The Origins of the Modern World (A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century)

As I was working on the first edition of this book in the year 2000, envi ronmental historian J. R. McNeill published Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. In that book, McNeill observed that he thought that a hundred years hence, at the end of the twenty-first century, historians and others looking back at the twentieth cen tury would be struck by the significance, not of the two massive world wars, the rise and fall of fascism and communism, the explosive growth of the human population, or the women's movement, but of the changed relation ship of humans to Earth's natural environment. As an environmental histo rian myself, I found that observation compelling and incorporated an ecological theme in my narrative. The world holds many surprises, but one has to be how much faster McNeill's prediction has arrived. It hasn't taken a century, but just a few years, for the importance of the change in our rela tionship to the environment to thrust itself to the forefront of our under standing of the recent past, and to give the epoch in Earth history we are now in a new name-the Anthropocene.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages