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

Referring to the ongoing issue of climate change, Marks states that the “story of how the world got to the point where human actions could affect global environmental processes is complex but not mysterious” (2). Understanding this story and the past could help people make a better future. On that basis, Marks argues that five “themes” form the history of the modern world: why “some parts of the world first industrialized” (2) and how industrialization spread; the rise of nation-states; the economic gap between the world’s wealthy and impoverished regions of the world; how humans have impacted the environment; and globalization. In addition, Marks points out that the modern era has seen dramatic changes: “Just 250 years ago” (2), China and India were the most economically powerful regions of the world. Western countries became the dominant economic and political force in the world, and China was only recently able to challenge the power of the world’s largest economy, the US. From these changes, Marks addresses how industrializing European nation-states, instead of “highly developed agrarian empires like China and India” (3), began to shape the world.

Next, Marks notes that the historical idea of “the rise of the West” (3) is used to explain how European countries formed the world of the present day. When the Spanish conquistadors encountered the peoples of South and Central America, they brought diseases such as smallpox and influenza that wiped out almost 90% of the Indigenous population. Instead of attributing their conquest of the Americas to disease, however, they attributed it to Christianity and later to superior Western traditions of rational, scientific thought inherited from the ancient Greeks. With the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Europeans came to view themselves as unique and more advanced than the rest of the world, particularly in industry, science, and liberty. Theorists like Karl Marx and Max Weber sought to explain this “gap” between Europe and the rest of the world by arguing for the “‘diffusionist’ theory.” This theory holds that industrial capitalism developed in Europe and other regions of the world had to catch up through a process that involved both industrializing and modernizing their cultures.

Modern social science still considers “European exceptionalism” a “paradigm” (10), meaning a set of assumptions that are meant to explain history and the way the world works in the present day. However, Marks argues that Europe was not exceptional or unique. Instead, the idea of European exceptionalism provided an excuse to justify Western political and economic domination of the world. Understanding the history of the rise of the West also means understanding why the present-day world is what it is. Also, it challenges the idea that “the institutions and values that supposedly propelled the rise of the West are universal and can—indeed, must—be adopted throughout a globalized world” (9), specifically by promoting free markets and Western democracy. Marks rejects the Eurocentric view of history and the present, which is the view that Europe alone shaped the modern world.

Instead, Marks explains that his purpose is to “construct an alternative narrative” (11). To do so, he addresses three elements: contingency (whether or not European supremacy was inevitable), accident (historical factors beyond human control), and conjuncture (the impact one region could have on another). Drawing on a “vast amount of new scholarship published in English on Asia, Africa, and Latin America” (16), Marks notes that regions of the world outside Europe were as advanced as Europe itself. He emphasizes the importance of challenging Eurocentric view of history because even today this encourages the belief that Westerners are innately superior to other peoples. Marks wants to write a history that explores the human relationship with the environment in order to “help us envision a more sustainable path forward” (18).