Modern World History-7

luni, 1 aprilie 2019 1
MODERN WORLD
HİSTORY
Dr. Dragoş C. Mateescu
Main bibliography
• Foucault, Michel, 1995. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison,
translated by Alan Sheridan. New York and Toronto: Vintage Books.
• Giddens, Anthony, 1990. The consequences of modernity. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, 1997. Age of revolution, 1789-1848, London: Phoenix.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, 1975. Age of capital, 1848-1875, London: Phoenix.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, 1997. Age of empire, 1875-1914, London: Phoenix.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, 1995. Age of extremes: a history of the world, 1914-
1991, New York: Vintage Books.
• Woodruff, William. 1998. A concise history of the modern world: 1500
to the present, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
• ALSO, do not forget about Fernand Braudel!
Modernity:
• questioning of tradition; prioritization of individualism,
freedom and formal equality;
• faith in inevitable social and scientific and technological
progress and human perfectibility;
• rationalization and professionalization;
• departure from feudal agrarianism toward free-market
capitalism, industrialization, urbanization and secularization;
• the emergence of the nation-state and its constitutive
institutions (e.g. representative democracy, public
education, modern bureaucracy) and forms of surveillance.
+ The idea that states gradually learn to respect and protect
the society in terms of individual and collective rights and
private property.
• Woodruff, William. 1998. A concise history of the modern

world: 1500 to the present, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp.
136-152.
• Relevant parts from Kennedy (1988) and the other
sources in the syllabus.
• The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

European phenomenon??
• ‘Between the third and the fifteenth centuries Arabic,
Persian, Chinese and Indian science and technology were
probably more advanced than those of the West.’
• Then came the Renaissance, followed by the Reformation.
• Printing.
• Perspective:
• Arab mathematician Abu Ali al-Hazen (c.965–1038) (optics);
• Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) (perspective
geometry).
• The possibility of depicting anything, from the human body
to the entire earth (more accurate mapping).
Origins
• A ‘shift in emphasis during the Renaissance
from authoritative truth – the truth of God
concerning mankind’s origin and destiny – to
factual, objective truth regarding the
processes and laws governing the natural
world.’
• From the ‘world’ after life to man’s actual world
and life.
• From concern with the possibility of
salvation/redemption to the actual causation in
the objective world. Speculative
thinking wins over
• Humanism. Man as measure of all things
the descriptive,
(Protagoras, c. 490 – c. 420 BC).
authoritative
• Man as the master of all possibilities. thinking of religion.
Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

European phenomenon??
• Medical sciences inspired by the
translation and literary transmission
of ancient Greek and Arabic scientific
texts from Arabic Spain – including
the works of Aristotle, Euclid,
Archimedes, Hippocrates and Galen.
• The geocentric view of the universe
from the Hellenistic period was
shattered by the Pole Nicolaus
Copernicus (1473-1543), the Dane
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), the Italian
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the
German Johannes Kepler (1571-
1630).
• A new understanding of the world
through mathematics.
Johannes Kepler was able to explain the

motion of planets.
The essential ‘Copernican’ revolution

• The challenge against the
Church doctrine concerning
the nature of the universe,
and man’s place in it, led to
the moral authority implicit in
religion being questioned: the
birth of modern philosophy.
The Reformation was the

logical consequence of this
process.
• Implications of the Catholic Inquisition: in the seventeenth century

Italy lost its leading position in scientific innovation to France, England
and the Netherlands.
• Spain and Portugal were never capable of entering such competition.
The birth of modern science:

modern (quantitative) research methods
Speculative philosophy – source of hypotheses. Experimental testing
begins.
Quantitative methods of research based on observation.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620): argued for a new scientific
method based on inductive (not deductive) reasoning.
Realisations of “modernity”
• Experimental optics Modern architecture

• Experimental medicine Modern medicine
Modern transportation
• Experimental physics
Modern communication
• Experimental astronomy
Modern industry
• Experimental geometry Modern (quantitative) social
• Experimental algebra sciences
Further steps
• The introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, of the
decimals in 1585, logarithms in 1614, the slide rule (Edmund
Wingate, William Oughtred) in 1622 and the first adding machine
(Blaise Pascal) in 1645.
The Cartesian logic

• The Frenchman René Descartes, Discours de la
méthode de bien conduire sa raison et chercher
la vérité dans les sciences (Discourse on the
Method of properly guiding the Reason in the
Search for Truth in the Sciences, 1637):
• ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am).
• ‘Being’ is dependent on human thinking.
• Outside mathematical quantitative analysis and proof,
nothing should be believed.
• A specifically European ‘’human reason’ is now
discovering and mastering the world.
Toward mastering space, time and motion

Englishman Sir Isaac Newton,
Philisophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy,
1687):
• Postulated that nature worked to strict
mechanical, mathematical, linear and
hence predictable laws.
• Established absolute principles of
motion and defined gravitational forces.
The institutionalisation of science

• 1662: The Royal Society (London,
England).
• 1666: Académie Royale des Sciences
(Paris, France).
• Chemistry founded as a separate science
when Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94) succeeded
in measuring chemical reactions accurately.
• 1675: The Royal Observatory
(Greenwich, England).
• Main mission, resolving the problem of the
longitude (John Harrison).
• The invention of the sextant (1730), the octant
(1731) and the chronometer (1735).
The “Greenwich” time-zones map

The Pope’s private library at the Vatican

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

• Illuminismo, Aufklärung, siècle des lumines.
• ‘The ultimate aim of all Enlightenment thinkers was to
wrest (take away) from the Church the moral and
intellectual leadership of western civilization.’
Fundamental logic: humanity is perfectable.
• The Church = home of ignorance and irrationality.
• MEDIOCRITY vs. (attainable) EXCEPTIONALITY.
• Positivism.

• As Newton had discovered the
unchanging, quantitative laws of nature,
the Enlightenment claimed to have
discovered the unchanging moral, social,
psychological and political ideas (and
laws) that determine human action.
• Human beings were naturally good and
could be educated to be better.
• Evil was not innate, as the Church held,
nor was hatred, or racial or religious
intolerance.
• Voltaire: ‘Traité sur la tolérance’ (1763).

• John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690). The
environment and not destiny
shapes human character. His
political theory founded modern
liberal democracy.
• Baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit
des Lois (1748). Reason vs.
religious intolerance. His theory of
the principle of separation of
powers was incorporated in the
American Constitution.

• Denis Diderot: Encyclopédie, an
encyclopedia of thirty-four
volumes, between 1751 and 1772.

Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776). Laissez faire.
Toward ‘modern’ politics

• Liberal democracy: a political system that protects natural
human political and economic freedoms (rights) from state
authority, and not authority from people.
• Modern citizenship (formal, legal rights and duties under a
constitution).
ONLY free people can feel free to explore, invent and prosper.
TOWARD THE 19th CENTURY

• Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851),
André Marie Ampère (1775–1836), Georg
Simon Ohm (1787–1854), Michael
Faraday (1791–1867): research in
electrical energy.
• Louis Pasteur (1822–95): biology (the
germ theory of disease).
• Dimitri Mendeleev (1834–1907), and the
German Lothar Meyer (1830–95):
chemistry (the periodic table).
• “Until the end of the nineteenth century,
western scientific thinking continued to be
developed in the mechanical, atomistic
framework outlined by Descartes and
Newton.”
“By the beginning of the nineteenth century, changes in

technology were taking place on such a wide front that
writers used the term
to describe them.
Although the Industrial Revolution was long in forming, it
is generally thought to describe the changes taking
place in England between the years 1760–1830.”
Why Britain?
• Scientific advances – large number of practical inventions.
• Machines could compete with cheap labour elsewhere.
• Rich reserves of iron and coal.
• Massive investments in communications.
• Growing supplies of credit and money, and the efficient joint
stock organization of businesses. Free-market (A. Smith).
• Protection of property by law. Political stability in a context of
relative political liberalism.
• Protestant work ethic. Benedictine principle: laborare est orare
(work is praying). Elites working with their hands.
• Unrivalled navy and excellent harbours.
• Abundant harvests between 1720 and 1750 – rapidly growing
population after 1830.
• Ever-growing profitable domestic and foreign trade.
George Stephenson
James Watt
The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway,

first passenger railway (1830)
• Faster communication, faster markets, faster enrichment.

• Increasing competition: “for part of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, while the French led in science, the
British led in technology. In the late nineteenth and the
early part of the twentieth centuries, the Germans
excelled in both.”
• “The mandarin class of China, who cultivated long
fingernails as a symbol of their elitism, were no match for
the pragmatists of the West.”
• British contributions: synthetic dyes (with France),

electrical energy (with Germany and France), the
Bessemer steel converter, the Gilchrist–Thomas basic
steel process and the Parsons’ steam turbine.
• German contributions: chemicals and electricity, the
internal combustion and the diesel engines.
• US contributions: the light bulb, the typewriter and the
telephone, electric lighting, the first aircraft, the first mass-
produced car, the first general-purpose computer and the
first transistor.
• In the twentieth century [North] America would challenge
Europe for preeminence in both science and technology.
HOWEVER…….
Critical views
• Enlightenment intellectuals were named ‘terrible simplifiers’.

Humanity and nature are not mechanical systems.
• The dawn of qualitative research thinking.
• Thomas Malthus, The Principle of Population (1798):
population growing faster than food supplies, the
Enlightenment’s belief in the perfectibility of society was
wrong.
• Immanuel Kant, 1784 essay "Answer to the Question: What
is Enlightenment?”
Critical views
• Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: On the Origin of

Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).
• Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905). Max Plank (1858–
1947): research in quantum physics (‘Energy is emitted in
minute, discrete quantities called quanta’). Plank and
Einstein treated matter and energy as exchangeable, which
Enlightenment physicists had always regarded as
inconvertible.
• Werner Heisenberg (1901–76): the ‘Uncertainty Principle’
(‘the observer alters the observed by the act of observing’).
Critical views
• “For the first time since Copernicus, the fundamental faith of

western man in science and the scientific method, and
especially scientific truth – the belief that the universe is not
chaos but possesses an underlying order, a linear kind of
certainty – was questioned.”
• The very questioning fervour of the Englightenment was
soon to be questioned – new revolutions at the horizon.

Modern World History-7

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luni, 1 aprilie 2019 1

• Woodruff, William. 1998. A concise history of the modern

Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

Johannes Kepler was able to explain the

The essential ‘Copernican’ revolution

The Reformation was the

• Implications of the Catholic Inquisition: in the seventeenth century

The birth of modern science:

• Experimental optics Modern architecture

The Cartesian logic

Toward mastering space, time and motion

The institutionalisation of science

The “Greenwich” time-zones map

The Pope’s private library at the Vatican

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

The 18th Century: Age of Enlightenment

Toward ‘modern’ politics

TOWARD THE 19th CENTURY

“By the beginning of the nineteenth century, changes in

The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway,

• Faster communication, faster markets, faster enrichment.

• British contributions: synthetic dyes (with France),

• Enlightenment intellectuals were named ‘terrible simplifiers’.

• Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: On the Origin of

• “For the first time since Copernicus, the fundamental faith of

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