How is the modern world different from previous periods of history and why did it come into
existence when and where it did? (Dr. Stephen Davies, Institute of Economic Affair
Runan Lin, Georgetown Preparatory School, United State
Picture a country that is the global leader in terms of military strength and
political in uence. It has a complex law code that governs all parts of the
population regardless of their social or economic status; it plays a major
role in global trade and maintains a vibrant industrial system divided into
public and private sectors; this is a country whose population comes from
different cultures and has various religious af liations, including but not
limited to Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam; this country practices the
idea of meritocracy - selecting government of cials on the base of merit -
and has a complex system of government built upon the balance of power.
This country is also unrivaled globally in civil and military technology, its
inventions being spread across continents
This country, of course, is China during the Tang and Song dynasties. The
“complex law code” refers to the law code of the Tang Dynasty, which
went through three major modi cations and included four distinct forms of
law enforcement;[1] meritocracy is exercised through the Keju examination
system; the “complex system of government” refers to the “Three
Departments and Six Ministries” model, which divides the government
into three major branches and six subordinating ministries; advanced “civil
and military technology” is exempli ed in the development of gunpowder
and the introduction of paper currency. Indeed, for many living during the
Tang-Song period, this was the pinnacle of civilization, their “modern”
society.[2]
The Oxford Dictionary de nes the concept of modern as “[pertaining to]
the present time or recent times.”[3] The Encyclopaedia Britannica explains
modernity as “the self-de nition of a generation about its own
technological innovation, governance, and socioeconomics,” and the key
phrase in this explanation is “self-de nition of a generation.[4] This essay
aims to reconsider the questions of how, why, when, and where the modern
world came into existence, and what sets it apart from the pre-modern
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world. Instead of tying the emergence of the modern world to a speci c
time and place, this work will analyze several historical periods to suggest
that the de nition of modernity is extremely subjective and that this
concept manifests itself differently in various times and places
Since modernity is, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “a self-
de nition of a generation,” the concepts of modernity and of a modern
society have been subject to different interpretations at different time
periods. For example, the United States considered itself to be the “City
upon a Hill,” the beacon of liberty and the avant-garde in democracy and
human rights. American Exceptionalism was a common theme since the
founding of the young republic, and Thomas Jefferson famously described
the United States in the following words
[The United States was] trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the
world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred re
of freedom and self-government from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of
the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign
in uence. All mankind ought then, with us, to rejoice in its prosperous, and
sympathize in its adverse fortunes, as involving every thing dear to man.[5]
The founding fathers had indeed provided their citizens with more
personal and political freedom under a democratic elective government,
and, at the time, the United States did indeed seem modern. However, only
several decades later, Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois would go on
to challenge Jefferson’s perception of America as the epitome of modernity
and freedom and the best realization of Enlightenment ideals by pointing
to the institution of slavery and to racial injustice. In the late 19th and early
20th centuries, when the US was at the forefront of modernity in terms of
industrial developments, activists such as Elizabeth C. Stanton criticised
the society’s unequal and backward treatment of women in social,
economic, and political spheres. What was thought to be modern in the
19th and early 20th centuries became obsolete within a matter of a few
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decades, once again demonstrating that the understanding of modernity
changes over time
Even within the same historical period, however, modernity remains an
extremely subjective concept that could be interpreted differently in
different places and cultures. In the Middle Ages, Europe saw little
progress under the shadows of feudalism and manorialism, while the
Islamic World and China were entering their respective “golden ages.” In
the Middle Ages, the Islamic World was reaching unprecedented heights
in cultural and scienti c advancements. Mathematician al-Khwarizmi
created the concept of algebra, Arab scholars in Cordoba translated and
preserved the works of great Greco-Roman writers, and Muslim scholars
made remarkable progress in medicine and navigation technology.[6] At the
same time, Song Dynasty China was going through a golden age similar to
that in the Islamic World. Therefore, while a resident of Song Dynasty
China would have considered paper currency, thousand-miles-long canals,
and civil service examinations to be modern, a contemporary Western
European would have never heard of gunpowder, compasses, spices of
Asia, and social mobility and would have seen the heavy plough as the
pinnacle of modernity.[7]
When Europeans rst discovered the American continent and came into
contact with the natives, the Aztecs must have thought that Tenochtitilan
was the most developed city of the world, and rearms, written languages,
and the Renaissance were de nitely not included in their de nition
“modernity.” Similarly, during the Industrial Age, Emperor Qianlong of
Qing Dynasty wrote a letter to King George III of the United Kingdom in
which he claimed that “...our Celestial Empire possesses all things in
proli c abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was
therefore no need to import the manufactures [sic] of outside barbarians in
exchange for our own produce.”[8] At the time of this letter (1793), Great
Britain was embroiled in the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the
inception of the Industrial Revolution and was considered to be the most
advanced nation in terms of its military and civilian technology. While an
18th-century European would have de ned modernity in terms of factorial
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production, voting, and republicanism, a citizen of the Qing Empire would
have had a vastly different interpretation of the term. This is re ected in
Qianlong’s belief that the Celestial Empire possessed “all things in proli c
abundance and lacked no product within its own borders” and therefore
did not need to be modernized any further.[9]
In each of the examples above, it is clear that interpretations of the concept
of “modern” differ drastically across time and space. Many scholars,
including those not coming from a Western background, believe that the
Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern world.[10] However, if
these criteria are applied to the contemporary world, then countries that do
not have a democratic or republican form of government or do not
otherwise conform to the western standards of modernity would have no
place in our shared modernity. Such a Western-centric approach dismisses
the cultural and scienti c innovations that non-Western civilizations have
made throughout history, thus contributing to the establishment of the
modern world from which they are now excluded. While the Western
understanding of modernity is becoming more prevalent around the world
due to globalization, the contemporary world still does not have a uni ed
de nition of “modern,” nor do people in different parts of today’s world
experience modernity in the same way. Even in the 21st century, absolute
monarchs retain their power in kingdoms such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei,
[11] despite the fact that this system of government goes against the ideals
of natural rights, republicanism, and democracy. Even throughout the
Western world, undisputedly “modern” to most, is still plagued by issues
such as slavery and human traf cking, as well as the remnants of racial
discrimination rooted in slavery. 12.3 million people remain under some
form of forced labor, and at least 10,000 of them are in the United States -
the number would increase further if the incarcerated population were
included in this statistic.[12] Stories of forced laborers being moved across
huge tracts of land and being abused along the way frequently make us
question our socioeconomic de nition of “modern.
In all of the three main factors de ning modernity according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica - technological innovation, governance, and
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socio-economics - the world had never before, has not yet, and probably
never will, reach a consensus. In terms of technological innovation, the
internet could not be accessed by 89.3% of the households in Africa and
52.4% in Asia and the Middle East.[13] In terms of governance, the debate
ensues in terms of the balance between individual freedom and security
ever since John Locke’s proposal of a social contract theory. The
discrepancy among attitudes towards socio-economics upheld by various
nations is even more extensive and complex. Taking these three factors
into consideration, it is impossible to identify a speci c point in history
during which everyone in the world lived according to the same de nition
of modernity, which suggests that the concept of modernity is subject to
individual interpretation and that there has never been and never will be a
universal “modern world.
Footnotes
1 Li Linfu, Tang Liudian, ed. Jiuling Zhang (Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1978)
2 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, trans. Shiyu Zhao, Shiling
Zhao, and Hongyan Zhang (Jinan, Shandong: Shandong Huabao Press, 2001), pp.76-92; 98-105
3 “Modern,” Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, accessed June 12, 2020, https://
www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/de nition/english/modern?q=modern.
4 Sharon L. Snyder, “Modernity,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., May
20, 2016), https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity.
5 Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to the Citizens of Washington, D.C., 4 March.,” National
Archives and Records Administration (National Archives and Records Administration), accessed
June 13, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0006
6 Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire (New Haven, CT:
Yale University, 2014), pp.181-186
7 “China in 1000 CE,” The Song Dynasty in China (Asia for Educators, Columbia University,
2020), http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/songdynasty-module/index.html; Thomas Barnebeck Andersen,
Peter S. Jensen, and Christian Skovsgaard, “The Heavy Plough and the Agricultural Revolution in
Medieval Europe,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2362894.
8 Qianlong, “Letter to George III, 1793,” Internet History Sourcebooks (Fordham University, 2020),
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp.
9 Qianlong, “Letter to George III, 1793,” Internet History Sourcebooks (Fordham University, 2020),
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp.
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10 Yi Junqing, and Lingmei Fan, "Dimensions of Modernity and Their Contemporary Fate,"
Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1, no. 1 (2006): 6-21, Accessed June 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/
stable/30209946. This article serves as a good example ofto the argument above, with the authors -
both Chinese- beginning by de ning modernity as “the cultural schemata and mechanisms of social
action stemming from the Enlightenment.
11 Harry St. John Bridger Philby, William L. Ochsenwald, and Joshua Teitelbaum, “Saudi Arabia,”
Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, iInc., June 13, 2020), https://
www.britannica.com/place/Saudi-Arabia; Ooi Jin Bee, Mohamad Yusop Damit, and Pushpa
Thambipillai, “Brunei,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., June 15, 2020),
https://www.britannica.com/place/Brunei.
12 Rodger Doyle, "Modern Slavery," Scienti c American 294, no. 1 (2006): 30, Accessed June 16,
2020. www.jstor.org/stable/26061289.
13 Marcus Leaning, “Internet Accessibility Continental Comparison,” UNESCO, accessed June 23,
2020, https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/ les/milweek17_marcus_leaning.pdf.
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