Welcome to Crash Course Big History.

Today we're going to look at the modern revolution.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

But what does modern even mean?

I mean, I know that fax machines

and Super Nintendo are modern, but, like, people used to think

that toilets that flushed were modern.

That's actually a pretty perceptive question,

me from the past.

So, if we're going to talk about modernity,

we should probably define modernity.

But first, I have great news.

There is a future me from the past

where video games are so much better than Super Nintendo.

In fact, this machine plays 24,000 games

and it's in the office of future you.

What were we talking about?

Oh, right, modernity.

So, some historians date the beginning of the modern era

with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution

in the 19th century.

Some date it to the French Revolution in 1789.

Some push it further back

to 16th and 17th century European colonialism.

And some date modernity with the European Renaissance

and call anything past the year 1500 "early modern."

But through aBig Historylens, all of these are just signs

of acceleration in human collective learning,

which was already underway and took its first tiny steps

in East Africa 250,000 years ago.

Then again, it would be silly

to call the first human foragers "early-early-early modern."

So for the purposes of today, let's say:

With an acknowledgment that it's all a little bit arbitrary.

And I know what you're wondering,

but no, 1750 was several decades

before the first flushing toilets.

So last week, we looked at how collective learning--

which relies on population numbers and connectivity

to produce new ideas-- grew by leaps and bounds

with the introduction of agriculture.

By the year 1400, the human population

had advanced magnificently, but the world was still divided

into four isolated world zones: the Americas, Australasia,

the Pacific, and Afro-Eurasia.

From aBig Historyperspective,

what makes the European explorations worthy

of a place in an episode called "Modern Revolution"

is that they eventually united all four world zones

into a global system.

But why did the Europeans feel so motivated to expand?

Well, a lot of reasons.

One, Ottoman dominance of overland trade routes with Asia,

particularly after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453,

made Europeans seek alternative routes to the populace

and rich lands of the East.

Two, European states were fairly small compared to some

of the vast empires of Asia and needed to compete

for more resources to fuel their almost-constant wars.

And three, the fruits of exploration

undoubtedly had positive effects,

whether it be the many advanced inventions

and consumer goods imported from China

or the spices of India and Indonesia,

or crops from the Americas.

That last one should not be underestimated.

Crops like the potato-- which earned the nickname

"ready-made bread" because it was easy to prepare--

combined with maize and squashes and tomatoes

and various yams allowed farms in Europe

to support more people.

This was also good for Asia,

where those crops were introduced in the 17th century.

And let us not forget about the vast amounts of silver

that the Spanish "acquired" from the Americas

or the many cotton, tobacco, and sugar farms

that Europeans bolstered their economies with.

The unification of the world zones

also had many, many negative effects.

For instance, it was terrible for people who worked

on those cotton and tobacco and sugar farms.

Europeans increasingly relied on African slaves,

the first of whom were granted to the Portuguese

by African rulers, and then, you know, several centuries

of horror ensued with an incomprehensible number

of African slaves dying in the appalling conditions

of the Atlantic crossing.

Life was also pretty miserable

for the slaves that survived the journey

and generations of their descendents.

Also, because Afro-Eurasia was a modestly connected

thriving cesspool of disease,

Europeans had developed many immunities.

When they started arriving in the previously isolated Americas

in the late 1400s and 1500s, the indigenous inhabitants

had no immunity to those diseases.

This resulted in one of the most horrific events

in human history.

A cocktail of various European diseases, most notably smallpox,

killed off an estimated 50 million people

in the Americas in little over a century.

A similar tragedy played itself out in Australia

when Europeans started arriving there in the 18th century.

Now, along with all this horrific stuff,

the unification of the world zones was, nevertheless,

a good thing for collective learning,

which would eventually prove our salvation in many ways.

Which is why people can now look at this on their smart phone.

Anyway, the unification of the world zones did not

in itself lead to a breakthrough

in the way humans harvested matter and energy.

The last major shift happened with the arrival

of agriculture 10,000 years prior.

The colonizing European societies of the 16th, 17th,

and 18th centuries remained agrarian.

But the explorations did allow for a network of exchange

that eventually did lead to a major breakthrough

in how humans harnessed more energy and produced more

and more cultural complexity:

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain,

as they'll be happy to tell you, in the 18th century.

But it was a global revolution involving collective learning

shared across the global system.

But a number of innovations that kickstarted industry

originated in Britain, like the more intensified use

of steam engines or the use of coke to refine metal.

Not that Coke-- yeah, that coke.

Also, they invented many textile machines

and Britain had lots of coal and it was relatively easy to mine.

Thank you, trees that died hundreds

of millions of years ago.

We're going to turn you into industry.

And smog.

But all those British breakthroughs

wouldn't have been possible without a huge global network

of trade that supplied raw materials like cotton

and that opened new markets

where Britain could sell its goods.

And it wouldn't have been possible to expand that network

of trade in the first place without gun powder

and the compass, which both came from China.

The methods of porcelain manufacture

that were important to the Industrial Revolution

in Britain also came from China via Germany.

And the improved methods of farming,

which freed up many British farm workers

for industrial wage labor in the cities came

from Flanders in the Netherlands.

Early designs for steam engines came from 18th century France,

and much of the designs for these machines depended

on mathematics preserved and transmitted

by Islamic and Hindu civilizations.

So up until the end of the 18th century,

virtually all production in human history was propelled

by human or animal muscle power, or else by wind and water power.

But it turned out the coal and oil had stored energy

from the sun that had built up over hundreds

of millions of years.

And using those resources dramatically increased

the energy that humans could harness.

Huge numbers of goods could be produced by factories

at relatively low prices which meant that over many decades,

goods that had previously been seen as luxuries

by common people were suddenly viewed as necessities.

By the 1900s, most Europeans enjoyed a standard

of living higher than the kings of the Middle Ages.

Coal and oil also allowed mechanization of agriculture,

which raised the carrying capacity,

increasing the population.

And new modes of connectivity beginning with the telegraph,

and then later, the telephone,

increasingly bound the human species together,

allowing for swift and rapid exchange of ideas.

For 250,000 years, if I wanted to tell someone

who lived 100 miles away from me something,

it took me days to do so.

For the last 100 years, it's taken me seconds.

Because a slight tweak in modes of production

in the 18th century and the adoption

of fossil fuels lead to an explosion

of productivity and invention in the 1800s and 1900s,

people often compare the Industrial Revolution

to the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago.

Remember:

In the Cambrian explosion, that evolutionary change

was biological.

In the Industrial Revolution, that increased pace

of change was cultural.

Consider bike design.

In the 1800s, there were many, many different designs

for bikes, some of which look amazingly, terrifyingly unsafe.

In the beginning of innovations for bicycles,

a huge number of designs filled all of the available niches.

Eventually, those designs started competing

with each other and a few forms won out.

You've got the road bike and the mountain bike and the BMX bike.

Just a little bit different variations of the same thing.

Another example is the adaptive radiation of electronics.

Take a look at all the stuff you needed in the 1980s

to do what your average cell phone can do today.

And that was only a few decades ago.

Many new ideas sparked an increase in the human standard

of living and the complexity of societies

in tons of different ways.

The explosion of cultural evolution

that started 200 years ago has yet to cease.

The Cambrian explosion went on for millions of years.

The Agricultural Revolution proceeded

for thousands of years.

We're still right in the middle of the modern revolution--

maybe only at the beginning.

The huge shift in human activity and a rise

in complexity may continue

long after our grandchildren's lifetimes.

That is, so long as we don't do something stupid,

which, you know, withhomo sapiens,

is always a distinct possibility.

And let's not forget about the rise in complexity

that's been happening since the beginning

of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

A star is essentially a pile of hydrogen and helium.

It's extremely simple.

By comparison, a brain that arose via biological evolution

is an intricate network of billions of connections

and building blocks.

Industrial society is an immense whirring global network

of millions upon millions of brains more closely connected

than ever before.

The products of this society raised complexity even further.

Bottom line is this, if the first part of this series,

which looked at the vastness of the universe,

made you feel insignificant, just remember that now

at the tremendous heights of technological progress,

humanity is, in terms of networks and building blocks:

And there's currently no end to the potential

for rising complexity in sight.

This brings us to a long-standing

historical question:

why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain?

Great Britain was certainly uncommonly well positioned.

That said, so was China.

So why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen

in, say, Song Dynasty China

between the 10th and 13th centuries?

So, we know:

And China has had both for a long time.

The medieval Chinese had much more advanced

agricultural methods than Europe.

They paid attention to weeding and growing crops

in rows and frequently used tools like the seed drill.

And they were doing it all centuries