Late Modern History
Main article: Modern history
This era (beginning about 1800) in European culture saw the Age of Enlightenment[103] which led to the Scientific Revolution.[104] The Scientific Revolution changed humanity's understanding of the world and developed simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution, a major transformation of the world's economies.[104][105] Geography also contributed to important geopolitical differences. For most of their histories, China, India and the Middle East were each unified under a single dominant power that expanded until it reached the surrounding mountains and deserts. In 1600 the Ottoman Empire[106] controlled almost all the Middle East, the Ming Dynasty ruled China,[107][108] and the Mughal Empire held sway over India. By contrast, Europe was almost always divided into a number of warring states. Pan-European empires, with the notable exception of the Roman Empire, tended to collapse soon after they arose. Another doubtless important geographic factor in the rise of Europe was the Mediterranean Sea, which, for millennia, had functioned as a maritime superhighway fostering the exchange of goods, people, ideas and inventions.
This era saw a great transformation in the Industrial Revolution. The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, however, had no immediate impact on technology; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied to practical invention. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and used new modes of production — the factory, mass production, and mechanisation — to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and using less labour than previously. The Age of Enlightenment also led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the late-18th century American and French Revolutions. Democracy and republicanism would grow to have a profound effect on world events and on quality of life.
After Europeans had achieved influence and control over the Americas, their imperial activities of the West turned to the lands of the East and Asia.[109][110] In the 19th century the European states had social and technological advantage over Eastern lands.[111] Britain gained control of the Indian subcontinent, Egypt and the Malay Peninsula;[112] the French took Indochina; while the Dutch cemented their control over the Dutch East Indies. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with large numbers of British colonists emigrating to these colonies.[112] Russia colonised large pre-agricultural areas of Siberia.[113][114] In the late 19th century, the European powers divided the remaining areas of Africa. Within Europe, economic and military challenges created a system of nation states, and ethno-linguistic groupings began to identify themselves as distinctive nations with aspirations for cultural and political autonomy. This nationalism would become important to peoples across the world in the 20th century.
During the Industrial Revolution, the world economy became reliant on coal as a fuel, as new methods of transport, such as railways andsteamships, effectively shrank the world.[105] Meanwhile, industrial pollution and environmental damage, present since the discovery of fire and the beginning of civilization, accelerated drastically.
The advantages that Europe had developed by the mid-18th century were two: an entrepreneurial culture,[111][115] and the wealth generated by the Atlantic trade,[111] (including the African slave trade). By the late 16th century, silver from the Americas accounted for Spanish empire's wealth.[116] The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[117] While some historians conclude that, in 1750, labour productivity in the most developed regions of China was still on a par with that of Europe's Atlantic economy (see the NBER Publications by Carol H. Shiue and Wolfgang Keller[118]), other historians like Angus Maddison hold that the per-capita productivity of western Europe had by the late Middle Ages surpassed that of all other regions.[119]
[edit]Contemporary history
Main article: Contemporary history
[edit]1900 to 1945
Main article: 20th century
The 20th century[120][121][122] opened with Europe at an apex of wealth and power, and with much of the world under its direct colonial control or its indirect domination.[123] Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: the United States andJapan.[124] As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately yielded to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models.
This transformation was catalysed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. World War I[125] destroyed many of Europe's empires and monarchies, and weakened Britain andFrance.[126] In its aftermath, powerful ideologies arose. The Russian Revolution[127][128][129]of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascistdictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.[130]
Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II.[131][132] Themilitaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism. Their defeat opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam and North Korea.
[edit]1945 to 1999
Main article: 20th century
After the World War II in 1945, the United Nations was founded in the hope of allaying conflicts among nations and preventing future wars.[133][134] The war had, however, left two nations, the United States[135] and the Soviet Union, with principal power to guide international affairs.[136] Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-year stand-off between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. With the development of nuclear weapons[137] and the subsequent arms race, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear warbetween the two superpowers.[138] Such war being viewed as impractical, proxy wars were instead waged, at the expense of non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.
The Cold War lasted to the 1990s, when the Soviet Union's communist system began to collapse, unable to compete economically with the United States and western Europe; the Soviets' Central European "satellites" reasserted their national sovereignty, and in 1991 theSoviet Union itself disintegrated.[139][140][141] The United States for the time being was left as the "sole remaining superpower".[142][143][144]
In the early postwar decades, the African and Asian colonies of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French and other west European empires won their formal independence.[145][146] These nations faced challenges in the form ofneocolonialism, poverty, illiteracy and endemic tropical diseases.[147][148] Many of the Western and Central European nations gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union, which subsequently expanded eastward to include former Soviet satellites.[149][150][151][152]
The 20th century saw exponential progress in science and technology, and increased life expectancy and standard of living for much of humanity. As the developed world shifted from a coal-based to a petroleum-based economy, new transport technologies, along with the dawn of the Information Age,[153] led to increased globalization.[154][155][156] Space exploration reached throughout the solar system. The structure of DNA, the very template oflife, was discovered,[157][158][159] and the human genome was sequenced, a major milestone in the understanding of human biology and the treatment of disease.[160][161][162][163][164]Global literacy rates continued to rise, and the percentage of the world's labor pool needed to produce humankind's food supply continued to drop.
The technologies of sound recordings, motion pictures, and radio and television broadcasting produced a focus on popular culture and entertainment. Television spots sold both commercial products and political candidates. Then, in the last decade of this century, a rapid increase took place in the use of personal computers. A global communication network emerged in the Internet. Mass entertainment gave way to individual communication in what has been called a shift from the fourth to a fifth civilization.[165]
The century saw the development of new global threats, such as nuclear proliferation, global climate change,[166][167] massivedeforestation, overpopulation, and the dwindling of global resources (particularly fossil fuels).[168]
Further information: American Century and Pax Americana
[edit]21st century
Main article: 21st century
The 21st century has been marked by the expansion of economic globalization, the expansion of communications and telecommunications with mobile phones, the Internet, and international pop culture. Worldwide demand and competition for resourcesrose due to growing populations and industrialization, mainly in India, China and Brazil. This demand is resulting in increased levels of environmental degradation and a growing threat of global warming.[169] This in turn has spurred the development of alternate or renewablesources of energy, proposals for cleaner fossil-fuel technologies, and consideration of expanded use of nuclear energy
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