There were three basic options for societies outside
Britain: to try to
carry on as if nothing had happened; to try to adopt some version of
the British model, directly or at a remove; or to try to come up with a
viable alternative. Much of the history of the world in the last two
centuries has been about the choices societies have tried to make in an
often unforgiving environment, and the ways in which these choices have
played out. Basically, as we will see, the first and last options have
not worked; the second has worked in some cases but not in others.
Continuing as if nothing had happened, as the Maya
tried to do, was not
an inherently foolish strategy. Overreaction is a common human failing,
and many of the problems that bother us end up by going away. But in
the event no attempt to ignore the modern world proved sustainable, and
many ended in disaster. Korea, for example, sought to maintain a
closure comparable to that of Japan in the crucial period when the
Japanese had reopened their country; until 1872 Korea was ruled by a
man who regarded China as the center of civilization and held Europeans
and Japanese in contempt. The outcome was that the Japanese retained
their independence, while the Koreans succumbed to Japanese rule in
1905; they escaped this predicament only thanks to the American defeat
of Japan in the Second World War.
As this example shows, adopting modernity was a better
bet than
ignoring it, and for many people this strategy worked remarkably well.
Modernity, after all, is just a matter of culture, and once the culture
has emerged in one place it can be imitated elsewhere; the model is
there in front of you. We can divide those who successfully adopted
modernity into three main groups. The first is represented by the
British overseas. In North America and the Antipodes, British settlers
either formed societies in which they constituted the great majority of
the population, or establishedtheir culture in such a fashion that
other European immigrants assimilated to it. These societies adopted
the industrial revolution and replicated the other basic aspects of the
British pattern with little difficulty; witness the fact that the
United States, the world's first modern republic, has for some time
possessed the world's largest industrial economy, and wields
commensurate power. The second group is the continental Europeans. As
early as 1815 some regions of Europe were undergoing the industrial
revolution. By the end of the nineteenth century large parts of western
and central Europe were firmly anchored in the industrial world, and
today the boundaries of successful modernity extend considerably
farther. The third group is the East Asians, or some of them. Japan was
remaking itself as a modern society in the later nineteenth century,
and it remains one today, despite its economic doldrums. The second
half of the twentieth century saw similar success among the Chinese and
Koreans, wherever political conditions favored free enterprise. Though
recent, this development clearly had old roots; Chinese barbers in
Mexico City were already competing so successfully in 1635 that their
Spanish counterparts sought the intervention of the town council to
constrain the market against them. The result of this East Asian
modernization is that what started as the British model and later
became the Western model has by now achieved a cosmopolitan status.
Industrialization apart, however, the experience of
many of these
societies was by no means as benign as that of the British. The United
States was the scene of a vicious civil war in the 1860s that arose
over an institution of very dubious modernity, the plantation slavery
to which the country owes its substantial black population. The history
of France since the late eighteenth century has been marked by
revolutions, invasions, and deep political fault lines—though it is
some comfort that the first of these revolutions, that of 1789, played
a key role in establishing the modern republican idiom in which even
the politics of monarchies are mostly conducted today. Germany, put
together as a country only in 1871, lost two world wars and was
occupied and partitioned at the end of the second; it was a distinctly
authoritarian state till the First World War, a failed democracy
between the wars, and a genocidal power in the Second World War. Japan
too took an authoritarian path, though a more chaotic one, and likewise
suffered defeat and occupation. Nevertheless, the experience of the
last half century suggests that by now all these modern societies have
acquired the benign features of what began as the British pattern: an
industrial economy that serves as the foundation for a fair
approximation to security, democracy, and civility for most of the
population within their borders. Thus, despite the fact that the world
today remains full of wars and rumours of wars, none of them are
between successfully modernized countries. Rightly or wrongly, no one
worries that a world war will break out because of tensions between the
French and the Germans—as happened twice in the last century—or between
the Americans and the Japanese, or the Americans and the Europeans.
This may be good news, but it leaves plenty of room
for bad news. There
remain large parts of the world that have not, or not yet, modernized
successfully. Many, of course, have willingly or unwillingly
contributed their raw materials and labour to the modernization of
others, and provided markets for their products, but for a variety of
reasons they themselves have lagged behind. Naturally there is great
diversity within this category in terms of both performance and
prospects. As of the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is not
considered unrealistic to think that China and perhaps India have a
chance of success, that the frontier of modernity in Eastern Europe
will eventually move a good deal farther east, and that some parts of
Latin America (though probably not those inhabited by the Maya) will do
better than in the past. On the other hand, there is little optimism to
be overheard about sub-Saharan Africa (with the possible exception of
South Africa, though not of Angola). More surprisingly, the same is
true about the Islamic world, where so far really significant wealth
seems to have accrued only to populations with vast amounts of oil (as
in Saudi Arabia) or large numbers of Chinese (as in Malaysia). But
however grim or rosy the future, as of the beginning of the new
millennium the world is full of populations that have yet to derive
wealth, security, democracy, or civility from the industrial revolution.
