Invention of the Modern World (1): What is the question?

Duration: 35 mins 22 secs
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Description: What question should we should ask - what is the puzzle I am trying to solve? What is modernity? What have been the favoured explanations of when and why it emerged? A brief survey of the history of attempts to set and answer this question. What is the appropriate methodology for the study of this huge topic? What evidence can we use? Was the modern world invented in the ‘great divergence’ of the nineteenth century, in the watershed of the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth century, or much earlier?
 
Created: 2011-05-18 12:18
Collection: Lectures: The Invention of the Modern World (Wang Gouwei Lectures, 2011) Alan Macfarlane
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng (English)
Keywords: modernity; individualism; divergence; capitalism; industrialism;
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