Marks - The origins of the modern world: a global and ecological narrative from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century

Robert B. Marks is Richard and Billie Deihl Professor of History at Whittier College and the author of Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial China (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In 1996 he received the Aldo Leopold Award for the best article in the journal Environmental History and has published numerous other articles on Chinas environmental history. Holding his position at a college that focuses on undergraduate education, Marks regularly teaches a course for entering college students on the origins of the modern world, and in 2000 received Whittier Colleges Harry W. Nerhood Teaching Excellence Award.

This brief inquiry into the history of the modern world has attempted to synthesize the results of recent historical research into a global narrative. Unlike most world histories, which either chart the rise and fall of various high civilizations without exploring what connected them, or use Eurocentric glue to hold the pieces together, I have attempted to develop a global storyline that shows how the modern world came to be while criticizing Eurocentric explanations. At times that may have seemed a paradoxical task, since I began by defining the modern world as industrial capitalism coupled with the system of nationstates and divided by a gap between the haves and the have-nots, all of which highlight European or Western strengths and achievements.

What emerges as central to understanding the emergence of the modern world is a global and ecological point of view which is essential for understanding what happened in and to the various parts of the world. In fact, interactions among various parts of the world account for most of the story of the making of the modern world, not the cultural achievements of any one part. Indeed, those achievements are not understandable except in a global context. The wholein this case the world and its modern historythus is greater than the sum of its parts.

However influential Europeans and Americans may have been in the making of this modern world, they did not make it themselves, and the West certainly did not rise over other parts of the world because of cultural (or racial) superiority. As this book has shown, Western superiority or preeminence has hardly been evident throughout much of human history over the past millennium, and the final decades of the twentieth century have witnessed the resurgence of Asia as a powerful challenge to European and American hegemony. Moreover, the history of the twentieth century demonstrates the roles that Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans have played in shaping their own histories through revolutions, independence movements, and economic development.

A strong strain of postWorld War II American political thought, reinforced by scholars who paint a picture of American exceptionalism in world history, sees the United States as having attained a uniquely special place atop the global hierarchy. This dominant position, which actually materialized only in the specific circumstances of the thirty-year crisis of 19141945 and particularly since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, is held by these proponents to be the end result of 2,000-plus years of Western development starting with Greek democracy. The United States is, in this view, not merely the inheritor of the mantle of democracy and freedom from the British, but its highest fulfillment. Such a view is the latest incarnation of a Eurocentrism that is not only blind to the actual ebbs and flows of world history, but now also informs the thinking of some American policymakers who attempt to impose those values on the rest of the world, by force if necessary.

In this books narrative, until very recently (about 1800 or so) nearly all of the worlds inhabitants lived within the constraints of the biological old regime. Within that world, agrarian empires proved to be successful states, developing high standards of living for their people, high cultural achievements, and substantial governmental power. The most highly developed states of the Old Worldin China, India, western Europe, Japan, possibly parts of Southeast Asiawere broadly comparable, with well-developed market systems, institutional arrangements enabling people to squeeze the most from economies rooted in agriculture, and productive industries, albeit ones still largely dependent on capturing annual flows of energy from the sun.

The ability of one part of the worldin this case western Europeans, led by the Britishto escape from the limitations of the biological old regime by tapping stored sources of energy (coal and then oil) was contingent and came about as a result of a global conjuncture. The first contingency was China deciding in the early 1400s to abandon its naval domination of the Indian Ocean, the crossroads where the wealth of Asia was traded for raw materials (including silver and gold) from the less developed parts of the world, and to remonetize its economy using silver, creating a new, global demand for silver that would soon be met by New World supplies. For four centuries (from 1400 to 1800), the commercial and industrial prowess of China and India, both made possible by highly productive agricultures, enabled Asians to dominate the world economy and to attract the attention, and resources, of those elsewhere in the world who wished to gain access to the riches of Asia. The demand for silver in Asian economies thus set into motion several other world-changing processes.

The second significant contingency in our story thus was the discovery of the New World and its stores of silver, the subsequent decimation of the native population by diseases carried by the conquerors, and the construction of an African slave-based plantation economy subordinate to European interests. Third, the failure of the Spanish in the sixteenth century to impose an empire upon the rest of Europe led to a system of competing European states locked in almost constant warfare, thus promoting rapid military innovation.

In the eighteenth century, a vast conjuncture of forces enabled Britaina small island off the western-most edge of Eurasiato begin breaking away from the pack. Wars between France and Britain, culminating in the Seven Years War (17561763), paved the way for Britains dominance in Europe, North America, and India. Almost simultaneously, Mughal power in India began to crumble, largely for domestic reasons, providing an opening for British adventurers to gain a colonial toehold. China, though, was still too powerful for the British, and so could define the terms of British participation in their East Asian world until the combination of opium from Britains colony in India and their steam-powered gunboats led to Chinas defeat in the Opium War (18391842). Coupled with internal difficulties of their own, the Opium War inaugurated a century of Western and Japanese aggression against China.

In retrospect, the tipping of the scales against China would not have happened had Britain not begun to industrialize and to apply the fruits of industry to its military. Moreover, industrialization there was contingent upon Britain having a peculiar kind of periphery in the New World, one that had the need for Britains manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles, to clothe African slaves. Britain also had the good fortune to be sitting on conveniently located coal deposits after it had deforested a good bit of the island to heat London. Thus, where Asia and Latin America by 1800 remained hemmed in by the limits imposed by the biological old regime, Britain first, then other European countries (fearing the consequences of losing ground to Britain), began to escape by applying sources of stored energy (first coal and then oil) to the production process.