The End of the Old World? Understanding the power relations that transoceanic settlements and trade opened up.
The End of the Old World? Understanding the power relations that transoceanic settlements and trade opened up. Jonathan Scott is one of the leading historians of 17th-century England. Here he continues the admirable expansion of his horizons to include oceans and the power relations that transoceanic settlements and trade opened up. But the book’s main aim is to use this international dimension to frame an argument about ‘how the old world ended’. His model depends on the viability of familiar ideas: that there was a single ‘old world’, and that its undoubted evolution was rapid enough to be historically analysed as an ‘end’. Yet Scott explores neither problem. With no doubts about the categories, he can advance his case in an extreme form: ‘Fewer than three hundred years ago there occurred the most fundamental reordering of human existence since the beginning of agriculture’; there was ‘an exponential Industrial Revolution in Britain from about 1780’. The Industrial Revolution ‘c...
