Modern World History-4

Modern World History
Dr. Dragoş C. Mateescu
7 March Thursday, 2019 1

The Rise of the West and the Impact of
Western Man
• Woodruff, William. 1998. A concise history of the modern world:
1500 to the present, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 54-80.
• Relevant parts from Kennedy (1988) and other sources indicated
in the syllabus.
• The first two weeks: explaining the context, the decline of the
‘old world’ (papacy, absolutism, the Spanish colonial system, the
English and the French absolutist kingdoms, the rise of
constitutional regimes and of the nation-states etc.).
• Today: the rise and impact of the Western Man, that is, the
modern “I” predicated in/by the West.

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 (state sovereignty respecting individual
sovereignty).
The modern ‘I’ (modern subjectivity) is the product of a
long historical process throughout which (Western)
Europe produced the currently dominant understanding
of the ‘individual’ and the (political) ‘person’.
A revolutionary perspective.
From the Dark Ages to Modernity:

• Renaissance
• Reformation (of the Church)
• Enlightenment
• Industrial (Technical) Revolution
• Political Revolutions (the paralel birth of individual
and national sovereignties)

Explaining European Supremacy
• Renaissance: art, music, literature, architecture, politics, religion,
education, commerce, and science and technology.
• A period from the 14th to the 17th century, considered the bridge
between the Middle Ages and modern history.
• At the heart of the Renaissance movement was the “human”, the
“secular”; praising individual judgment.
• It made possible the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific
and Industrial Revolutions.
• The rise of the Western man – a new ‘god’?

Medieval Art
6
Mosaic in Florence Baptisery, 13th century (Duecento)
From Duecento (Cimabue) to…
Renaissance
• ‘Rebirth’ (rinascimento) from the ancient
cultural roots.
• Return to the aesthetics and values of
antiquity.
• Rebirth of man versus religion.

Pietro Perugino (1483-1520)

Jean
Fouquet
c.1450
Mantegna
1431-1506
Botticelli (1445-1510)
Botticelli
Titian (1488-1576)
Titian (1488-1576)
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
da Vinci
(1452-1519)
da Vinci
(1452-1519)
da Vinci
(1452-1519)
Not only art…
• Niccolò Machiavelli
(Florence, 1469-1527)
• Desiderius Erasmus
(Rotterdam, 1466-1536)

Not only art…
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
François Rabelais (1494–1553)

Not only art…
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)
The birth of
empirical research,
that is, modern
science.
Johannes Gutenberg
(1398-1468)

A ‘universal’ humanity united not by religion,
but by the promise of the scientific
knowledge and understanding of… us.

The Dutch Renaissance and the
beginning of ‘realism’ about humanity

Hieronymus Bosch
(1450-1516)
Pieter Bruegel
the Elder
joi, 7 martie 2019 1525-1569 45
Pieter Bruegel
the Elder
joi, 7 martie 2019 1525-1569 46
The essence…
• The idea that man could independently improve his
lot, that he (not God, or the hidden forces of nature)
was the originator and the measure of all things
(Parmenides’ idea).
• Emphasis placed not on timeless salvation, but on
progressive action toward an attainable goal.
• Time becomes purposive time.
• With the growth of a money economy, time became
money; the market became supreme.
• Increasingly, nothing was permanent, fixed, stable or
immutable.
• The rise of the Western man as human being
capable of and entitled to control life.
The essence…
• The Asian empires that preceded the rise of the
West were probably more glorious than anything
that Europe subsequently achieved.
• China in the thirteenth century was the most
technically advanced and economically powerful
state in the world.
• Yet, being more despotic, these states hindered
individual action, and hence were less dynamic.
• Europe’s main strength: capacity of self-
transformation. Readiness for action and for the
study of action (analytical reflexivity).

The essence…
• Contrast between the European man’s desire to
mould the world to his will and the Buddhist’s desire
to escape from worldly strivings, or the Hindu’s
sense of illusion when speaking of the actual world
and of individual man, or the stress placed by
Confucius on the need for harmony and stability.
• Contrast between the importance placed by the
West upon the role of the individual (especially in
the post-Protestant period of European history) and
that placed by the East on the collective.
• While western Renaissance art delights in
expressing the individual, Eastern art makes the
individual part of the whole.
EASTERN ORTHODOXY

CHINA
7 March Thursday, 2019 CHINA 52
MUGHAL EMPIRE (INDIA)

The essence…
• The Occidental “values”: the individual, action,
tension and change, increased social mobility,
individual reason, logic and linear progress.
• The Oriental “values”: the collective, harmony,
stability and continuity.

Practical consequences
• The increasing isolation and eventual decline of the empires not
connected to Rennaissance and Reformation (the Spanish and
Portuguese colonial systems, partially France, the Habsburgs, Russian
Romanov Tsars and the Ottomans).
• The development of sciences: weapons, technologies of navigation,
superior economic, military and political organisation of states.
• Joint stock companies, stock exchanges, banking and insurance systems.
Property protected by rule of law.
• The birth of institutionalised “trust systems”.
• “Universe economies” (F. Braudel): Florence, Venice, Barcelona,
Amsterdam, London, Bruges, the Hanseatic league, Hamburg, etc.
• In the nineteenth century western merchants and manufacturers
established an almost complete control of Ottoman (and world)
markets and manufactures (think the capitulations).

The Impact of Western Man
• The importance of Christopher Columbus is not
that he discovered America. America had been
discovered long before 1492. His importance lies
in the fact that he began a process whereby
western man extended his influence across the
entire earth.
• ‘Mission civilisatrice ’. The “white man’s burden”.
• The “imperial” logic of competition.

The (Negative) Impact of Western Man
• Western needs, aided by superior weapons,
alcohol and devastating sicknesses – accelerated
the decline of most native Americans and many
Africans, Australians and Asians.
• In the Americas especially, onslaught of
European microbes was far more deadly than
European weapons.

• World wide network of finance: the economic
foundations of a Eurocentric world.
• The redistribution at the world scale of plants
and animals, wealth and poverty, health and
diseases, systems of care, surveillance and
predictive analysis, methods and technology for
the mass-production of…everything.

• In particular, Europe’s colonization of the New World
allowed it to transfer to other continents many
native American plants: tobacco, corn, cacao, certain
beans, yams, manioc, peanuts, pineapples,
tomatoes and potatoes.
• Some historians credit the potato for the
subsequent upsurge in European and Asian
populations.
• After 1492 nobody ate the same food again.
• South America was also the source of rubber-
bearing plants, which became the basis of the
rubber plantation industry of East Asia.

• New forms of communication and
transportation invented and
employed by Europeans around the
world.
• The steam locomotive, steam-ship,
automobile, submarine, airplane,
radio, telegraph and telephone were
all invented before 1914.
• In 1869 the Suez Canal was
completed.
• At the beginning of the nineteenth
century Napoleon could travel no
faster than Caesar had done 2,000
years before. Fifty years later, the
situation was transformed.

• Between 1830 and 1930, about 60 million
Europeans left their homelands for overseas or
for Siberia.
• While Russians bypassed the Islamic world by
crossing northern Asia on land, other Europeans
outflanked the Islamic world by sea.
• It was the greatest migration of all time.
• A global space of shared knowledge and
understanding of… ‘things’.
• The vast majority migrated to the Americas.
• The largest group of migrants were British and
Irish (Great Famine 1845-1849), soon joined by
Germans and Scandinavians.

• From the 1880s onwards, there followed the
Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Austro-
Hungarians, Ottomans (minority groups living in
Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey), Poles
and Russians (including many ethnic Jews).
• The peak of the movement was reached in the
first decade of the century. Between 1909 and
1914 the annual flow from Europe was about 1.5
million emigrants.

• While the European powers have lost their
colonial empires, their descendants remain in
possession of great parts of the world.
• Colonisation of space and time: political,
economic, religious, philosophical and legal
ideas.

The (Negative) Impact of Western Man
• Armed resistance to Europeans, from terrorism
and guerilla to large-scale wars, led eventually to
independence movements (contemporary states
of the world).

Modern World History-4

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modern World History-4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modern World History

Dr. Dragoş C. Mateescu

7 March Thursday, 2019 1

7 March Thursday, 2019 2

From the Dark Ages to Modernity:

7 March Thursday, 2019 4

7 March Thursday, 2019 5

7 March Thursday, 2019 9

7 March Thursday, 2019 10

7 March Thursday, 2019 33

7 March Thursday, 2019 34

7 March Thursday, 2019 38

7 March Thursday, 2019 39

7 March Thursday, 2019 41

7 March Thursday, 2019 48

7 March Thursday, 2019 50

7 March Thursday, 2019 53

7 March Thursday, 2019 54

7 March Thursday, 2019 55

7 March Thursday, 2019 58

7 March Thursday, 2019 59

7 March Thursday, 2019 60

7 March Thursday, 2019 61

7 March Thursday, 2019 63

7 March Thursday, 2019 66

7 March Thursday, 2019 69

7 March Thursday, 2019 73

7 March Thursday, 2019 74

You might also like