By Paul Horton.
No question is more puzzling to teachers of World or Global History than, when did the modern world begin?
We inherited this question from the hand-me-down versions of Western Civilization and European history that served as the foundations for World History as it gradually evolved away from the “Rise of the West” approach of William McNeill in the 1950s to the decentered (“nonEurocentric”) and delinked Global History of today.
This debate moved to center stage with the recent controversy surrounding the curriculum of the AP World History course. While the new consensus of global historians is that we must move modern to earlier dates to critically assess “connected histories” that suggest that European Exceptionalism is on shakier ground, conservative historians and organizations like the National Association of Scholars argue that the Renaissance still represents a fundamental shift in the course of World History that demarcates “traditional” cultures from “modern” cultures.
When the College Board sought to begin a course revision at 1450, a date corresponding to the beginning of the Renaissance, historians pushed back to demand that the course begin at 1200 in order to incorporate new research on global economic and cultural exchanges that set the stage for the Renaissance.
But, despite this debate, the course still accepts the idea that what we call modern began in Europe with economic and cultural developments in Italy that were diffused to the rest of Europe in the 16th and CONTINUE READING: Defamiliarizing the Idea of the Modern: Where Do We Begin World History?