The Modern Era Essay Example for Free

The groundbrea force Era Essay ear perchst refreshful(a) WorldHistorians approximatelytimes refer to the succession between the pre sensitive(a) (or medieval) and late sweet-made whiles as the aboriginal fresh dry land. The world during this season was increasingly united by the projection of atomic number 63an indicator abroad, especially in the the Statess. Although archaeozoic sophisticated europiumans still had subaltern k straightledge of, let alone hegemony (influence) over, the inland regions of Africa and Asia, the links created and dominated by atomic number 63ans made the entire world a stage for fundamental historical processes.Historians debate, or lean over in silence, the problem of determining the precise starting and revokeing dates of the early mod world and bind produced moreover the vaguest consensus. Roughly, the era of the early modern font world began during the fifteenth century with the Timurid (relating to the Turkic conqueror T imur) and Italian cultural renaissances. The division 1405 serves as a convenient starting date because it marks not only the death of Timur, the last great central Asiatic conqueror to join farmers and nomads into a star imperium, but also the bugger off-go of the Chinese admiral Zheng Hes (c. 13711435) naval expeditions to the western almostern Oceans.The era force be taken to end in the late eighteenth century with the French and industrial revolutions, both European purgets of orbiculate consequence in the late modern world. The uncertainty of this periodization derives in fail from the concept of an early modern Europe, with its own uncertain chronological boundaries, and in part from the unconsidered expression in which both articulates entered historical scholarship.Origins of the ConceptAlthough conceptually the phrase early modern world is an addition of the phrase early modern Europe, the initial histories of both phrases capture some surprises. The earlies t known look of the phrase early modern world occurs in Willard Fishers capital and Credit authorship in the Modern Marketfrom The diary of Political frugality (1895).Although Fisher writes, We all know that the body of bank credits and bank money, which was introduced into the great commercialized centers of the early modern world, has now attained a quite marvelous development (1895, 391), the geographic sense of his statement is strictly, if implicitly, European. On the other hand, the phrase early modern Europe first shows up twenty years later, in Dixon Ryan Foxs Foundations of West India Policy in Political learning Quarterly (1915). Fox remarks, It was now realized by students of compound history that in the Caribbean the West India of the articles title might best be traced the application of those principles which throw away the bestowing basis for the old empires of early modern Europe (1915, 663). Ironically, the phrase early modern Europe first appe atomic nu mber 18d in the Caribbean, in the globular context of colonialism, in an article advocating trans-Atlantic history. In their debuts each phrase bore something of the others sense.Foxs usage was an anomaly, and when the phrase early modern Europe arrived in Europe, it had come to stay. The phrase early modern world, however, for decades would imply world to mean, in an indefinite way, present(prenominal) rather than global surroundings because this historical scholarship dealt with European subjects, the early modern world was in fact early modern Europe. The early modern world became global only with C. F. Strongs grammar school textbook The advance(prenominal) Modern World (1955) and S. Harrison Thomsons 1964 review of J. H. Parrys The senesce of Reconnaissance, in which Thomson uses the phrase to describe the story of the successive expansion of European venture, from Africa to the reaches of the Indian Ocean by Arabs and Lusitanian by sea, the movement westward to the the St atess and the early transition from discovery to fishing, calling, and exploitation(1964, 188). The first considered abridgment of the early modern world came after the posthumous publication of Joseph Fletchers article Integrative fib in 1985. Such analysis has tended to adopt either a deductive or an inductive approach.deductive ApproachA deductive approach to the early modern world compares premodernity and late modernity, devises the signs necessary to twain the two stages, and only then callks confirmation in the historical record.This approach assumes the existence of a modernizing trajectory, which the early modern world shared with (and perhaps inherited from) early modern Europe. Informed by a Marxist perspective, the essentials of the early modern world would highlight transitions from feudal to bourgeois, from serfdom to wage-earning proletariat, and from local subsistence to regional market economies. A functionalist understanding of modernity, of the sort theorize d by the German sociologist Max Weber, the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons, or the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, explains brotherly phenomena in terms of their ability to fulfill social ask and broadens this base beyond the mode of production. here(predicate) the critical shifts would be from teaching in miracles to belief in science, from household-based craft production berthed by muscle, dung, water, and wood to factory-based mass production powered by electricity and fossil fuels, and from government justified by tradition to government consciously invented. Even in the context of early modern Europe critics altercate the effectiveness of a deductive approach by condemning its implication of an inevitable progress from premodernity to modernity. A deductive approach takes little cognizance of the possibilities of various starting points, different destinations, and particular paths. In some twentieth-century cases the transition to modernity was less a progression than a violently dramatic smorgasbord. When expanded to a global context this approach becomes not only teleological (assuming a design or bearing in history), but also artificially Eurocentric.Inductive ApproachRather than specify theoretical factors to be sought in the time period, an inductive approach examines what happened in different places and extracts from what happened a set of car park features. Although such an approach removes the theoretical obstacle of a modernizing trajectory, the historian is left with the Herculean task of specifying processes that united all,most, or many of the worlds citizenrys. Such an approach need not focus on Europe, nor need it measure the success of various regions in terms of their progress along Europes path.How tightfittingly do the rough chronological parameters suggested here match the conventional historiographies (the writings of history) of the various regions distant Europe?Traditional periodizations in Afri post and Ameri privy history are directly linked to European expansion. Marked by a European presence that could not yet dominate the continent, an early modern Africa might last from the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, a port on the Moroc potentiometer side of the fling of Gibraltar (1415), until the development of quinine and steamships in the ordinal century. The first Niger steamship expedition returned without casualties in 1854.An early modern America might stretch from the encounters of 1492 until the period of independence movements, from 1776 to the independence of Brazil in 1822. An early modern India might begin with the fifth generation descendant of Timur, Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, whose ancestry inspired him to conquer northern India. The Mughal dynasty he founded (1526) would harness effectively for two centuries the British would take charge of its Delhi nucleus in 1803.An early modern lacquer stretches from the unification efforts of Oda Nobunaga (15341582) to the end of the Tokuga wa shogunate (the dictatorship of a Japanese military governor) in 1867. Other regional historiographies fit less indwellingly. Although the Ottomans 1453 conquest of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Tur recognise) was timely, the Chinese Ming dynasty began too early (1368) and ended inconveniently in the middle of our early modern period (1644). Worse, key modernizing revolutions came late relative to the western European timetable the Chinese change in 1911, the Russian Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and the Kemalist (relating to the Turkish soldier and statesman Kemal Ataturk) revolution in Turkey in 1923.The actual use of the phrase early modern in the periodization of regional histories varies. right(prenominal) of Europe, it is most commonly used in Asia, especially in works on China, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, India. Historians of China sometimes extend the period into the twentieth century. Far fewer historians write of an early modern Africa or an early modern Braz il. This fact is due in part to the power of the word colonial to identify these time periods.Latin American periodization is so consistently divided into pre-Columbian, colonial, and national periods that there is no need for the phrase earlymodern, which should correspond to the middle, colonial period. In fact, the phrase early modern Mexico sometimes refers to the period immediately after independence. The divergence of these traditional periodizations of regional histories, so often linked to superior political history, should not surprise. The global historian in search of an early modern world can look beyond these periodizations to reckonk processes that enveloped wide swaths of the planet.Development of global Sea PassagesNothing is more than characteristic of the early modern world than the creation of truly global sea passages. Before 1492 the Americas remained essentially free from Eurasia. In 1788 the last key sea passage was completed by the first permanent reso lving power of Europeans in Australia. This passage also concluded the integration of the Pacific Ocean as a geographical concept, a process that began when the Spanish explorer Vasco Nuez de Balboa became the first European to see the Pacific from America in 1513. During the early fifteenth century the Europeans were unlikely candidates to fill the key role in this process of exploration.Portuguese exploration of the African coast was declining, and mariners were averse to sail out of sight of land. Even the overland excursions undertaken by Europeans had become more modest. Muslims still controlled southern Iberia, and in 1453 the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. Smart money would have looked rather at the Chinese admiral Zheng He, whose s until now expeditions between 1405 and 1433reached even the shores of eastern Africa. A change in Chinese imperial policy halted these expeditions, and the voyages that finally connected the world were directed by Europeans.In 1522 the surviv ors of the expedition of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. During the following centuries a s protrudeed captain and crew could navigate a ship from any port to any port and reasonably expect to arrive. In 1570 the Flemish cartographer Ortelius published what has been described as the first modern atlas, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (Theater of the World) this comprehensive yet handy and inexpensive work enjoyed immediate success. By the end of the period the best mapped region of the world would be China.Global demographic InterconnectionsThe worlds population doubled during the early modern period, from approximately 374 million (1400) to 968 million plenty (1800). Although demographic data are limited, some patterns emerge. Rapid growth was punctuated by a 17thcentury stemma in Europe, Russia, Iran, Central Asia, China, and Korea and recovery from this decline occurred globally, even in the Americas. The more populo us regions tended to grow more rapidly.The refreshful global sea passages set the stage for a transatlantic Columbian exchange (the biological and cultural exchange between the freshly World and the Old World that began with the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus) and for a transpacific Magellan exchange of crops and malady pathogens that put the peoples of the world in a more direct demographic relationship than ever before. The reaching of American maize and potatoes in Eurasia, and later in Africa, facilitated an intensive agricultural, and thus demographic, growth, and the appearance of tomatoes in Italy and chili peppers in India had important dietary and culinary consequences.Disease also became a global phenomenon. First appear in Europe in 1494, venereal syphilis reached India four years later, and by 1505 it hadoutraced the Portuguese to China. The unfermented Worlds isolation and limited bio vicissitude (biological diversity as indicated by numbers of species of pl ants and animals) did not submit to its indigenous peoples the same immunities enjoyed by Europeans, who as children were exposed to a multiplicity of infections. Measles, bantampox, and other diseases brought by Europeans triggered a long-term demographic catastrophe.The indigenous population of central Mexico declined from 30 million in 1518 to 1.6 million in 1620 a genocide unintended, misunderstood, and undesired by the Spanish who sought souls for salvation and laborers for their mines. Contact with the wider world work similar demographic calamities on other isolated peoples, including Pacific Islanders, Siberian tribes, and the Khoikhoi of southern Africa. Increased contacts distributed pathogens more evenly throughout the world and generally reduced susceptibility to epidemic disease.Development of a Global EconomyThe development of global sea passages integrated America into a truly global economy. speedily growing long distance commerce linked expanding economies on e very continent. Dutch merchants in capital of The Netherlands could purchase commodities anywhere in the world, bring them to Amsterdam, store them safely, add value through processing and packaging, and cover them for profit. Intensive production fueled by the commercialism of an increasingly global market gave new wideness to cash crops and sparked an unprecedented expansion in the slave trade.The movement of manufactured goods from eastern Asia toward Europe and America created a chain of balance-of-trade deficits, which funneled silver from American mines to China. Regular transpacific trade developed during the decades after the founding of manila paper in the Philippines in 1571 and followed the same pattern Exports of porcelain and silks from China created a trade imbalance that sucked silver from the Americas and from Japan. through with(predicate) military-commercial giants such as the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602), European merchants disrupted traditional t radingconditions in Africa and Asia to muscle into regional country trade. The expansion of settled populations, as well as the new ocean trade route alternatives to the Silk Road that linked China to the West, contributed to the decline of nomadism. The agriculture of settled peoples support large populations and tax bases that an efficient state could translate into permanent military strength.Development of Large and effectual StatesThe global trade in firearms and similar weapons contributed to the growth of large and efficient states, known as gunpowder empires. Expensive and complex, the most advanced weapons became a monopoly of centralized states, which employed them to weaken local opposition.During the mid-fifteenth century the king of France used artillery to reduce some sixty castles annually. Administrative procedures also became increasingly routinized and efficient. Ever more abstract notions of state authority accompanied the evolution of newsources of legitimacy. From the Irrawaddy River in Asia to the Seine River in Europe, ghostly uniformity served to reinforce and confirm centralized formula. The ideal of universal empire was native to America, Africa, and Eurasia. The early modern unification of England with Scotland and Ireland was paralleled throughout Europe. If in 1450 Europe contained six atomic number 6 independent political units (or more, dep mop up on the criteria), in the nineteenth century it contained somewhat twentyfive.About thirty independent city-states, khanates (state governed by a ruler with the Mongolian title khan), and princedoms were absorbed into the Russian empire. By 1600 the Tokugawa shogunate had unified Japan. Fourteenth century southeasterly Asia had two dozen independent states that evolved into Vietnam, Siam (Thailand), and Burma (Myanmar) by 1825. The Mughals unified India north of the Deccan Plateau for the first time since the Mauryan empire (c. 321185 BCE). Unification was also an overture to expa nsion.In addition to an increasing European presence worldwide, Qing China (16441912) invaded Xinjiang,Mongolia, Nepal, Burma, and Formosa, and during the seventeenth century Romanov Russia stretched out to the Pacific. The new unities led relentlessly to new fragmentations and hierarchies, and resistance to such centralizing political forces was equally universal. During the century between 1575 and 1675, for example, uprisings occurred in China, Japan, India, Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan, Ukraine, the Balkans, the German lands, Switzerland, France, Catalonia, Portugal, England, Ireland, and Mexico. At the end of the period, the French Revolution (1789) would enjoy global influence as the first revolution modern in its progressive, absolute, and sudden nature.Intensification of Land riding habitThe concurrence of population growth, global markets, and aggressive states led to wider and more intensive use of land. Displacing or rank indigenous peoples, pioneers backed by aggressive states drained wetlands and cleared forests to create new lands for intensive commercial, agricultural, and plain regimes. (Similarly, commercial hunters pursued various species of flora and fauna to extinction for sale on a global market.)Oblivious to any land claims held by indigenous peoples, states would offer pioneers low taxes in exchange for answer and land rights. For example, the Mughal Empire provided land grants, Hindu merchants provided capital, and Sufi (Muslim mystic) brotherhoods provided leadership for the communities of Muslim pioneers who transformed the Bengal wetlands into a key rice-producing region. These efforts compensated for the extended disobliging weather patterns that plagued temperate zones throughout the Northern Hemisphere a little ice age affecting climate throughout the early modern world.Religious RevivalThe most distinctive religious characteristic of this era was the globalexpansion of Christianity. Indeed, the impetus driving the creation of global sea passages was religious as well as commercial. The efforts of Catholic religious orders predominated the great Protestant missionary societies would be founded only in the 1790s. Sufi brotherhoods such as the Naqshibandiyah expanded Islam in Africa, India, China, and southeastern Asia.Tibetan Buddhism pushed into north China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Buryatia, and to Kalmikya, on the shore of the Caspian Sea, which remains to solar day the only Buddhist republic in Europe.The increase speech pattern on orthodox and textual conventions of Latin Christendoms Reformation had a parallel in the Raskol stock split of the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1650s. Elsewhere, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (17031792) founded the Wahabbi movement to reform Sunni Islam under strict Quranic interpretation.Many people believed that the era that historians call early modern would be the last. Franciscan apocalyptic thought inspired Columbus, and the belief that the god Quetzalcoatl would r eturn from the East in a One Reed year led the Aztec self-reliant Montezuma II to regard the Spanish conqueror Hernn Corts and his comrades as divine envoys. A Jesuitical at the court of Akbar in 1581 found the Mughal ruler open to the idea of the imminent end because that year was eleven years from the thousandth anniversary of the Hijra, which was the journey the Prophet Muhammad took from Mecca to Medina in622 CE. The Jewish Sabbatian movement judge the end of the world in 1666. In late eighteenth-century central China the White Lotus auberge awaited the return of the Buddha to put an end to suffering. All these developments might best be understood in the context of notions of history in which significant change was either absent or sudden and awesome. first momentNeither a deductive nor an inductive approach to the early modern world isentirely satisfactory. A deductive approach expects to see the entire world following a Eurocentric roadmap to modernization (one that Europ e itself might not have followed). An inductive approach respects the diversity of historical experience, but this diversity itself can frustrate attempts to delineate a discrete list of unifying features. If historians can tolerate the inconveniences of regional exceptions to every global process, the idea of an early modern world has its attractions. Although a perspective that twists the world around a European center is unproductive, the regions of the early modern world were increasingly named (in America) and mapped (as in China) by Europeans.Nevertheless, in its application beyond Europe the idea of an early modern world redresses the distortions of the Orientalist assumption of parochial, timeless, and conservative inertias unmoved by European expansion. It recognizes that peoples of the early modern era in some ways had more in common with each other than with their own ancestors and descendents that time unites just as goodishly as place. It facilitates proportional an alysis and abets inquiry that trespasses across national boundaries. It sees the entire world as a stage, not only for comparative study, but also for the broadest possible analysis for a historians scrutiny.Further knowledgeBenton, L. (2002). Law and Colonial Cultures Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 1900. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press.Black, J. (Ed.). (1999).War in The Early Modern World, 14501815. London UCL Press.Fisher,W. (1895). Money and Credit Paper in the Modern Market. The Journal of Political Economy, 3, 391413.Fletcher, J. (1985). Integrative History Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 15001800. Journal of Turkish Studies, 9, 3757. Flynn, D. O., Giraldez, A. (1995). Born with a Silver Spoon World look ats Origins in 1571. Journal of World History, 6(2), 201221.Fox, D. R. (1915). Foundations of West India Policy. Political ScienceQuarterly, 30, 661672.Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley and Los A ngeles University of California Press.Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press.Goldstone, J. A. (1998). The enigma of the Early Modern World. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 41, 249284.Huff,T. E. (1993). The switch off of Early Modern Science Islam, China and the West. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press.Lieberman,V. (1997). Transc closing curtain East-West Dichotomies State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas. Modern Asian Studies, 31(3), 463546. Mousnier, R. (1970). Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China (B. Pearce,Trans.). New York Harper and Row.Parker,G. (1996). The Military Revolution Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 15001800 (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press. Pomeranz, K.(2001).The Great Divergence China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ Princ eton University Press.Richards, J. F. (1997). Early Modern India and World History. Journal of World History, 8, 197209.Richards, J. F. (2003). The Unending Frontier An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press. Starn, R. (2002). The Early Modern Muddle. Journal of Early Modern History, 6(3), 296307.Strong, C. F. (1955). The Early Modern World. London University of London Press. Subrahmanyam, S. (1997). Connected Histories Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia. Modern Asian Studies, 31(3), 735 762. Thomson, S. H. (1964). The Age of Reconnaissance, by J. H. Parry. The Journal of Modern History, 36(2), 187188.Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System. New York Academic. Wiesner-Hanks, M. (2000). Christianity and sexual activity in the Early ModernWorld Regulating desire, reforming practice. London Routledge.Wills, J. E., Jr. (2001). 1688 A Global History. New York Norton.The Modern EraThe modern er a is the briefest and most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the rural era astir(predicate) 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet, during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before indeed, populations have grown so betting that 20 share of all humans may have lived during these two and a half(prenominal) centuries.The modern era is also the most interconnected of the three eras. Whereas new ideas and technologies once took thousands of years to plenty the globe, today people from different continents can converse as easily as if they lived in a single global village. History has become world history in the most literal sense. For our purposes the modern era is assumed to begin about 1750.Yet, its roots lay deep in the agrarian era, and we could make a good case for a starting date of 1500 or even earlier.Determining the end date of the mode rn era is even trickier. Some scholars have argued that it ended during the twentieth century and that we now live in a postmodern era. Yet, many features of the modern era persist today and entrust persist for some time into the future thus, it makes more sense to see our contemporary period as part of the modern era. This fact means that we do not know when the modern era provide end, nor can we see its overall shape as clearly as we might wish. The fact that we cannot see the modern era as a whole makes it difficult to specify its main features, and justifies using the purposely vague label modern. At present the diagnostic feature of the modern era seems to be a sharp increase in rates of innovation.New technologies enhanced human control over natural resources and stimulated rapid population growth. In their turn, technological and demographic changes transformed lifeways, cultural and religious traditions, patterns ofwellness and aging, and social and political relationships . For world historians the modern era poses distinctive challenges. We are too close to see it clearly and objectively we have so much information that we have difficulty distinguishing trends from details and change has occurred faster than ever before and embraced all parts of the world. What follows is one attempt to construct a crystal clear overview, based on generalizations that have achieved broad acceptance among world historians.Major Features and Trends of the Modern EraThe modern era is the first to have generated a large body of statistical evidence thus, it is also the first in which we can quantify many of the larger changes.Increases in Population and ProductivityHuman populations have increased faster than ever before during the modern era, although growth rates slowed during the late twentieth century. in the midst of 1750 and 2000 the number of men and women in the world travel from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an multiple increase i n just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doublingtime of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.) An eight close down increase in human numbers was possible only because productivity rose even faster. The estimates of the economist Angus Maddison suggest that global gross domestic product rose more than ninety fold during three hundred years, whereas production per person rose nine fold.These astonishing increases in productivity lie behind all the most significant changes of the modern era. Productivity rose in part because new technologies were introduced. In agriculture, for example, food productionkept pace with population growth because of improved crop rotations, increased use of irrigation, widespread application of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, a nd the use of genetically modified crops. However, productivity also rose because humans learned to exploit new sources of energy.During the agrarian era each human controlled, on average, 12,000 kilocalories a day (about four times the energy needed to sustain a human body), and the most powerful prime movers available were domestic animals or wind-driven ships. During the modern era humans have learned to reap the commodious reserves of energy stored in fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas and even to exploit the power lurking within atomic nuclei. Today each person controls, on average, 230,000 kilocalories a daytwenty times as much as during the agrarian era. A world of planes, rockets, and nuclear power has replaced a world of horses, oxen, and wood fires.City SprawlAs populations have increased, so has the average sizing of human communities. In 1500 about fifty cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants, and none had more than a million. By 2000 several(prenominal) thousand cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants, about 411 had more than a million, and 41 had more than 5 million. During the agrarian era most people lived and worked in villages by the end of the twentieth century almost 50 percent of the worlds population lived in communities of at least five thousand people. The rapid decline of villages marked a fundamental transformation in the lives of most people on Earth. As during the agrarian era, the increasing size of communitiestransformed lifeways, beginning with patterns of employment Whereas most people during the agrarian world were small farmers, today most people support themselves by wage work in a huge variety of occupations.Innovations in transportation and communications have transformed relations between communities and regions. Before the nineteenth century no onetraveled faster than the pace of a horse (or a fast sailing ship), and the fastest way to transmit written messages was by state-sponsored courier systems that used relays of horses. Today messages can cross the world instantaneously, and even perishable goods can be transported from one end of the world to some other in just a few hours or days.Increasingly Complex and Powerful GovernmentsAs populations have grown and peoples lives have become more intertwined, more complex forms of regulation have become necessary, which is why the business of government has been revolutionized. Most premodern governments were content to manage war and taxes, leaving their subjects to get on with their livelihoods more or less unhindered, but the managerial tasks facing modern states are much more complex, and they have to spend more effort in mobilizing and regulating the lives of those they rule.The huge bureaucracies of modern states are one of the most important byproducts of the modern revolution. So, too, are the structures of democracy, which allow governments to align their policies more closely with the needs and capabilities of the large and varied populations they rule. Nationalismthe close emotional and intellectual identification of citizens with their governmentsis another by-product of these new relationships between governments and those they rule.The presence of democracy and nationalism may suggest that modern governments are more reluctant to impose their will by force, but, in fact, they have much more administrative and coercive power than did rulers of the agrarian era. No government of the agrarian era tried to track the births, deaths, and incomes of all the people it command or to impose compulsory schooling yet, many modern governments handle these colossal tasks routinely. Modern states can also inflict violence more effectively and on a larger scale than even the greatest empires of the agrarian era.Whereas an eighteenth century cannon could destroy a house or kill a closely packed group of soldiers, modern nuclear weapons can destroy entire citiesand millions of people, and the concert launch of man y nuclear weapons could end human history within just a few hours.A subtler change in the nature of power is the increased dependence of modern states on commercial success rather than raw coercion. Their power depends so much on the economic productivity of the societies they rule that modern governments have to be effective economic managers. The creation of more democratic systems of government, the declining importance of slavery, the ending of European imperial power during the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet command economy in 1991, and the ending of apartheid (racial segregation) in South Africa in 1990 and 1991 all reflected a growing awareness that successful economic wariness is more effective than crudely coercive forms of rule.