Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution

Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution

Lecture 38

Then, things seemed to suddenly go very strange. From 1500 onwards, the pace of change accelerates. Suddenly, the isolation of the different world zones is broken in the rst phase of what today we call “globalization.” The world suddenly comes together. It’s interlinked for the rst time in human history. Then, from about 1700, changes appear that within 300 years will have transformed the entire world. Population numbers go crazy.

In the last millennium, the pace of change accelerated sharply and decisively. The isolation of the world zones was breached in the 16th century. Then, from 1700 the pace of innovation began to accelerate so rapidly that, within just three centuries, the entire world had been transformed. Global population rose from 250 million in 1000 C.E. to about 700 million in 1700 C.E. and more than 6 billion in 2000 C.E. As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan put it, humans had become a sort of “mammalian weed.” Yet productivity rose even faster, so (so far!) there has not yet been a global Malthusian collapse. These transformations mark the eighth threshold of increasing complexity in this course. They lead us into the “Modern era” of human history.

The Modern era is the third major era of human history. So far, it has lasted just a few hundred years. Though all periodizations are somewhat arbitrary, here is the periodization we will use. We will date the beginning of the Modern era to about 1700 C.E., because that is when we rst begin to see, in some regions of the world, a transition to radically different types of society capable of extraordinary rates of innovation and change. However, the roots of change lay in the previous millennium, so our explanations of the Modern era will begin more than 1,000 years earlier, in the 1st millennium C.E. I will divide the period after 1700 into two main periods. Between 1700 and 1900, parts of the world—particularly in the Atlantic region—were transformed, acquiring unprecedented wealth and power in the process. During the second period, beginning in about 1900, the Modern Revolution transformed the rest of the world.

What are the most distinctive features of the Modern era? Above all, modern human societies are much more complex than those of all previous eras.

First, they have more structure: For example, the variety of roles available to individuals is vastly greater than it was in the Agrarian world, where most people were peasants. Second, modern societies mobilize energy ows many times greater than those typical of earlier eras of human history. Total human energy use today is almost 250 times what it was just 1,000 years ago (mainly due to the use of fossil fuels). Third, associated with the Modern Revolution is a spectacular range of new, emergent properties—from the ability to communicate instantly across the globe, to the existence of cities of 20 million people, to weaponry capable of obliterating these same cities in a few minutes.

However, identifying the most critical changes is extremely dif cult. This is partly because there have been so many different types of change, partly because the changes are still continuing today, and partly because, as yet, there exists little scholarly consensus about the nature of modernity. The discussion that follows represents an attempt to pick out the crucial features of the Modern Revolution, as seen through the wide lens of big history. We try to see this threshold as one in a sequence that reaches back to the very origins of our Universe. Our discussion builds on a long tradition of debate about modernity that includes major thinkers from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Max Weber. So we have plenty of ideas! But the big history perspective has certain consequences for our view of modernity. The rst is that some familiar landmarks (e.g., the French Revolution or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) may vanish entirely at these scales. A second consequence of the big history perspective is that we will try to see the Modern Revolution as a global phenomenon, generated by global exchanges of ideas, technologies, goods, and people. Though many of the crucial changes rst became apparent in the Atlantic region, they were the product of global forces.

Four features of the Modern Revolution explain why in this course we treat it as a new threshold of complexity. Rates of innovation accelerated sharply. Accelerating innovation increased the pace of historical change. It took 200,000 years for foraging lifeways to spread around the world, about 10,000 years for agriculture to do so, and just 200 to 300 years for

the Modern Revolution to transform the entire world. Innovation increased human control over the energy and resources of the biosphere. Modern forms of education and science have created formal structures that encourage and sustain innovation.

Rapid innovation drove many other changes. It increased available resources, allowing humans to multiply—creating larger, denser, and more complex societies than those of the Agrarian era. Human numbers rose from about 250 million in 1000 C.E., to about 950 million in 1800 C.E., to about 6 billion in 2000 C.E. Larger and denser communities meant new lifeways and new power structures. Wage-earning replaced peasant farming as the normal way of earning a living. Governments became larger, more powerful, and more intrusive, but also more responsive to the needs and capacities of their subjects. Human history became global. Since the 16th century, human societies have exchanged goods, ideas, diseases, and people within a single global network, and rapid improvements in communications and transportation have steadily tightened these links.

Our species has begun to transform the biosphere. By some estimates, humans now control 25% to 40% of all the energy that enters the biosphere through photosynthesis (Christian, Maps of Time, p. 140). Modern weaponry is so powerful that humans could, if they chose, destroy much of the biosphere within a few hours. Increasing human control of biospheric resources has affected other species through loss of habitat and increasing extinctions, and it is beginning to transform the global climate system. John McNeill writes, “For most of Earth’s history, microbes played the leading role of all life in shaping the atmosphere. In the twentieth century, humankind stumbled blindly into this role” (McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, p. 51).

How can we explain these vast transformations? I will focus on accelerating innovation, because this is the key to most other aspects of the Modern Revolution. So why did innovation accelerate so sharply? Economists and

The dominant groups are not tribute-takers but entrepreneurs, who make their wealth by trading ef ciently on competitive markets.

historians have discussed the main drivers of innovation at least since the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1723–1790). Though historians have identi ed many possible drivers of change in the Modern era, we will concentrate on three drivers of growth that played only a limited role in the era of Agrarian civilizations: (1) commercialization and the spread of competitive markets, (2) the spread of capitalism, and (3) the expansion of global exchange networks.

Driver 1 is commerce. Adam Smith argued that specialization raises productivity, and specialization depends on the extent of market competition. Smith’s idea that the spread of competitive markets drives innovation remains fundamental in modern economic thought.

Driver 2 is the spread of capitalist social structures. Karl Marx (1818–1883), though determined to overthrow capitalism, also admired it because he believed it encouraged innovation. His ideas expand in important ways on those of Smith. Marx offered a “social structure” theory of growth, arguing that different social structures affect innovation differently. We have seen how social structures of the Agrarian era limited innovation because neither peasants nor tribute-taking elites had a sustained interest in generating innovation. Capitalism is different. The dominant groups are not tributetakers but entrepreneurs, who make their wealth by trading ef ciently on competitive markets. The majority class consists not of self-suf cient peasants but of wage earners who have to work hard and ef ciently to “market” their labor. Capitalism forces both major social groups to concern themselves with productivity so the spread of capitalist social structures should encourage innovation.

Driver 3 is a sudden expansion in the size and reach of exchange networks. The coming together of the four world zones from the 16th century stimulated commerce and capitalism by expanding the scale and intensity of both entrepreneurial activity and information exchanges. This sudden rearrangement of global networks of exchange also shifted the center of wealth and power in the world away from its traditional centers (in the Afro-Eurasian world) toward a region that had previously been somewhat marginal—the Atlantic seaboard! That would prove one of the most radical of all the changes associated with the Modern Revolution.

This lecture has described some major features of the Modern Revolution and described the strategy we will use in the next three lectures to explain this remarkable transition.

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Questions to Consider

Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 11.

Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, Introduction. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, chaps. 1, 2.

1. What features distinguish the “Modern era” most decisively from the

“era of Agrarian civilizations”?

2. Is it possible to nd a better label than “Modern Revolution” to summarize the major transformations of the Modern era?