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Index: History & Travel

The Invention of the Modern World 13.

Monday, 1 October 2012

Alan Macfarlane: ‘More important than specific inventions or events were other less direct features. One was that the universities, along with the Inns of Court, preserved a tradition of enquiry by contest, by confrontation, by argument and disputation, by putting forward a hypothesis and testing it. Francis Bacon summarized this in what we call the ‘experimental method’. It sped up the evolution of ideas in the same way as selective breeding of animals sped up stock improvement. And both changed the world.’

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The e-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Monday, 17 September 2012

Alana Shilling: ‘Digitization only multiplies possibilities and begs questions that have yet to fully emerge from dusky uncertainty. Before predicting that technology would create a “global village,” Marshall McLuhan wondered how medium determined content. When the physical presence of a book is replaced with a digital version, how does that impact our thought processes, our understanding of what we read and how we read it?’

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The Invention of the Modern World 12.

Saturday, 15 September 2012

Alan Macfarlane: ‘The system of grammar and public schools and the university education in England is unusual. To a considerable extent, the system was designed to teach people to think – to remember, to argue, to disagree, to try out new ideas, to invent new solutions, to persuade others.’

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The Invention of the Modern World 11.

Saturday, 1 September 2012

Alan Macfarlane: ‘If the essence of modernity is the separation and tension between the contrary demands of politics, religion, economy and society, it is the legal system which holds them in balance – and which underpins them all. It is difficult to conceive of a game of football or cricket without rules, referee or umpire. ‘

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A brief note on Nothing.

Thursday, 23 August 2012

Thomas Conlon: ‘One of the leading principles of his physics was that it was impossible that a rent could ever be torn in the plenum of substance to expose an underlying nothingness. According to him, everything that happens in the physical world was a consequence of the interaction of substances and nothing, indeed, could ever come of nothing.’

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The Invention of the Modern World 10.

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Alan Macfarlane: ‘Finally,’ said Toqueville, ‘the Englishman’s great objection to allowing the government to do his business even well, is simply his wish to do it himself. This passion for being master at home, even to act foolishly, essentially characterises the British race. “I had rather plough badly for myself than give up the stilts into the hands of the government”.’

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The Invention of the Modern World 9

Wednesday, 1 August 2012

Spring-Summer Serial 2012. Chapter 9: CIVIL SOCIETY  By Alan Macfarlane. THE ESSENCE OF modernity is the elimination of all three traditional means of enforcing co-operation – kinship, an absolutist State and an absolutist Church.  Yet modern societies, if anything, need more self-sacrifice of the individual for the general good than ever. How can this be […]

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The Invention of the Modern World 8.

Sunday, 15 July 2012

Alan Macfarlane: The spread of the modern family system was noticed as something that was happening all over Western Europe in the nineteenth century and since then has spread over the world.[1. See Goode, World.] For long it was believed that the ‘modern’ family system with its bundle of characteristics was a product of the disruption of the industrial and urban revolutions – with the entire world having an ancien regime system before that.

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An Englishman at the first modern Olympics, 1896.

Sunday, 8 July 2012

G. S. Robertson: ‘Who, who was present there, does not wish that he may once again be permitted to behold it? After the ode had been recited and the olive-branches presented, everyone’s first desire must have been for a repetition of the whole. The feeling of absolute entrancement with the beauty of the sight, the rapture of sensation, and the joy of recollection, which overmastered all who shared in this spectacle, found vent in ardent wishes that the Olympian games should be reserved to dignify Athens and to be glorified by her glory.’

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The Invention of the Modern World 7.

Saturday, 30 June 2012

Alan Macfarlane: One sign of ‘modernity’ is the importance of competitive games and sports. Here we find one of the earliest and most important of British exports, including the games which can claim to be the new world religion – cricket and football. India is united by cricket, and Brazil by football…Playing games of all kinds was a hugely important and old phenomenon in Britain – we see it in art, literature and other sources from the Middle Ages. To a very considerable extent, the ‘imagined Empire’ of Britain was held together by games.

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Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Monday, 11 June 2012

Ouidah: that Burton merely used the translations of others, as his detractors venture to say is, I am certain, a cowardly calumny. He was not perhaps a scrupulous man, but he was a very clever man, a man who knew other men in all their wisdom and al their folly; and it is quite certain that such a man would never have done such an imbecile act, or given such a handle against himself to his antagonists.

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The Faustian impulse and European exploration.

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

Ricardo Duchesne: Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Norman Davies does, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.” The expansionist dispositions of Europeans as well as their literary and other achievements were similarly driven by an aggressive and individually felt desire for superlative and undemocratic recognition.

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The Invention of the Modern World 3.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Spring-Summer Serial 2012. Chapter 3: MODERN TECHNOLOGY By Alan Macfarlane. IT IS USUAL to separate the industrial and agricultural revolutions, but in the short space here available, I shall treat them together and over a much longer time frame than is normal. The final break-through to steam power in the later eighteenth century is only […]

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The Invention of the Modern World 2.

Saturday, 14 April 2012

Spring-Summer Serial 2012. Chapter 2: WAR, TRADE AND EMPIRE By Alan Macfarlane. WE START WITH brute force. The energy which projected what I shall argue was an unusual and early modernity through the world came through political, economic and imperial domination.  For most of the most influential period of British history, the ‘long’ nineteenth century […]

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The Invention of the Modern World 1.

Sunday, 1 April 2012

Alan Macfarlane: The ‘modern world’ was never a peculiar thing. In one sense it was always everywhere, in another it was a set of surface changes in economy and technology which spread rapidly and effortlessly across the world after 1800. Modernity is a tool kit of inventions, many of them originally made in China, then stolen or borrowed and improved, and then re-exported to Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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