Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional customs - How are the boundaries between ancient and modern times drawn in world history?

How are the boundaries between ancient and modern times drawn in world history?

In the mid-19th century, this was the historical moment when the modern phase of world history had largely arrived.

First, the Industrial Revolution was completed or rapidly developing in the major countries of Europe and America, allowing the spread of the productive forces of Western great industry across the globe, and the world market had largely taken shape.

Secondly, the mechanism of industrial products of the West has been dumped into most of the backward countries and regions of the world, and many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have begun to produce or initially developed their own modern capitalist economies, so that, except for some regions in Asia and Africa, the whole world has entered the historical era of capitalism, and the historical stage of modern world history has basically arrived.

The end of the 19th century was the moment in history when the stage of modern world history had fully arrived.

Firstly, after the second industrial revolution, the productive forces of the great industries of the West were fully capable of spreading throughout the world, and the capitalist societies of the West had begun to enter a new qualitative stage of development.

Secondly, the export of capital has become so important that it "accelerated the development of capitalism in the most backward countries", and most of the backward countries in the world have entered the historical period of the occurrence and development of modern capitalism.

Thirdly, by the end of the 19th century, the world had been divided up, the world capitalist economic system had been formed, and the whole world had entered the age of capitalism, and the stage of modern world history had come full circle.

Expanded:

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This viewpoint holds that, for a long time, people have been accustomed to regard the upper limit of modern Europe as the upper limit of modern world, but due to the unbalanced development of the world's history, there is inevitably a "time gap" between the two upper limits, with the beginning of modern European history in the 15th century and the beginning of modern world history in the 15th century. The modern history of Europe began in the 15th century, while the modern history of the world began in the 19th century.

The fundamental reason for the arrival of modern world history was the industrial revolution in the West, the formation of the ability to spread the productivity of large-scale industry on a global scale, the export of goods and capital. As a result of all this, the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which accounted for 80% of the world's population, entered their own phase of modern history in the 19th century.

Thus, the previous regional modern history within the scope of Europe and the United States, in the nineteenth century expanded into the real modern history of the world. It is from this point that modern world history begins.

Scholars who hold this view believe that the second half of the fifteenth century, Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern history of the transition period to the early sixteenth century, Europe that is formally entered the stage of modern history, but until the end of the eighteenth century, the whole world did not enter the stage of modern history, the period, in fact, is only the world's modern history of the arrival of the preparatory period. Because,

First, to take the English revolution of 1640 as the beginning of the world's modern history is both a misunderstanding of Marx and a manifestation of the lack of world vision. When Marx elaborated on the significance of the English and French revolutions, he explicitly referred to the English and French revolutions as "revolutions on a European scale".

Secondly, from the 17th century onwards, the region of the world that entered the stage of modern history expanded, but this expansion was still localized rather than global.

Thirdly, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, it was the period of workshop crafts and the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe. Workshop handicrafts, because of their relatively low labor productivity, could not be, and were not, carried around the world by European nations in their predatory international trade.

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