Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution............................................

LECTURE

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.

I

n 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.