Modern era

• 1. Introduction

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  The modern era is the name historians give to the current period of human history, the stretch of time we are still living inside right now. The label was not always so generous in scope. It was first applied only to the history of Europe and the Western world, for events that came after classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. The word "modern" itself was coined shortly before 1585, to mark the start of what felt like a new age. But where does this era begin? Around the year 1500, many say. Yet historians cannot agree, and the boundaries keep moving. How did a term invented to describe Europe come to describe almost the entire globe? Why have so many people, even in this age of progress, turned against the idea of progress itself? The answers run through printing presses and trenches, through emancipation and atom bombs, and through a century that changed more than all the centuries before it combined.

• 2. Drawing The Line

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  Periodization, the process of sorting the past into named blocks of time, resists tidy edges. The year 1500 serves as an approximate start for the modern era because a cluster of events reshaped the Western world right around then. The fall of Constantinople came in 1453. Gutenberg's moveable type printing press arrived in the 1450s. Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492, and Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, igniting the Reformation. Since the 1990s, historians have grown more likely to call the long span after the Middle Ages and up to the 19th century the early modern period. The term "early modern" was once thought to be an invention of the 1930s, meant to separate the Middle Ages from the late Enlightenment around 1800. Justus Nipperdey corrected that record, noting American historians used it widely by 1900. In his words, "In the interwar years the term permeated all areas of professional activity from textbooks and graduate school seminars to conferences, research articles, and job descriptions." What split "early modern" from "modern" was a pair of upheavals: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The European Renaissance of the 14th to 16th centuries, born in Italy, marks the bridge from the Late Middle Ages into early modern history.

• 3. A New Way Of Seeing

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  Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, written around 1513, became a foundational work of modern political philosophy. The early modern period was not only war and exploration. It was a shift in how people understood reality itself. Nicolaus Copernicus, in his 1543 work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus letter, published in 1503, was the first printed claim that the lands found to the west were not the edges of Asia but an entirely different continent. The terms "modernity" and "modernism" describe this new way of thinking, distinct from medieval thinking. They are sometimes kept separate from the historical periods themselves. "Postmodernism" was coined in 1949 to describe a movement in art rather than a span of history, and it usually applies to the arts alone. That changed when the word "postmodernity" appeared, describing major shifts in the economy, society, culture, and philosophy during the 1960s. These terms all grew out of European history. In China, India, and the Islamic world, they are applied differently, often in the context of contact with European culture during the Age of Discovery.

• 4. The Scientific Revolution

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  Tycho Brahe observed a new star in 1572, brighter than any star or planet, one that according to the science of the day ought not to exist. The Scientific Revolution and early Baroque, roughly from 1550 to 1700, turned such anomalies into method. Johannes Kepler's Astronomia nova of 1609 contained the first mention of elliptical planetary orbits. Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger, published in 1610, was the first work to share observations made through a telescope. Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared in 1687, formulating the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. Politics moved alongside science. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 secured English naval supremacy and opened the way for the British Empire. The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, devastated Europe before the Peace of Westphalia treaties of 1648 ended multiple conflicts and established the principle of state sovereignty. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England affirmed parliamentary supremacy over the monarchy, even as the early reign of Louis XIV, from 1643 to 1715, came to epitomize the Age of Absolutism in France.

• 5. Steam And Iron

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  The Industrial Revolution began around 1760 in Britain, with the mechanization of textile production and the development of the steam engine. It replaced an economy based on manual labour with one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. Iron-making techniques advanced, while canals, improved roads, and then railways expanded trade. Steam power, fuelled primarily by coal, drove dramatic increases in production capacity. All-metal machine tools, developed in the first two decades of the 19th century, made it possible to build more production machines for other industries. The exact dating remains contested. Eric Hobsbawm held that the revolution "broke out" in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s. T. S. Ashton placed it roughly between 1760 and 1830. Its impact on society has been compared to the Neolithic Revolution, when mankind developed agriculture and abandoned its nomadic life. Around 1850, the First Industrial Revolution gave way to the Second, as steam-powered ships and railways gained momentum. Later in the century came the internal combustion engine and electric power generation, with electricity, steel, and petroleum allowing Germany, Japan, and the United States to rise as great powers.

• 6. Empires And Abolition

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  Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire became the world's leading power, controlling one-quarter of the world's population and one-third of the land area. It enforced a Pax Britannica, encouraged trade, and battled rampant piracy. The Napoleonic era, regarded as the fourth phase of the French Revolution, ran from Napoleon's coup in 1799 to his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Congress of Vienna, held from 1814 to 1815, sought to restore the pre-Revolutionary balance of power across Europe. Slavery shrank sharply across the world during this century. After a successful slave revolt in Haiti, Britain forced the Barbary pirates to stop kidnapping and enslaving Europeans, then passed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and charged its navy with ending the global slave trade. Slavery was abolished in Russia in 1861, by the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States in 1863, and in Brazil in 1888. Yet the same century carved Africa apart. The Scramble for Africa began formally at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884 to 1885, where European powers laid claim to spheres of influence without needing treaties or real holdings. Leopold II of Belgium kept the Congo as his personal fiefdom.

• 7. The Century Of World Wars

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  More than 9 million soldiers died on the battlefields of the First World War, which ran from July 1914 to the Armistice on the 11th of November 1918. The Allied Powers, led by the British Empire, France, Russia, Japan, and the United States, defeated the Central Powers led by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The war shattered four empires and, along the Western Front, dug a system of opposing trenches separated by a "no man's land" running from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. Fighting came for the first time from the air. Yet more people died of the worldwide influenza outbreak at the war's end than died in the fighting itself. World War II followed about twenty years later, lasting from 1939 to 1945, the largest and deadliest war in history. The conventional view holds that it began on the 1st of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Around 62 million people may have died, roughly 60% of them civilians. The Soviet Union lost around 23 million and China about 10 million, but no country lost a greater share than Poland, where approximately 5.6 million people, 16% of the pre-war population, died. The Holocaust was the deliberate and systematic murder of millions of Jews and other groups by the Nazi regime. Japan surrendered after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war on the 2nd of September 1945.

• 8. The World At A Crossroads

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  The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War, the long standoff between the "West" of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and the "East" of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. That rivalry had dominated politics since the end of World War II in 1945. The Korean War, Vietnam War, Soviet-Afghan War, and Gulf War shaped political life, while the counterculture of the 1960s and the rise of computers changed society in complex ways. The post-Cold War era that followed left the world at a major crossroads. The gap between rich and poor nations kept widening. Disease threatened to destabilize whole regions, with viruses like West Nile and Avian influenza spreading, malaria afflicting the poor, and millions infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, then becoming an epidemic in southern Africa. Increased globalization, specifically Americanization, stirred anti-Western feeling in parts of the world, especially the Middle East, as English became the global language. Terrorism, dictatorship, and the spread of nuclear weapons demanded immediate attention. Dictators such as Kim Jong-il in North Korea pressed toward nuclear arms, and the fear existed that terrorists had not only attempted to acquire such weapons but might already possess them.