A major mining region in Wales in the nineteenth century
Photo by R. Dunn
Humans and Other Humans
In Big Era Seven, autocatalytic change prevailed as ecological,
economic, political, and technological developments fed back
on one another and merged into a single global process, the
Modern Revolution. Because this revolution was based on the
cumulative interactions of humans in all earlier eras, it
was global in scope.
As peoples around the world, especially elite groups with
power and wealth, attempted to understand and influence the
multitude of new developments that constituted the Modern
Revolution, the doctrines of liberalism, formulated mostly
in Europe, came to the fore. The term “liberal”
refers basically to an attitude that favors progress or reform.
In Big Era Seven, liberalism took the form of a complex “package”
of ideas and plans of action.
In the economic sphere, liberalism called for such reforms
as establishment of the rule of law in societies, the sanctity
of private property, and the improvement of communications,
including railroads, steamship lines, telegraphs, and modern
port facilities. Liberal economic reformers believed the market
to be the ultimate governor of human relations, and they insisted
that both property and labor be released from the outmoded
restrictions of medieval times.
In politics, liberal reformers called for republican, that
is, representative, government characterized by democratic
participation, constitutions, and legislatures. They also
demanded the separation of church and state and an end to
policies that allowed churches to be exempt from taxes and
to control primary education.
The Modern Revolution was inevitably unstable and unpredictable
because it involved disagreements, conflicts, and contradictions
among numerous social and political groups. It set off multi-sided
political struggles both within societies and between them.
Let’s consider both economic and political trends.
Liberal Economic Trends. In the first phase
of the industrial revolution (1750-1840) entrepreneurs and
workers harnessed coal and steam power to drive industrial
machinery and vastly increase production. This development
occurred first in England. Railroad construction propelled
coal and steel industries and facilitated the expansion of
markets. After 1840, and especially after 1860, steam-generated
electricity powered industrial machinery. Also, the modern
world economy became organized on the basis of an international
division of labor. This meant that colonial dependencies and
other rural regions of the world produced raw materials for
export. In return, they imported finished goods from their
“mother countries” and in general from the more
industrially developed and urbanized regions.
At the beginning of the era, sugar was the world's most important
commercial crop, but in the 1830s cotton replaced it, owing
to the mechanization of production and establishment of a
global cotton market. Britain did not produce cotton but rather
imported it at advantageous prices from India, Egypt, and
the southern United States. British manufacturers then mass
produced textiles using machines and inundated the world market
with cotton products. For British business people, this was
good liberal practice because the market was allowed to determine
whether Indians bought local or European cottons. The market,
however, drove down prices in India and thereby destroyed
the livelihood of local spinners and weavers there.
In the previous Big Era, Asians had been unwilling to import
European goods. This had been a key economic weakness for
European manufacturers and merchants. As a result of the Opium
Wars (1841-1847), however, Britain compelled the Chinese government
to open its market to opium grown in South Asia. This traffic
enabled Britain to balance its trade with China for the first
time. Following the Opium Wars, the British government imposed
a series of treaties on China that gave Britain favored and
unequal trading privileges. British merchants regarded this
course of events as a case of practical liberal reform. In
the second half of the era, European and American governments
followed suit, establishing, by armed intervention, privileged
enclaves in Southeast Asia and China. Japan was better able
to protect itself, but in 1854 it too had to sign an unequal
treaty with the United States and then with major European
powers.
These unequal treaties were the norm not only for European
trade with Asia but also with Latin America and the Middle
East. States wishing to trade with Britain had to set low
tariffs on British imports and adopt legal and other measures
favorable to British interests. In the course of the nineteenth
century, other European countries, as well as the United States,
imposed similarly unfavorable commercial treaties on many
countries.
A new cycle of global economic growth followed the discovery
of gold in California in 1849 and subsequently in Australia,
Alaska, and South Africa. The increased availability of this
precious metal led in 1878 to the establishment of the gold
standard, which fixed the value of all currencies in terms
of gold. For the first time, there was a single global financial
market, which liberals regarded as a progressive reform.
Black, Chinese, and White Laborers in a
South African Gold Mine (1890-1923)
Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection
Library of Congress
Between 1880 and 1914 the world economy underwent
a second major wave of expansion. Global growth increased
threefold, world trade fourfold, and international investment
eightfold. Historians have called this expansion the “second
industrial revolution.” It was the result of the merging
of three notable trends:
• The modern communications revolution, including
the building of railroads in Africa and Asia, the global
expansion of steamship travel, the laying of the trans-oceanic
telegraph, and the invention of the telephone, greatly enhanced
the movement of peoples, goods, and capital worldwide.
• The mechanization of agriculture in both Europe
and temperate regions where Europeans settled made it possible
to produce, process, and transport food more cheaply and
efficiently.
• The steel and chemical industries emerged as a
new focus of production and profit just when innovations
in the textile industry were slowing down.
The era also saw major economic consolidation. In accord
with liberal principles that valued accumulation of private
capital and the sanctity of property, new cartels and trusts
were formed whose wealth dwarfed any business organizations
previously known in history. Two examples were U.S. Steel
and Unilever Brothers. The dark side of wealth accumulation
was that increased integration of the world market made economies
more vulnerable to financial crashes that could wipe out vast
sums in a moment.
The Fairy Queen
A locomotive built in 1855 for the East Indian Railway
National Rail Museum, India
www.railmuseum.org
Liberal Political Trends. Big
Era Seven began with the rise of Britain as the leading global
power, overshadowing France and all other countries. The Seven
Year's War and the American Revolution bankrupted France and
stripped it of its possessions in Quebec, Haiti, Louisiana,
and India. But despite Britain’s great power, it still
had to accommodate itself to the consequences of the revolutions
that occurred in the Thirteen Colonies of North America, France,
Haiti, and the Latin American colonies of Spain between 1774
and 1830.
The French revolution, which broke out in 1789, opened a
new phase in the political history of humanity. From then
on, individuals were no longer to be subjects of monarchs
who ruled by “divine right,” but citizens possessing
specific rights and duties embodied in a system of laws. These
laws were to be enacted by legislatures composed of the people’s
elected representatives. The democratic republic, a new form
of government, gradually replaced monarchy, the dominant centralized
political system in the world during the previous four Big
Eras. Britain and several other European countries remained
monarchies, but their kings and queens became subordinate
to parliaments and other democratic institutions. Monarchies
also continued in Russia, China, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand,
and many other countries. Almost all of them, however, had
to respond to pressure from liberal-minded elites to incorporate
at least some democratic political features, such as constitutions
and elected assemblies.
In both the United States and Latin America, revolutions
involved the founding of republics dominated by affluent middle
classes. Voting was at first confined to property holding
adult males, and slavery was left largely undisturbed. Nevertheless,
the visible contrast between the huge profits plantation owners
made and the misery of laboring slaves provided an engine
for political change. The anti-slavery movement was an important
part of liberal reform in the Americas in the first half of
Big Era Seven. The success of the revolution in Haiti (St.
Domingue) in 1804 ended slavery there and produced the world's
first republic governed by descendants of African slave immigrants.
As a result of anti-slavery protests, the British government
abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery as a legal institution
in its colonies in 1833. The liberal victory over slavery,
however, was incomplete. For one thing, other European states
failed to follow the British example right away. The United
States did not end slavery until 1862, Brazil not until 1888.
Also, slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced
labor, such as indentured servitude and share-cropping. A
parallel initiative, the abolition of serfdom in Russia in
1861, eliminated a major source of rural rebellions, but it
did not unleash capitalist energies in that country.
Overall, liberalism provoked great opposition and struggle.
While some elites, notably merchants, manufacturers, government
bureaucrats, educators, and some church leaders endeavored
to implement the liberal package of democracy, constitutions,
parliaments, separation of powers, and individual freedom,
other groups resisted these reforms. Opposition came especially
from commercial planters, established landowners, military
officers, and some religious authorities. In societies as
diverse as Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, China, and Japan,
attempts to implement a liberal reform package divided elites
and caused prolonged social struggles. From a global perspective,
the civil war, abolition, and reconstruction in the United
States fit into this pattern of conflict between liberal and
anti-liberal forces.
Colonial Encounters between 1870 and 1914
The Modern Revolution deepened the extremes of wealth and
poverty in the world, and the expansion of European colonial
empires greatly widened this gap. Colonialism assumed many
forms and produced contradictory results. In South Asia, Britain
spent much of the era incorporating numerous pre-existing
territories and kingdoms into a unified Indian colonial empire.
In Africa and mainland Southeast Asia, the chronology was
different. Before the 1870s, European territorial expansion
in Africa was largely confined to Algeria and South Africa.
In Southeast Asia, the Dutch ruled much, though not all, of
Indonesia. From the 1870s to 1914, however, most of Africa
(with the exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia) came under some
form of European colonial rule. In Southeast Asia, Britain
expanded in Burma, France in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia,
and Laos), and the Netherlands in more remote parts of Indonesia.
European expectations of new wealth and markets impelled much
of this expansion.
In all these places local populations resisted European take
over, sometimes mustering large military forces, sometimes
fighting in guerrilla bands, sometimes striving for religious
or political reforms that might keep invaders at bay. However,
European forces equipped with up-to-date weapons and communications
equipment put down almost all organized resistance. Once they
set up their colonial governments, they proceeded with systematic
extraction of raw materials from their colonies, including
rubber, cacao, peanuts, tropical oils, and minerals. In 1800,
Europeans controlled some 35 percent of the earth’s
land area. By 1914, they dominated about 84 percent.
The Battle of Adowa in Ethiopia, 1896
A well-armed Ethiopian force under the command of
King Menelik II defeated an Italian army. Ethiopia was the
only African country to defend itself successfully against
European invasion in the late nineteenth century.
Artist unknown
Photo by R. Dunn
Humans and Ideas
In Big Era Seven the ideas of the scientific revolution
and the Enlightenment sank deep roots in Europe and spread
widely to other parts of the world, especially within elite
culture and city-dwelling middle classes. On the other hand,
peasants and workers who could not read and write tended to
be unacquainted with these ideas, at least not until later.
In 1750, science and technology were culturally marginal,
even within Europe. By 1914, they were ascendant around the
globe, as new scientific ideas, inventions, and applications
speedily succeeded one another. In the process, science emerged
as a new cultural system, which claimed to cancel earlier
understandings of nature and the universe. This development
represented a radical departure for humankind, though we must
keep in mind that it built on the long-term history of scientific
and cultural exchanges across Afroeurasia.
Liberals argued that human progress was desirable and inevitable.
Opponents of reform, however, deplored the dizzying change
and the weakening of religious and moral traditions. In fact,
the Modern Revolution involved a major cultural struggle between
advocates of science and defenders of traditional religions.
Scientific explanations of the universe assumed that things
happened without intention or purpose and that the universe
was inanimate, rather than a manifestation of supernatural
power. Scientific perspectives on the earth’s geology
challenged the Biblical story of the Great Flood, while Charles
Darwin’s book The Origin of Species (1859) provided
a new perspective on the place of humans in the scheme of
nature. Gradually a secular, that is, “worldly”
or non-sacred, culture emerged that accepted the premises
of modern science and challenged the cultural dominance of
religious organizations and doctrines.
This “secularization” was an important part of
the Modern Revolution, first in Europe, then in other parts
of the world. Advocates and opponents of secularization struggled
mightily over many issues, including the role of religious
institutions in education, the rights and privileges of religious
denominations, and the place of women in public life. Liberal-minded
secularists believed that science and technology would inevitably
banish superstition and backwardness. Christian, Muslim, Jewish,
and other believers argued that scientific explanations dismissed
God, undermined moral standards, and left humans without spiritual
guidance or direction.
Most leaders of secular culture also believed that progress
was a uniquely European idea generously made available to
the world. Many even used Darwin’s theory of evolution
to demonstrate the racial and moral superiority of Europeans
over other peoples on the grounds that the grounds that Europeans
were making more material progress than others and were therefore
the “fittest” members of the human species.
This distortion of Darwinism became a justification for racism
and colonial rule. Suspicion and disdain among social and
cultural groups, who regarded one another as strange and inferior,
had been common in world history for millennia. What emerged
in Europe, however, was a supposedly scientific racism that
cloaked theories of European racial superiority in the vocabulary
and methods of modern biology and anthropology. This “pseudo-science”
provided a moral justification for both colonial conquest
and the systems of inequality that governed colonial societies.
Popular race theories had in fact no sound basis in science,
but this seemed of no consequence to those who wished to justify
imperial rule and economic exploitation of colonial labor
and resources.
Charles Darwin (1809-82)
United Kingdom postage stamp
Photo by R. Dunn
The advance of secular culture challenged the
world’s religions, but Big Era Seven was nevertheless
one of great vitality for them. In fact, the major faiths
grew at a faster pace than ever. Propelled by the new communications
technologies, Christian missionaries of various denominations
brought their faith to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, where
communities frequently adapted its teachings and rituals to
local social and cultural ways. The spread of European settler
colonies also greatly facilitated the diffusion of Christianity
in the temperate regions. Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism took
advantage of railroad and steamship technology to expand into
new regions, partly in connection with the migrations of Asian
and African workers. Opposition to rapid change, liberal practices,
and European colonialism often took religious form. Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian leaders protested foreign
rule and growing social inequalities in their lands.
Numerous sects also arose to preach millenarianism, a word
related to “millennium” and referring to a “thousand
years” of justice on earth. Millenarian ideology centered
on the idea that supernatural forces would bring about a sudden
change to end foreign domination, social inequality, and even
all evil. Millenarian movements included the Ghost Dance religion
of American Indians on the Great Plains, the Tai’ping
Rebellion in China, and, in the Muslim Sudan, the appearance
of the Mahdi, an individual divinely inspired to establish
a “reign of peace” leading to God’s Final
Judgment. Ultimately, none of these movements withstood the
power of modern weaponry.
Outside Europe, debates over reform and progress pursued
complex paths. In countries as diverse as Turkey, Russia,
Mexico, and China the supporters of economic reforms stressed
the benefits of liberal economic improvement. However, because
these reforms tended to make economic inequalities worse,
they had little popular appeal . Also, traditional elites
such as landowners, church officials, and high-ranking military
officers saw these changes as undermining their way of life
and therefore resolved to resist.
The ideology of the Atlantic revolutions had profound influence
on political reform movements. In many ways struggles over
these ideas continue to this day. Let’s look at some
examples.
• At the beginning of the era, slavery was broadly
accepted and widely practiced. By 1914, the notion that
humans could be conceived as property was broadly condemned,
and slavery itself legally abolished throughout much of
the world. The fact that industrialists and commercial farmers
continued to substitute other forms of coerced labor for
slavery and that the struggle against slavery continues
today does not detract from this achievement.
• At the start of the era, the holders of power almost
everywhere in the world viewed the notion of popular sovereignty,
that is, that people are citizens, not subjects, and should
have the right to vote and hold office, as dangerous nonsense.
By 1914, the principle that the right to govern belongs
to the people and not to a divinely-appointed monarch was
deeply engrained in the industrialized countries. The struggle
for the enfranchisement of women also got underway, though
it made much greater gains after World War I.
• A third transforming idea was that workers have
rights, among them the right to organize to advance their
economic and social interests. In Big Era Seven, workers’
rights gradually gained momentum in industrialized countries.
A major stimulus to worker organization was the thought
of Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto (1848) presented
an alternative vision of history centered on the interests
of the working class. Marx’s writings together with
those of other socialist authors had their roots in the
ideas of the European Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions,
but they also offered a critique of liberal reform and its
failure to address inequality. In defense of liberalism,
Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations (1775). He stressed
both the importance of the free market as the ultimate judge
of the value of things and the responsibility of governments
to support the expansion of capitalism through laws and
policies. While differing in their evaluations of society,
both Smith and Marx viewed capitalism as both an outgrowth
of European experience and as a global phenomenon.
• Finally, there was nationalism, one of the greatest
forces contributing to the Modern Revolution. Although nationalism
is part of the way we see the world today, this was not
always so. In 1750, monarchy was the prevailing form of
government, while language and ethnicity, though important,
were not viewed as the proper basis on which to organize
states. By 1914, peoples in Europe and the Americas widely
accepted nationalist principles, and nationalism was becoming
an important factor in politics in such places as the Ottoman
empire, Egypt, China, India, and South Africa. Nationalism
aimed to convince individuals to merge their hopes and goals
with those of the “imagined community” of the
nation, that is, a community based on shared language, culture,
and history. The members of an “imagined community”
do not for the most part know one another but nonetheless
have common bonds of aspiration and loyalty.
• The rise of nationalist thought was linked to growing
literacy and public education. It was also connected to
the mechanization of printing, the growth of a market for
printed works, and the diffusion of newspapers and other
print materials by way of the new communication technologies.
The Modern Revolution involved not only economic and political
changes but a profound cultural upheaval. It reshaped our
understandings of the natural world and the place of humans
in it, our basic economic and political understandings, and
our sense of cultural identity. Today, we are conscious that
the modern world is radically different from all earlier eras.
Overview Presentation
