Lecture 38: Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution
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 À 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