The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century

First published in 2002, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century by Robert B. Marks is a world history that asks how the globalized and industrialized modern world came to be. Challenging the notion that the rise of the British Empire and then the US was inevitable, Marks addresses questions like how the West came to dominate the world until relatively recently and how civilization let itself get to the point that it faces the existential threat of climate change? A specialist in environmental and Chinese history, Marks taught history at Whittier College in California until his retirement in 2019.

Several editions of The Origins of the Modern World have been published. This guide refers to the 2024 edition of the book.

Summary

The Origins of the Modern World begins in the year 1400, when all of humanity lived under what Robert B. Marks describes as the “old biological regime” (19). This refers to the fact that only so much land was available, and agriculture could produce only so many crops, limiting how much a society’s population could grow. All economies were agricultural, and although large cities like Nanking in China, Vijayanagar in India, and Constantinople in modern-day Turkey existed, most people lived in rural areas. Apart from devices like water mills, most industry was done through muscle power provided by humans or animals like donkeys. Trade was not truly global, but Europe, Africa, and Asia were linked through six interconnected “trading zones.”

At this time, China and India were wealthy regions that had much to offer in trade. By comparison, Europe was poor and had little to export, so the region depended heavily on imports from Asia. When the main route for this trade was lost to the Ottoman Empire after its conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Europeans looked elsewhere to reach Asia. This led to the Portuguese sailing around the Horn of Africa and reaching the Indian Ocean, whose rich trade they sought to dominate through force, and then to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. European diseases like smallpox helped facilitate the Europeans’ conquest and settlement of American lands. Because China under the Ming dynasty in the 15th century had switched from paper currency to a silver-based currency, its demand for silver grew, and the Spanish benefited because they extracted massive amounts of silver from the Americas. In colonizing the Americas, Spain and other European powers traded “slaves” from Africa for commodities from the Americas like rum, which enslaved laborers produced on plantations. Under the economic doctrine of mercantilism, the European powers tried to prevent their colonies from trading with anyone but their mother countries.

During the 18th century, much of the world reached the population limits imposed by the biological old regime. However, this changed starting in the late 18th century, because several factors—such as Britain’s having a large amount of coal and the invention of the steam engine (originally to help mine that coal)—kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Such circumstances, and not innate European superiority in culture or science, made Western powers like Britain, France, and the US, as well as the rapidly industrializing East Asian nation of Japan, the world’s dominant powers. Meanwhile, the countries of the Global South that were under colonial rule found their economies reduced to just providing exports for the colonial empires that controlled them. Industrialization and the invention of nitrate fertilizer in the early 20th century enabled the great departure from the biological old regime: Agricultural constraints no longer limited humanity. This allowed the human population to increase dramatically to 8 billion within a century. In recent years, the environmental issues resulting from this change have gained wide acknowledgment. Additionally, China has become a major economic power in the world again, raising the possibility of conflict even though global cooperation is crucial to address issues like climate change.