Modern world we have spoken easily of historical eras. Can we speak of cultural eras? It can actually be a useful concept. There are many ways to divide time into cultural eras. But for our purposes, a cultural period is a time marked by a particular way of understanding the world through culture and technology. Changes in cultural periods are marked by fundamental changes in the way we perceive and understand the world. For example, you may have had readings about the “Middle Ages,” a marker for European history from the 5th to 15th Century. In that era, technology and communication were in the hands of authorities like the king and church who could dictate what was “true.” The Renaissance, the era that followed the Middle Ages, turned to the scientific method as a means of reaching truth through reason. This change in cultural period was galvanized by the printing press. (In 2008, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief proclaimed that the application of Internet technology through Google was about to render the scientific method obsolete.Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008.
HOW THE WORLD GOT MODERN
Possibly the biggest question for historians and social scientists such as economists is the question of what modernity is and how and why it came about in the way that it did. Recent years have seen a renewed focus on this question, with the sudden revival of world history as a serious subject for historical research and a whole series of works by economists all dealing with the same question: How and why is the world we live in so radically different from that of our ancestors and how and why did this radical discontinuity in historical experience come about? The answers to these questions that are popular among classical liberals have been increasingly undermined, as have the corresponding theses of many on the political left. However a new consensus is starting to emerge, with interesting implications. At present however a couple of crucial pieces are missing from the jigsaw of historical narrative.
This Is the Modern World is the second studio album by British band The Jam, released in November 1977. The album was released less than six months after their debut album In the City, and reached No. 22 on the UK Albums Chart.
Although generally met with negative reviews by music critics upon release, This Is the Modern World has been described as being an album “with far more light and shade” than In the City.
The only single from This Is the Modern World was the censored version of “The Modern World”, which peaked at No. 36 on the UK Singles Chart
The Making of the Modern World is extraordinary for research into the history of the dynamics of Western trade, including the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It is also strong in the rise of the modern labor movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories that championed and challenged capitalism in the nineteenth century.
In addition, The Making of the Modern World offers deep resources in the role of finance and taxation and the growth of the early modern monarchy. It features essential texts covering the function of financial institutions, the crisis of the French monarchy and the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and the connection between the democratic goals of revolutionaries and their legal aspirations.
