| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative. By Robert B. Marks. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002. xi + 173 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Paper $17.95.

An environmental historian of China, Robert B. Marks focuses in this volume on the development between 1400 and 1900 of the modern world's basic features. In 1400, two structures predominated: the "biological old regime," based on organic sources of energy grown with the sun's yearly supply, and trading networks that tied together the Eurasian land mass and parts of eastern Africa. Changes came not through the superiority of European institutions, values, and culture but from the "conjunction" of European marginality in the world economy and diseases that killed New World natives. The rise of the West was contingent upon events outside of Europe: finding slaves from Africa to mine New World silver and later to work plantations. Accident is also important since, for instance, neither the Dutch nor the Chinese had coal supplies in close proximity to those who might use coal. The English did. Marks argues that conjuncture, contingency, and accident leave open the possibility for human agency.

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