The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century

The Origins of the Modern World reflects recent trends in historiography, including increased interest among scholars in world history rather than history specializing in one nation or one region. World history is a more comprehensive approach that is especially important when discussing topics that affect various regions of the world, such as trade or colonialism. Also, world history is an important way of correcting how history in the English-speaking world has focused excessively on Western Europe and the US. Traditionally, when written histories did focus on regions like South Asia or West Africa, they tended to view non-Western peoples and states as passive, acted upon by the Western powers (especially in the age of colonialism) rather than acting in their own right. Another related trend in historiography over the last five decades has been an expansion of the concept of history beyond the political, the economic, the intellectual, and the military to other aspects of human experience across time, like social, cultural, gender, and environmental history. The view of history as more than just the story of various nation-states and wars lends itself to the development of world history as a popular approach.

Attitudes among both scholars and the general public have increasingly questioned the idea of Western exceptionalism, and this has become a bitter topic of political debate. While conservatives argue that history teachers have downplayed the accomplishments of the West, liberals counter that older historians romanticized the West to an extent that is racist and nationalistic. Interest in and support of scholarship that examines the history of non-Western regions and of Indigenous peoples like the Aborigines of Australia and Indigenous Americans in the Americas.

In addition, The Origins of the Modern World reflects global concerns about the environment. These concerns are not new but became a major force in Western politics and culture by the 1960s and 1970s, when the severity of air and water pollution in some areas and anxieties over global overpopulation shaped public opinion in much of the West, leading to reforms like the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US in 1970. More recently, climate change has become a major environmental cause, inspiring fears of civilizational decline and even human extinction. Fears that governments are doing little to address the crisis as temperatures continue to warm have influenced not just politics but society and culture as well.