The Origins of the Modern World by Robert B. Marks

Author:Robert B. Marks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442212411
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2016-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Into the Anthropocene

In the course of human history, the Industrial Revolution equals or surpasses that of the agricultural revolution in importance. Where agriculture allowed people to capture the annual energy flows of the sun, allowing human populations to rise and civilizations to flourish, albeit within the limits of the biological old regime, over time the Industrial Revolution has enabled human society to escape from the constraints of the old regime and to build whole new economies and ways of organizing human life on the basis of stored sources of mineral energy, in particular coal and oil. As we will see in coming chapters, the lifestyle in the world we inhabit is made possible by the immense increase in material production spawned by the Industrial Revolution.

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.61 That story line becomes especially noteworthy in the twentieth century, the focus of chapter 6.

Of course, it is only in hindsight that we now know that the development of coal-fired steam power set in motion forces that we now call the ‘‘Industrial Revolution,’’ and it is important to remember that this was not inevitable. Indeed, similar developments elsewhere and at other times promised a transition to industry and self-sustaining economic growth, but those flames flickered out or were extinguished.62 So the Industrial Revolution that ‘‘succeeded’’ and ushered in the modern world was both contingent and located in global conjuncture. How the world got to that point is important to understand.

Globally, European textile manufacturers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were at a disadvantage to Indian and Chinese competitors, whose calicoes and silks were of higher quality and much cheaper than anything they could produce. Support from a government willing to use force and arms to protect its domestic manufacturers, coupled with colonial legislation in the New World, enabled British cotton manufacturers to exclude Indian cotton textiles and to gain a market for their own goods and a source of cheap raw materials.

Ecologically, Old World (and biological old regime) economies from China to England alike were beginning to experience shortages of land because of the clearance of forests to make way for farms and to use as fuel for heating. Increased market size and division of labor allowed China and England alike, for instance, to wring greater efficiencies out of the biological old regime (i.e., mostly agrarian) economy, but supplying the necessities of life all required land. Without coal or colonies, the Chinese were forced to expend greater amounts of labor and capital on improving output from land, where the British were released from that constraint by New World resources and the ready availability of coal.

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