In the great roll of time and civilization the great advances of antiquity have surged forward, generating the great traditions of China, India and the Occident. The slowing advance has seen in the Occident the coming and passing of Rome, and its force lap on the frontier Europe, there to convey the fruits of the great streams originating in Sumer, recharged from Athens, Jerusalem, India and Rome, to reach a fertile soil. The emergence and spread of Christianity, Islam, and the quite different Buddhism  have reached the limits of their expansion, in the complex field of oikoumenes generated from the classical phase. Paul Kennedy , at the beginning of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , asks, “Why was it among the scattered and relatively unsophisticated people inhabiting the western parts of the Eurasian landmass that there occurred an unstoppable process of economic development and technological innovation which would steadily make it the commercial and military leader in world affairs?” We have already asked the same question of Archaic Greece , and the other transitional areas. And the answer, in part, has been to see the factor of periodization  beside the factor of eonic jump diffusion, the takeoff in the open fringe, if this can be balanced by good diffusion from the sources.

‘ET6,…’:  The rise of the modern…

From the first moments before dawn in the fifteenth century, we see the clear ‘jump-start’ effect in the explosion of the Reformation. “The century of European history between 1460 to 1559 was a period of rapid, comprehensive change…Was the shift from old to new a shift medieval to modern? The answer is yes, with qualifications” From this point onwards, the acceleration is pronounced and unflagging until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and generates an explosion revolutionary turbulence, from which emerges the new industrial society we call ‘modern’. As in the ancient world, the first changes hug the proximity of the earlier age, visible as the (late) Italian Renaissance , and then appear in the outlying areas, moving in south/north direction. The clear appearance of focal intensity in a Northern band  of Germany, France, Netherlands, England, is exactly to be expected, and passes immediately to the New World as a great extension of the effect.  The overseas expansion and global connection, nationalism and new forms of warfare, the onset of early industrial transformation with a price revolution, a demographic surge, the scientific renewal, the first phases of social revolution, the Reformation as a religious evolutionary transform or ‘re-formation’, the crystallization of the early forms of a new tradition in the rapid appearance of national literatures climax in the passage from a first to a second stage in the seventeenth century. Here in many ways we see the character of the changes begin to reveal the results of their random stirrings in the beginnings of human direction to the transformation: the beginning of the Enlightenment, the real Scientific Revolution, and the generation of the new forms of economy, culture and economy that will initiate a new pattern of world history in the passage through the cauldron of revolution and industrialization.

            The transformation clearly begins to show its truly new character from the middle of the seventeenth century, as if what came before were nothing more than the breaking of ground. The Reformation begins to yield to the Enlightenment, the age of Copernicus to the age of Newton, the forms of governance stir in the English Revolution to generate the forms of the new liberalism, with a ‘socialism’ hiding behind it, and quite underpowered. The final pieced of the new world is rapidly taking form before the onset of industrialism in an earthquake of democratic revolution, globalization, and economic expansion.

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