The Modernity Machine

Though the Old World was known to itself in rudimentary outline in 1200, it actually took the Mongol invasions and the rise of Islam for this understanding to arrive at any sort of geographic accuracy. So this period was a kind of terrestrial Age of Exploration of the Eurasian-North African landmass, featuring the adventures of figures like Marco P... See more

In the model I want to lay out, non-Western populations globally became technologically modern through the effects of scientific and technological revolutions acting on a landscape of regional early modernities that took shape 1200-1400. The science-technology strand, being far more weakly attached (if at all) to the European historical experience ... See more

the emerging technologies of today should be analogized to events like Genghis Khan’s rise in the 12th and 13th centuries or the proliferation of personal ranged weapons like longbows and muskets. While the technologies themselves are interesting enough, it’s their obvious capacity for triggering entirely new evolutionary arcs for humanity that are... See more

Ever since I read Barbara Tuchman’s book about the Black Death, A Distant Mirror, in 2020 (my notes here), I’ve been enamored of the idea that modernity began not in the 16th century, with the Age of Exploration, as in conventional accounts, but in the 13th (which was also an age of exploration1). Apparently I’m not alone in thinking this. Sachin B... See more

This 300-year rewind isn’t a trivial act of revisionism. Moving the birth of modernity this way locates it temporally in the Islamic and Mongol phases of globalization, rather than the Western phase, and constructs it primarily in political and socio-economic terms rather than philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological terms. It identifi... See more

Imagine this machine, taking shape starting around 1250, being wound up like a clockwork toy, and being allowed to run for 700 years, and you get what we currently living generations recognize as our modernity. In terms of a technological metaphor, the machine was shifting steadily from one equilibrium point to another in a surprisingly controlled ... See more