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

“But as we will see, Europeans were not exceptional, and one of the most important points about the history of the world until about 1800 is the broad comparability of Asia with Europe, showing more surprising similarities than meaningful differences.”

One of the most vital recurring points in The Origins of the Modern World is its argument against Eurocentrism and European and American exceptionalism. For most of history, nothing significantly distinguished Europe from other regions in Eurasia. Furthermore, the rise of the West over the rest of the world resulted from the complex interplay of various historical developments.

“[O]ur understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.”

Instead of seeing history as the past, Marks argues for a continuity of experience in which an understanding of history shapes and informs the present. The lessons from the past can be useful in determining the future.

“In summary, nearly all of the world’s 380 million people living in 1400 were rural people producing food and raw materials for handicraft industries to sustain both themselves and a small ruling elite that took a portion of the harvest as taxes (to the state) and rent (to landowners).”

While Marks argues that understanding history is important to addressing issues in the present, he believes that a huge divergence occurred in history: The “biological old regime” (21), in which natural limits on soil and agricultural production prevented human populations from growing beyond a certain number, once constrained human civilization, keeping populations in check.

“The agrarian world that we have been considering thus was not made by ruling elites but came about as a result of the interactions, understandings, and agreements (both explicit and implicit) among state agents, landowners, and rural peasant producers, and interactions between human societies and the natural environment.”

Another defining aspect of Marks’s view of history is that while the environment is an important factor, it is not the only one. History and human experience are shaped by interactions between and within societies as well as with the environment.

“The significance of the spread of Islam for the course of world history was profound. First and foremost it created a realm of common language and custom covered much of the Eurasian world within which trade, ideas, and culture could develop.”

While Marks argues that globalization did not truly begin until Spain established the port of Manila in the Philippines, he highlights the ways in which diverse and distant cultures were linked together either by trade or shared cultures. The Islamic world is one such example.

“Had the Chinese themselves decided to round the Cape of Good Hope and head north along the African coast…they would have encountered the Portuguese in the 1420s making their way down the coast of Africa…Thus, it might have been the Chinese, not the Portuguese, who established a direct water route between Asia and Europe, reaping the profits from that trade and keeping the Europeans close to home.”

This is an example of what Marks means by “accidents.” The Chinese government chose not to assert its control of the Indian Ocean before Portuguese explorers were able to circumnavigate Africa and reach it. This was one of several such accidents that helped pave the way for the rise of the West by the 19th century.

“Most societies could participate in this world system by producing and trading something that others wanted. Europeans, however, were particularly handicapped by the fact that they had little to trade with the rest of the world, with the possible exceptions of wool and, with Africa, firearms.”

A crucial point that Marks raises against the idea of Western exceptionalism is that Europe was once a relatively poor and isolated region of the world. Before at least the late 18th century, nothing was particularly exceptional about Europe compared to the rest of Eurasia.

“We can easily think of these sixteenth-century developments as the ‘first globalization.’ They were contingent on the withdrawal of the Chinese navy from the Indian Ocean and the historical accident of an Asia-seeking Columbus landing in the Americas.”

Marks views history, especially the events that enabled the hegemony of the West, as the result of not just individual historical circumstances but also how such circumstances influenced and interacted with each other. In this case, two different events from very distant regions culminated in a particular historical development.

“Why we are not now living in empires instead of nation-states is worth pondering. We aren’t because a new kind of state system developed in western Europe, and the resulting nation-state and a world based around nation-states has come to structure the modern world. Formal empires no longer exist.”

For Marks, the fact that the world no longer has empires, only nation-states, is vital to understanding the modern world. He argues that we still live in an international system of nation-states defined by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

“Although we use the word ‘conquest to describe what happened to the Aztecs and Incas in the sixteenth century, the fact is that Spanish victory was neither swift nor complete, for the native peoples of the Americas put up a long and valiant struggle against European invaders and colonizers.”

In trying to offer a less Eurocentric narrative of world history, Marks emphasizes the actions and agency of non-European peoples. Here, he emphasizes that Indigenous Americans did not simply disappear, even when European diseases decimated Indigenous populations, what he describes as the Great Dying.

“These communities were the result of the actions of colonizers upon the colonized and enslaved, and their creation was accompanied by much violence, trauma, and oppression. In Latin America, native cultures were not obliterated by the conquest and the forced immigration of African slaves, but by a two-way process of ‘transculturation’ created new cultures.”

Globalization was a complex process that covered many aspects of human experience. One of these was the creation of hybrid cultures resulting from migration into an entirely different area. One such example is the religion of Voudou, which people practice in Haiti and the southern US and which combines elements of traditional African religions and Catholicism.

“By 1775, therefore, the processes of state building in Europe had led to the creation of a system defined by war, which favored a particular kind of state exemplified by the ones built in Britain and France. Balance of power among sovereign states, not a unified empire, had become the established principle, and Britain had emerged as the strongest European state.”

Marks explains the origin of the nation-state. However, it was not just the nation-state that emerged in the 18th century, but the idea of an international community of nation-states that may compete with each other economically but should strive for some kind of political equilibrium with each other.

“Indian textile producers were the first ones to create a worldwide market for cotton textiles—the British then captured it from them.”

Another way Marks tries to combat Eurocentric narratives is to emphasize the accomplishments of non-European countries and regions. Here, he describes India’s vast and rich trade in cotton textiles, which Britain’s trading policies and colonization of India eventually undermined and destroyed.

“Where we have thousands of years of perspective on the results and consequences of the rise of agriculture, the industrial world is barely two hundred years old, but it is becoming clear that it has ushered in a new epoch in which the actions of humans have had such huge environmental impacts that the very relationship between humans and the global environment has changed—we have entered the Anthropocene, where the actions of humans have come to overwhelm the forces of nature.”

In Marks’s view, the defining trait of the modern era is that humans are inadvertently shaping the environment in ways they never did before. This is why he views it as important to understand how humans got to this point. By understanding this, societies might reorient human civilization in a way that can effectively address environmental problems like climate change.

“There just is no evidence that Europeans were smarter, had a superior culture (that is, one that sustained if not created an industrial economy), or were better managers of natural and human resources than Chinese, Indians, or New Guineans for that matter.”

The problem with Western exceptionalism is that no historical evidence supports it. To prove this, Marks highlights how non-European societies, especially China and India, managed agricultural production and trade.

“[T]hese massive global famines came about as a result of El Niños working in conjunction with the new European-dominated world economy to impoverish vast swaths of the world, turning much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the ‘third world.’”

Marks’s view of environmental history is that the environment and geography alone do not shape history. Instead, how societies choose to interact with their environment is the key. For example, he argues that famines in agricultural societies result from social arrangements as much as from droughts.

“‘The gap’ was—and remains—a life-and-death matter, and the analytic tools of historical accidents, contingencies, and conjunctures can help us understand how and why that is.”

One of the book’s key arguments is how the economic gap between the West and the Global South began. Marks views it as a purely historical phenomenon that can be understood as the result of specific historical processes and not something that was inevitable due to Western exceptionalism.

“The combination of both rapid industrial and population growth in the twentieth century and beyond marks a ‘great departure’ of humans and our history from the rhythms and constraints of the biological old regime.”

This great departure was, Marks posits, the most significant historical event since the Agricultural Revolution of prehistory. Humanity was no longer limited by the natural restraints on agricultural production that defined the “biological old regime.” Nevertheless, Marks adds that climate change is one way we are now “pressing the limits” (251) of the natural world.

“Whereas in Europe nationalism was mostly a conservative force that emphasized cultural, linguistic, and religious commonalities to blunt the class conflicts that grew along with industrialization, in Asia and Africa nationalism would have an explicit anti-imperialist content, often fueling socially revolutionary movements.”

The history of the Global South was profoundly shaped by the legacy of Western and Japanese colonization. One part of this legacy was how nationalism became a liberatory force in the Global South. Meanwhile, in the West, it had been used as a rallying cry to justify exclusion and oppression.

“The world is dependent not only on oil and natural gas for energy but also on the particular social, economic, political, cultural, and military complexes that have arisen to control it.”

Again, Marks notes that environmental factors do not act on human history alone. How social and political structures and institutions interact with the environment truly shapes history, in Marks’s view.

“Economic growth is a rough indicator of our species’ relationship with the environment because virtually anything that counts as ‘economic’ results from a transformation of nature.”

Something Marks often emphasizes is that civilization deeply shapes the environment. This occurs to such an extent that economic activity, both in old agricultural societies and present-day industrial societies, is inseparable from how people interact with the environment.

“In fact, interactions among various parts of the world and between humans and the environment account for most of the story of the making of the modern world, not the cultural achievements of any one part. Indeed, those achievements are not understandable except in a global context.”

The Origins of the Modern World is based on the argument that the beginnings of the modern world should not be understood as a European history. Marks insists that such a history must be a world history.

“Dominance was not achieved because Europeans had a superior culture to others, despite attempts to contrast the ‘civilized’ heirs of ancient Greece with the ‘barbarians’ of Asia and Africa. The idea of cultural superiority is dubious at best, but it can be dangerous when infused with nationalism, as the world found out earlier in the twentieth century and is dealing with again.”

Marks argues that denying Western or American exceptionalism is important. The reason for this view is that such attitudes conflict with the existence of the international system of nation-states and thus pose a problem in trying to find a globally cooperative solution to problems like climate change.