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World History Project - 1750 to the Present
WATCH: How Did Change Accelerate?
Exchange multiplies, markets grow, and fossil fuels flow, revolutionizing government and industry. Created by Big History Project.
Want to join the conversation?
- In a way this is a Columbian Exchange video.(13 votes)
- What exactly was the black death? What were the causes to call it the black death? What happend to people?(4 votes)
- The Black Death was a deadly plague that struck Europe during the 14th century. It struck Europe again during the 18th century. It was spread around Europe by rodents and fleas. It was called the Black Death because of the dark patches on the skin caused by subcutaneous bleeding. 30% to 60% of Europe's population died during the 14th century due to the plague.
For more information, I suggest looking at this site:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/medieval-times/disease-and-demography/a/disease-and-demograpy(7 votes)
- What's the difference between sweet potatoes and potatoes?(3 votes)
- I found this article regarding your question - do you think it's a credible source? Do you trust the answers here?
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/regular-vs-sweet-potatoes(9 votes)
- Out of the majority of the asian super powers, why did a small country like Japan get indrustrilized?(3 votes)
- Japan's highly developed Edo-period education system was a key factor in its swift turn to industrialization and a capitalist economy after the Meiji Restoration, as well as its subsequent position as a major world power.(3 votes)
- Why did China not keep up with the industrialization?(3 votes)
- The want of potential customers for products manufactured by machines instead of artisans was due to the absence of a "middle class" in Song China which was the reason for the failure to industrialize.(1 vote)
- hello there,
so basically if it wasn't for Britain the industrial era would have had a slower rate(2 votes) - The Mongls are the best(2 votes)
- How was the middle-class affected?(2 votes)
- how did most people feel about the change?(1 vote)
- why did that certain area get change before others?(1 vote)
Video transcript
In the last 500 years, our world has been
utterly transformed. At the heart of
those transformations was a sharp increase
in human control over the resources
of the biosphere. You can see this increase
very clearly if you look
at population figures. In 1500, there were 500 million
humans living on Earth. In 1900,
just four centuries later, there were 1.6 billion humans. And today, early
in the 21st century, there are almost
seven billion humans. The changes that
made this possible transformed our world
and created today's world. At their heart is a sharp increase
in rates of innovation. But why did rates of innovation
increase so suddenly? That's a question that
historians have debated for over a century. It's not a problem
we're going to solve right now, but what we can do is look at three
of the most crucial factors. The first crucial change
was a breakdown in the barriers between the four world zones. This allowed a rapid
expansion in the size and diversity
of exchange networks as different regions
contributed their own plants, animals, customs,
trade goods, ideas to an emerging global network--
the first in human history. Between 1519 and 1522,
a Portuguese fleet traveled all around the world, the first time that
had ever been done. By the 1550s or the middle
of the 16th century, American corn was being grown
in China, in parts of China where you
couldn't grow rice. And it led to rapid
population growth. Other American crops
were also being grown in Afro-Eurasia,
such as tomatoes, potatoes and sweet potatoes, and everywhere
populations began to rise. Afro-Eurasian crops also
moved in the opposite direction, such as sugar and coffee, and so did
Afro-Eurasian animals: horses, oxen, sheep, pigs. Actually, horses
were really ironic because horses had originally
evolved in the Americas and it seems that they had
been driven to extinction by the first humans
to arrive in the Americas. When the Spaniards brought
horses back to the Americas, they would transform
the lifeways of those Americans who lived
on the North American plains. Diseases also
crossed the Atlantic such as smallpox,
and their impact was devastating amongst American populations
that lacked any immunity. In fact, the die-off as smallpox arrived
in the Americas may have been greater
than that that was caused by the Black Death
in Afro-Eurasia. In the 1570s, silver from
a mountain of silver in Potosi, in what is now Bolivia but was then part
of the Spanish Empire, began to flow
through Mexico and Europe and the Philippines to China, becoming the first
global currency. New information also traveled--
information about new lands, new peoples, new customs,
new plants, new crops, new stars even, even new gods. And that gave people entirely new ideas
about the world and may have contributed
to the scientific revolution. By the 1800s, the Australasian
and Pacific world zones were being incorporated within this
emerging global system that was now the largest,
most diverse and richest exchange network that had
ever existed in human history. The second crucial change was an increase
in the importance of commerce and markets. In agrarian civilizations,
as we've seen, elites and rulers
tended to extract resources through the threat of force. But there were many groups
such as merchants or artisans or wage earners who actually
had to get revenues on competitive markets. What they did was
they sold their goods or their labor or their services
on competitive markets. And to succeed
on competitive markets, what you have to do
is you have to innovate. That means you have
to offer better goods, services or labor
than your rivals. That explains why where
competitive markets flourish you tend to get
a lot of innovation. And that's why
throughout the agrarian era, trading cities such as Venice
or Baghdad tended to be areas where you got much innovation and so did areas
between agrarian civilizations where goods had to be
traded on markets rather than exchanged
through the threat of force. After 1500, expanding global
networks of exchange increased the
importance of commerce and markets everywhere and they began
to transform society. Governments began to realize there were huge
sources of revenues available in commerce and they began
to support merchants. This was particularly
true in Europe, where governments
were constantly at war, constantly looking
for new sources of revenue, and where merchants
were deeply involved in international trade. But these changes also
affected ordinary people, particularly peasants and particularly
in regions where growing populations meant that
peasants were short of land. Now what they had to do was find new ways
of raising money, and that often meant wage
work of various kinds. So peasants too
began to enter markets as perhaps weavers or artisans. The third crucial change was the discovery of new sources
of energy from fossil fuels. In some regions such as Britain,
there had appeared a shortage of wood and wood was
the main source of energy in the pre-modern world. This prompted a search
for new sources of energy, and in the 1700s, some innovators
such as James Watt began to develop
cost-efficient steam engines that could turn the world's vast and largely
untapped sources of coal into cheap energy. The steam engine marked the beginnings
of an energy revolution that would
revolutionize our world. By the early 19th century,
steam engines were being used for industrial-scale
production of textiles and many other goods. And with the invention
of railways and steamships, they began to revolutionize
transportation as well. By the late 19th
and early 20th century, new innovations
such as the creation of the internal combustion
engine made it possible
to harness the power of two other fossil fuels,
oil and natural gas. Never before had so much
cheap energy been available. To give some idea of this,
here are some statistics. We estimate that
in the Paleolithic era each human used, on average, something like 2,000 to 3,000
kilocalories of energy a day. That's a little bit more
than you need just to survive. With agriculture,
the domestication of animals, and the harnessing
of wind and water power, that figure may have
risen in some regions to perhaps 10,000 or 12,000 kilocalories
a day per person. In the early 21st century, it's estimated that each
person is using on average perhaps 200,000 kilocalories
of energy a day, and most of it
comes from fossil fuels. Now, imagine what it would mean if fossil fuels
vanished overnight and you had to cut your personal
energy budget by 90% or 95%. By the early 19th century,
these three factors-- the creation of the first
global networks of exchange, the expansion in the importance
of commerce and markets, and the discovery
of fossil fuels-- began to transform societies
in some parts of the world. Those tended to be regions best placed to benefit
from these changes, and they tended to be in Europe and around
the North Atlantic seaboard. In some of these regions,
societies grew rapidly in wealth and power to create the first
truly modern societies. By 1900, industrial methods of
production based on fossil fuels had spread to Europe,
to North America, to Russia, and Japan. Innovations
particularly affected the production of textiles,
of iron and steel, and of chemicals
such as dyes and fertilizers. They also transformed communications
and transportation with the creation of railways,
of steamships, of the telegraph, of the telephone,
and of the radio, and also the introduction of commercial scientific
laboratories. All of these processes
exchanged... or accelerated
the exchange of people, of goods and of ideas. These factors also
transformed governments. As governments began to face new managerial
challenges in a world increasingly dominated
by commerce and markets, no longer was it
possible for governments simply to skim off
resources from peasants through the threat of force. Now, as increasing
numbers of their citizens became wage earners, they had to become
managers of markets. During the French
and American revolutions, governments began to develop entirely new types of
partnerships with their citizens through the creation
of elections and the introduction sometimes
of compulsory military service. They also began
to provide new services such as mass education
or banking. All in all, governments
became more powerful, more complex,
more market-oriented, and much, much wealthier. The Industrial Revolution transformed the
international balance of wealth and power. It shifted it right away from the old hub regions
of the agrarian era-- the Mediterranean,
Mesopotamia, India, and East Asia-- and it shifted it
towards a new hub zone whose center was
the North Atlantic region. Other beneficiaries included
European settler societies such as the Americas,
South Africa and Australasia. By the late 19th century, early industrializing
societies, including Britain, the USA,
France, Germany, and then Russia and Japan, began to use
their growing wealth and modern military
technologies, such as ironclad gunships
and machine guns, to build powerful armies and eventually
to create empires. The newly
industrializing societies conquered the old superpowers
of India and China. By 1900, India
was ruled by Britain and the Chinese economy was
dominated by a consortium of industrialized powers. The Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa were also
carved up into colonies. By now it was clear that industrialization
meant power. So by 1900, the world seemed to be
divided into two regions: a smaller, industrial, wealthy
and extremely powerful region; and a much larger, weaker,
unindustrialized and much poorer region. It began to seem as if the main
changes of recent centuries, or the main result
of those changes, was to create two regions, to benefit one region
at the expense of another-- to create a rich region
and a poor region.