|
|
|
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. |
1
|
|
While China, India, and other eastern areas developed large empires at the center of the world economic system, competition at the periphery and near constant warfare created smaller European nation-states. Silver supported Hapsburg efforts to consolidate their empire in the 1500s and enabled European trade with China. From 1500 to 1800, nearly three-quarters of the silver from the New World wound up in China, the engine of the world's economy. Asians provided two-thirds of the world's population and 80 percent of the world's goods. However, a well-developed market economy pushed China toward labor-intensive agriculture within the "biological old regime" rather than industrial revolution. |
2
|
|
Industrial development growing out of a conjunction of European nation-state development, mercantilist policies, and well-placed coal provided the tools necessary for constructing empires during the 1800s. Iron-hulled, steam-powered gunboats and guns together with machine production of cotton goods allowed Europeans to undermine India and China as the foci of the world economy. India went from exporting to importing cotton goods. It "de-industrialized" as other European states followed England's lead and industrialized. By 1900, the basis for the current system of nation-states, global capitalism, and growing differences between rich and poor areas had developed. Marks notes the more recent reestablishment of Asia as the center of the world economy. |
3
|
|
This well-written volume should prove valuable in courses concerned with the rise of the global economy and its environmental effects. William McNeill and Daniel Headrick have told similar stories. In an ongoing debate concerning the contingencies that relate science and technology, Marks argues against European exceptionalism by insisting that European science did not lead to the industrial revolution. However, some scholars argue that itinerant lecturers using demonstration devices—air pumps, levers, gears, and the like—familiarized many in England with Newtonianism, the basis of mechanical engineering. A more mathematical and less accessible form of Newtonianism spread on the continent. Nevertheless, Marks uses recent literature on Asia, which may be less familiar to American and European historians. |
4
|
|
Edmund N. Todd teaches European history and the history of science and technology at the University of New Haven. His research involves the Ruhr and its relationship to Prussia and Germany. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|