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Explanation:
the period from 1750 to 1914 was a pivotal moment in human history. Historians
have named it the era of the “modern revolution.” Over the course of Big Era
Seven, change in human society became “autocatalytic.” Scientists use this term to
describe a chemical process, but it is also a useful historical concept. A catalyst is a
person or thing that precipitates a change. Autocatalysis occurs when one kind of change
precipitates by itself the need for other kinds of changes. Since about 1750, a steadily
pyramiding sequence of changes has transformed human life. Moreover, the dynamic
interactions among changes in many di)erent areas—political, economic, technological,
cultural, environmental—have, by the very process of interaction, generated the need
for even more changes. Once autocatalytic processes got going, they tended to speed up.
Overall, global changes have become self-perpetuating and ever-accelerating.
*e modern revolution involved numerous interacting developments. Six interrelated
factors were particularly important:
First, a revolutionary transformation occurred in human use of energy. Until the
nineteenth century, the energy basis of human society had been biomass energy, mainly
the burning of wood to produce heat, plus human and animal muscle power. With Big Era
Seven, the world entered the age of coal and steam power. *e fossil fuel era had begun,
and this is the era we still live in today. By the early nineteenth century, the harnessing of
steam power enabled humans to vastly multiply the energy generated from burning coal,
thereby greatly expanding the amount of energy available to humans per capita, that is,
to each individual. By 1914, petroleum, a second major fossil fuel, began to be extensively
used as well. Natural gas is the third important fossil fuel.
Second, unprecedented global population growth accompanied the fossil fuel revolution.
In Big Era Seven the world’s population more than doubled, de/nitively piercing the
previous limits on growth. In 1800, the global population stood at around 900 million, by
itself a huge leap from the start of the previous era. By 1914, it stood at around 1.75 billion
people. *e great increase in human numbers is a sign that major changes were at work.
*ird, an industrial transformation got under way. In the Industrial Revolution,
humans—western Europeans at /rst—learned to exploit coal and steam energy
to mass produce goods with machines and to sell them worldwide. *e Industrial
Revolution began with production of textiles and eventually spread to other areas of
manufacturing, as well as to farming and food processing. In the later nineteenth century,
industrialization occurred on a large scale in metallurgical, chemical, and electrical
industries. Once begun, it could not be stopped. *e Industrial Revolution greatly
altered the distribution of wealth and poverty around the world and also engendered new
attitudes towards nature and society.
Fourth, a revolution took place in communications and transport. Unprecedented
numbers of people in this era took advantage of steamships and railroads to migrate
long distances within continental spaces as well as across oceans. European migrants
were especially attracted to areas such as North America and the southern cone of South
America where the climate was reasonably
familiar. Asian migrants, especially South Asians
and Chinese, settled in many parts of the tropical
world as well as in the Americas.
Fifth, the modern revolution was partly a
democratic revolution. Popular revolutionary
movements of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries dramatically reshaped ideas
about government and political power. While
these movements were initially centered on
countries around the rim of the Atlantic, their
ideas proved contagious, provoking movements
for the abolition of slavery, representative
government, constitutions, universal su)rage,
workers’ rights, gender equality, and national self-determination, /rst in Europe and the
Americas, later all across Afroeurasia.
Finally, the era witnessed the rise of new colonial empires. Using new technologies
of warfare and political control that came out of the Industrial Revolution, the empires
of several European states greatly increased in size during this era. *e United States,
Russia, and Japan also drew on these new capabilities to expand their own empires.
All of the imperial states adopted elaborate racial justi/cations for dominance over
other peoples.
