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

As late as the 18th century, “China, India, and Europe were broadly comparable in […] their level of economic development, standard of living, and people’s life expectancies” (131). In the 19th century a split began between the wealthy developed world (mainly of the West and Japan), and the impoverished “Global South.” China’s demand for opium helped transform India from “one of the world’s greatest industrial centers” (136) into a mainly agricultural society because the Indian textile industry had collapsed, partly because of competition from Britain’s industrialized textile industry. However, Britain had colonized India, a process that began when the East India Company took over Bengal and created its own army of Sepoy or Indian mercenaries, which it then used to take over other Indian lands. By the middle of the 19th century, the British government directly ruled India. British policies deliberately sought to “transform India into a producer of food and raw materials for export” (138) to benefit the British economy.

Industrialization spread to other countries by the late 19th century. The process of industrialization in France was hindered by the fact that peasants held on to land they gained during the French Revolution of 1789. The US both industrialized and expanded its agricultural sector due to its westward expansion at the expense of Indigenous Americans, becoming “a major exporter of food in global markets” (141). Germany only became a unified nation-state by 1870 and industrialized late, focusing on iron and steel production and developing university-run scientific programs focusing on industrial research. Russia, which was an extremely rural country, embarked on a state-led industrialization program by the 1880s. Under pressure from the US and knowing what happened to China after the Opium War, Japan rapidly modernized and industrialized during the reign of Emperor Meiji from 1868 to 1912. By 1911, Japan was strong enough to break with the unequal treaties that Western powers had imposed. At the end of the 19th century, Europe and the US had replaced China and India as the world’s great economic powers.

Marks points out that whereas economies under the biological old regime were limited by harvests, industrialized economies were limited by cycles of boom and bust, the latter resulting when the supply of manufactured commodities grew greater than the demand. One severe bust that started in 1873 might have caused the new global industrial capitalist economy to collapse. However, Marks argues that Britain “kept the system from crashing” (145) through heavy trade with China and India. At the same time, industrialization began to cause massive environmental problems due to air pollution, industrial waste, and human waste that growing, industrializing cities generated.

Industrialization had numerous major social aspects similar to the agricultural revolution millennia before. It created an underclass of urban workers who had to work under strict surveillance, low pay, and regulations on their own time. Women and children were drafted into this work force. However, due to a growing number of work regulations that restricted female and child labor, women became seen as homemakers, and children were no longer put to work as sources of income. As a result, families became smaller. The poor and demanding working conditions led to worker resistance, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 book The Communist Manifesto dramatically documented. In addition, industrialization led to migration, both from the countryside to cities and from poorer nations to more industrialized, richer nations. This was especially evident in the mass migration to the US from Europe. Levels of migration led to governments passing stricter laws regulating it, especially in Australia and the US, which often drew on “racist Darwinist ideas about a hierarchy of races” (154).

Such social changes posed a problem for governments. The challenge to traditional ideas of divine right monarchy by the French Revolution, the rise of new social classes like the urban working class and the middle class of capitalist managers, and mass immigration raised questions about how a government could best ensure the loyalty of its population. As a result, governments promoted nationalism, which spread as the railroad and telegraph made it easier for people who had a shared culture and language to politically organize. Countries that had ethnically diverse populations, like the US, promoted their own idea of nation in political rather than “ethnic, religious, or even linguistic terms” (156). Nevertheless, certain groups were excluded from these ideas of nation, such as Indigenous Americans and enslaved African people in the US.

Another change in the late 19th century was that European powers aggressively expanded into China and Africa. Steamboats that could easily navigate African rivers and the discovery of quinine, a natural chemical derived from South American tree bark, enabled Europeans to enter the African interior without fear of malaria. In addition, European firepower advanced, culminating in the invention of the machine gun in the 1880s, which facilitated the conquest of interior Africa. By the end of the 19th century, out of all the African states, only Ethiopia remained independent. Meanwhile, a severe civil war—the Taiping Revolution, which lasted from 1850 to 1865—weakened China, as did pressure from the Western powers and Japan. China and Japan fought a war in 1894 over Korea, which ended with a Japanese victory and Japan claiming Manchuria and Taiwan. Only the fact that Britain and the US wanted China to remain independent for their own trade benefits saved China from being split up like Africa.

In Latin America, India, East Asia, and the Caribbean, deforestation caused a greenhouse effect, intensifying the climate cycle known as El Niño. This cycle brings rainfall to North America while causing drought in Asia, Africa, and part of Brazil and flooding in Argentina. The negative impact of El Niño worsened in India because of the actions of the British colonial government there, which continued focusing on exporting food for Britain rather than providing for Indians themselves, which intensified famines due to droughts, while China lacked the resources to effectively deal with famine in its province of Shanxi. These factors contributed to many countries falling behind the West in quality of life and economic well-being. Marks describes this as “the gap”, which still exists today.

As Marks writes, “[b]y 1900, Europeans and their North American descendants controlled, either directly through their colonies or indirectly through financial, military, or political dominion, most of the world” (165). European intellectuals explained this domination by drawing on the theory of evolution laid out in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. They divided humanity into races and argued Europeans were the superior race. This idea led to the science of eugenics, the idea that selective breeding could improve humans. A real consequence of this was the governments of Brazil and Mexico favoring the immigration of light-skinned individuals.