In this course, we study change and continuity over time, from about 1750 to today. It’s a shorter period of time than it sounds. There are sharks alive today that were born before 1750. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old, and our species is 250,000 years old. The earliest written sources we have for human history are more than 5,000 years old. So, 270-ish years is a drop in the bucket.

But studying the recent past can be especially useful for understanding change and continuity in a way that makes it meaningful and usable. By studying patterns – looking at the things that change, for whom they change, and how they change – we find meaning within the evidence. In this course, we give you lots of evidence about continuity and change between 1750 and now. We hope you can subject this evidence to your own interpretations, and that what you find will help you understand the world you live in today and make decisions for the future.

To make this kind of meaning of the past, and to understand continuity and change over the last 27 decades or so, you have to know where you’re starting. How can you tell what has changed if you don’t have a picture of what things were like before? So unit one is all about the period in which the course begins, the years around 1750.

We can begin our story of the year 1750 by looking at a narrative – a story about continuity and change – that for a long time was believed by most historians. The thing about world history is that there are narratives that try to give us a single, simplified story about the shared past of everyone, everywhere.

In this case of 1750, the narrative most historians believed for a long time was the “Rise of the West”. It was developed mostly by historians from countries in Europe and North America, also known as the “West”. So, it’s not surprising that the narrative focuses on the rise of these regions of the world. The story begins by suggesting that up until about 1750, wealth and power were pretty evenly distributed in several parts of the world, including China, Europe, and elsewhere. But soon afterward, the story goes, Europe and its overseas colonies in North America began to dominate the world. This change sped up in the twentieth century, so that the “West” still occupies a dominant position in world affairs today.

Or does it? This narrative has been around for a while, partly because it has some evidence behind it and partly because powerful people want to believe it. But it also needs to be tested using evidence. Is this narrative really an accurate explanation of what has happened over the years since 1750? Or is it the product of a group of Western historians looking at the past from one perspective, and missing the broader patterns?

As you learned in the first lesson, two scholars, Bob Bain and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, have suggested strategies for us to understand the problems of a narrative like this one.

But it’s just as important for you to actually look at the evidence used in this course. Armed with evidence, you will be able to support, extend, or critique this narrative by viewing the world in the year 1750 through three frames. Each of these frames is like a filter through which we can look at the evidence from a unique perspective.

Communities: A world of states and identities

Through a series of articles focused on different regions of the world, we will explore the diversity of human communities in 1750. We will encounter states, from small chieftaincies to larger kingdoms, confederations, and sultanates to vast empires. Some people lived in empires that had existed for centuries – the Ottoman Empire in North Africa and around the Mediterranean and Red Sea, the Mughal Sultanate in South Asia, and the Habsburg Empire in Europe were particularly old. In China, the Qing Dynasty was relatively new, but it ruled a vast and ancient state. Meanwhile, the rulers of Russia were fast becoming conquerors of a vast landmass. In the Atlantic, small European states were busily building large, oceanic empires.

We will see how people in states of all sizes identified as members of religious communities. Large, widespread religions like Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism spanned many countries, sometimes closely tied to governments, sometimes not. In some cases, these religious communities appeared in little pockets across many states. This was particularly true of Judaism. Other people had identities as members of smaller, more local religious communities. We all have layers of identity that shape how we understand the world and our place in it, and so did the people of 1750. This course will bring those layers of identity into clearer view.

Production and distribution: Doing business globally

People’s lives were also shaped through their participation in systems of production and distribution in these years. In 1750, the word economics had not even been invented, but it is the modern theory of economics that gives us terms like production and distribution. People everywhere had already been making or growing things, processing them, trading or selling them, and consuming them for some time. We will see how most of what was made or grown was still produced by families or small groups of people and consumed by them or their neighbors. But there was also unprecedented trade and commerce. In fact, by this period, there were companies whose reach, for the first time, spanned the world. These massive companies, like the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, and others, were in many ways the models for the modern multi-national corporation. They made their investors and directors as wealthy as kings by trading for goods in Asia and Africa and extracting raw materials from colonies in the Americas. Based in Europe, they are evidence we can use in understanding the so-called “Rise of the West” in economic terms.

And yet, there is plenty of evidence that, in terms of production and distribution, the “West” was not in the driver’s seat at this time. Indeed, these companies existed largely because Europeans wanted access to the wealth of Asia. India was the world’s largest producer of cloth, which was in particularly high demand. Even more desirable were the fine goods produced by the Qing state of China, the world’s largest economy in 1750. European merchants were desperate to break into Chinese markets, but the Chinese leadership was not impressed enough by European goods to start trading.

Networks: Connections across and around the world

You will assemble a picture of production and distribution in 1750 by looking at the economies of different regions of the world as well as some evidence of global patterns. Thinking about patterns gets even more interesting, because that is what leads us to the vital consideration of networks. The more you look into them, these economic patterns will start to mirror the networks of ideas, culture, and language that connected people across regions.

Those networks were key to bringing together many different concepts, innovations, and cultural ideas in some regions at this time. Cities became centers where people and worldviews met and mixed. For example, the creole cities of the Americas were inhabited by a potent mix of indigenous American, African, and European cultures. This kind of fusion also occurred wherever there was large-scale migration, in places like Manila in the Philippine Islands and Cape Town in Africa.

In western Europe, knowledge brought back by merchants and other travelers from many parts of the world created the conditions for intellectual leaps and political changes – and we’ll jump into that in the next unit. This build-up again points to a “Rise of the West” narrative, but it is important to remember what some historians of the past left out of the story: much of the knowledge and many of the ideas came from other parts of the world.

The next three units will all focus on massive transformations – political, economic, and social – that occurred between 1750 and 1914, and helped shape the modern world. But to evaluate and find meaning in these changes, we must understand their starting point, in 1750. That starting point is the purpose of this unit.