Modern World History: Ideas, Industrial Power and the World Order
What this domain tests
From roughly 1500 to the present: the formation and global expansion of capitalism, the revolutions that legitimised it, and the international order from 维也纳体系 to the Cold War and after. The exam links ideas → institutions → industrial power → world order.
Ideas and expansion
- 文艺复兴 placed the human being, not the divine order, at the centre; 宗教改革 broke the papal monopoly on salvation and, through 因信称义, handed religious authority to the individual and the prince.
- 新航路开辟 (1492, 1498) joined the oceans, moved American silver into Europe and Asia, and began the 商业革命 and 价格革命.
- 启蒙运动 supplied the vocabulary of revolution: 天赋人权, 社会契约, 三权分立, 人民主权.
Revolutions and industry
- Britain's 1688 光荣革命 and the 1689 权利法案 made parliament sovereign; the 1776 独立宣言 first wrote natural rights into a founding document; the 1789 人权宣言 attacked privilege and the 等级制度.
- The 工业革命 (from c.1760): 珍妮机, 蒸汽机, railways - factory system, urbanisation, two opposed classes. The second revolution (electricity, chemicals, steel) produced monopolies and 帝国主义.
- 马克思主义 (1848 共产党宣言) analysed the same process from the workers' side; 巴黎公社 (1871) was its first attempt at state power.
- 俄国1861 农奴制改革 and Japan's 明治维新 (1868) were defensive modernisations; the 美国内战 (1861–65) preserved the union and abolished slavery.
World order
维也纳体系 (1815) → 凡尔赛-华盛顿体系 (1919–22) → 雅尔塔 and Cold War bipolarity → post-1991 multipolarity and globalisation.
Worked example
Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? Reasoning: combine conditions instead of listing one. Political: parliamentary stability and secure property rights. Economic: colonial markets, capital from trade and enclosures, a mobile labour force. Social: enclosures pushed peasants toward towns. Technical: coal near iron, and textile demand pulling invention. The answer must show a market large enough to make machines profitable plus the resources to build them.
Traps
Treating 启蒙运动 as identical with 文艺复兴; saying 明治维新 preserved the shogunate; mixing up 凡尔赛 and 雅尔塔; telling the Cold War as a single-country story; assuming globalisation began after 1991 rather than in sixteenth-century trade networks.