A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Demographic trends are also both a cause and a result of inequality. New birth control methods introduced in the 1960s, particularly “the pill” but also new types of intrauterine devices (IUDs), proved very effective, and by 2000 roughly two-thirds of the world's population appeared to have been practicing some kind of birth control. Fertility rates remain high in the world's poorest countries, however; the total fertility rate for women in Burundi in 2009 (according to UN estimates) was 6.8 children, fourth highest in the world, while in the Netherlands it was 1.7, 155th in the world. Since 2005, birth rates have actually fallen below replacement levels in many places. In China, the one-child policy has been so effective that officials are now worried about too low a birth rate—often called the “graying” of a population—and are granting more exemptions. The expenses of a second child and a shortage of housing mean that few urban couples choose to have a second, however. The Chinese population is still expanding because a large share of the population is in its childbearing years, but in Japan birth rates are so low that the population is declining. Japan is culturally homogenous and government policy has never favored immigration—the solution to a shrinking population elsewhere—so various high-tech methods including robots and electronic monitoring systems are currently being proposed to address such issues as care for the elderly. In India, middle-class urban families have access to contraception and thus have smaller families, while families in villages remain large; demographers predict that as of 2050 India will pass China as the world's most populous country, with 1.5 billion people. Today the world's lowest fertility rates are in the wealthy, heavily urbanized, and crowded states of East Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao as well as Japan, and in eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, where what sociologists term “partner instability” and other uncertainties have led women to decide not to have children. France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Singapore, and some other countries have adopted policies to encourage couples to have more children, and there has been a slight uptick in some places, but the increased cost of living, especially in cities where most of the world's population now lives, women's participation in the paid labor force and the social acceptability of small families mean that low birth rates in industrialized societies will no doubt continue. All of these trends make it very difficult to predict what will happen to global population levels over the next century, and estimates range from a near flattening-out at current levels to growth at an even faster pace.

  Migration and travel were responsible for the global spread of AIDS—along with other, less devastating new diseases—and are also among the factors creating changes in family structure. Despite continued ethnic and religious tensions and violence in many areas, in some parts of the world marriage or cohabitation between individuals of different races, ethnicities, and religions has become increasingly common, challenging centuries-old boundaries and definitions of who is family and who is kin. Long-distance migration and urbanization account for most of these inter-group relationships, but many also result from internet-based sex, dating, and marriage services, which involve thousands of agencies. In some situations the internet also enhances endogamy, however; high-caste Hindus and orthodox Jews now search for appropriate spouses through internet ads as well as traditional marriage brokers and matchmakers, and people in various new sorts of clan groups—fans of Star Trek, birdwatchers, gay police officers—can find like-minded partners through the web as well.

  Households today are less likely to consist only of a married couple and their children than they were fifty years ago. Effective contraception has meant that sexual activity is separated from its reproductive consequences for people in many parts of the world, and sex before marriage with a variety of partners has become more widely accepted, even for women. Since 1970, marriage rates have steadily fallen in most of the world, as the increasing social acceptability of cohabitation and childbearing outside of marriage has led many people not to marry until quite late in life or never marry at all. Divorce rates have simultaneously risen: in the United States in the 2000s one out of every two marriages ended in divorce, and in the Arab world one out of every four. Many families include the children from several different relationships, thus returning to an earlier pattern when spousal death and remarriage had created such “blended” families. To this variety are added households in which children are being raised by their grandparents, by gay, lesbian, and transsexual individuals and couples, by adoptive parents, by single parents (most often the mother), and by unmarried couples who have no intention of marrying. Statistics from the USA provide evidence of all these trends: in 2013, 15 percent of new marriages were mixed race, 19 percent of households consisted of a married couple and their children, 51 percent of adults were married (down from 72 percent in 1960), and 41 percent of children were born to unmarried women.

  The transportation and communications systems that have allowed globalized banking and dating have also allowed a spread and blending of cultural forms on an unprecedented level, as music, movies, television programs, websites, radio stations, internet-based social networks, classrooms, and everything else can now reach a global audience. Prophets of the new information technologies also predict that older cultural forms—the university, the gallery, the book, the musical recording—will disappear in the near future, replaced by computer or cell phone based forms of training, display, and distribution. Advocates of these developments praise the possibilities, arguing that this will democratize culture, making it open to anyone with creative ideas and access to digital technology. Critics highlighting a “digital divide” note that most of the world's population still does not have access to computers, and though more and more people each year have cell phones, this is leading to commercial globalization and cultural homogenization rather than a flourishing of individual local cultures.

  The last letter in Nehru's collection was written in August 1933, in the midst of a worldwide economic depression when the Japanese army was advancing in China and the Nazis had just come to power in Germany. It is not surprising that Nehru comments: “our age … is an age of disillusion, of doubt and uncertainty and questioning.” He might have been speaking of the early third millennium, and now access to a television, a computer, or a cell phone allows people all over the world to see the affluence or misery of others on a regular basis, rather than simply during a royal procession or a visit to a capital city, as was the case in earlier centuries. Inequality has been a central feature of human society since the Neolithic (or perhaps earlier), but within the last several centuries ideologies of egalitarianism have said this is wrong, and people have worked to lessen it, in some cases successfully. Whether this will be true in the future—whether Burundi and the Netherlands will move together or further apart in their connectedness, wealth, and hunger—remains to be seen.

  Further reading

  General introductions to the modern era abound. Among the best, with considerations of social and cultural history as well as political and economic, are Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004) and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Volume 7 of the Cambridge World History: Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present, edited by J.R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz, has many relevant chapters. Books that examine transformations in key social structures across the modern period include Joan Smith and Immanuel Wallerstein, Creating and Transforming Households in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Susan Bayly, Caste, Society, and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); “Forum: Transnational Sexualities,” American Historical Review 114/15 (2009): 1250–1353.

  Regional histories that pay attention to society and culture include: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 3rd edn. 2011); Norman Owen, ed., The
Emergence of Southeast Asia: A New History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn. 2011); Teresa A. Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Richard Reid, A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2nd edn. 2012).

  On the role of cotton in sparking and sustaining the Industrial Revolution, see Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which has wonderful color illustrations, and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the development of industrialism more broadly, see Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002): 323–90, which has a huge bibliography. Jordan Goodman and Katrina Honeyman, Gainful Pursuits: The Making of Industrial Europe, 1600–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1988) and Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) examine social changes that accompanied industrialization in Europe. On industrialization outside of Europe, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Marcel van der Linden, ed., Workers of the World, Essays toward a Global Labor History (Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008). On the role of large corporations, see Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Immanuel Wallerstein's classic work is The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989), and a more recent discussion with Wallerstein is “Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long Term View of the Trajectory of the World System,” International Sociology 15:2 (2000): 251–67. Kenneth Pomeranz's major study is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) has been extremely influential in highlighting new developments in the eighteenth century that led to modern nationalism, but Azar Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) has countered that political nations are very old. On inclusions and exclusions in ideas about the nation, see Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford International Publishers, 2000); Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martin Manalansan and Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Don H. Doyle and Marco Antonio Pampalona, eds., Nationalism in the New World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006). For nationalism today, see Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge, 2007).

  Every movement for social change has a deep bibliography. The books of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series are good places to start, including Michael Newman, Socialism (2005), Leslie Holmes, Communism (2009), and Manfred B. Steger Neoliberalism (2010). On women's movements, see Estelle Friedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantyne Books, 2003). On immigration restrictions, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On eugenics, see Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) is an excellent overview of migration. More detailed studies include: Pamela Sharpe, ed., Women, Gender, and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2001); Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  On European imperialism, the best place to start is Eric R. Wolf's classic Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, reissued 2010). H.L. Wesseling, The European Colonial Empires, 1815–1919 (London: Routledge, 2004) is a good introduction to European colonization in the nineteenth century. Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) offers a comparative analysis of reactions to European colonialism, and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014) provides a comparison of the British, Japanese, and Ottoman imperial systems, and their racial, gendered, and economic forms. A few of the many books on empire that focus on issues discussed in this chapter are: Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

  The total wars of the twentieth century have been examined from every possible perspective. Studies that examine their cultural impact include Paul Fussell's classic, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, reissued 2013) and Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

  Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (London: Routledge, 2nd edn. 2004) provides a brief overview of the process of decolonization. Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2013) is an excellent collection of articles by prominent historians of decolonization and writings by some of its architects, including Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, and Kwame Nkrumah. On the Cold War, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: the Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) traces fundamentalism in seven different religions, and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 3rd edn. 2003) analyzes religious extremism.

  On neoliberalism and economic developments, see Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alfred D.
Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi, eds., Liberalism and its Discontents: Gender Justice, Development, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd edn. 2012). On cities, see David Clark, Urban World/Global City (London: Routledge, 2003).

  The cultural and social effects of globalization have been examined in Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (New York: Routledge, 1996); Saskia Sassen, ed., Globalization and its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998); Pierre Hamel et al., eds., Globalization and Social Movements (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Frank J. Kechner and John Boli, World Culture: Origins and Consequences (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Jennifer Cole and Deborah Lynn Durham, eds., Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The latest comments, research, and reflections on these issues (and on everything else in this book) are available on the various forms of modern media that have made this globalization possible, on a device that is most likely within your easy reach, if it's not how you are reading this book.