Back in the dim dark ages of my late-fifties/early sixties Queensland primary school education the conventional wisdom, or what I remember of it, suggested that the modern world had been shaped by a couple of revolutionary developments in industry and agriculture that kicked in around the middle of the eighteenth century and more or less tapered off around the beginning of the twentieth century.
From a Eurocentric viewpoint, of course, that’s probably more or less true. The industrial devastation caused by strategic bombing through the Second World War was still in the process of being rebuilt, and Germany and Japan were still on the cusp of major industrial power status. The Japanese economic miracle was still in its infancy, and anyone predicting subsequent developments like the emergence of China and India would probably have found himself being bundled away by the nice men in white coats for an extended spell in an institution for the delusional.
China was, after all, coming off the disaster labelled the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution and the era of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book coincided with my Senior education.
Looking backwards from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century it seems fairly clear that what we’ve come to know as the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions kicked off an on-going period of increasingly rapid economic, technological and social change that will continue, more or less, until we’ve either run out of things to invent or have drowned the planet with the consequences of four centuries of increasingly rapid technological evolution.
Academic historians, being the kind of creatures they are, can, do, and probably always will argue about whether those labels are accurate, when they started, what should be included under those titles (assuming that they are valid) and where and whether each of those phenomena concluded. Like the world’s economists laid end to end, they’ll ever, however, reach a conclusion.
Under other circumstances I might be inclined to join them, but the scope of the current exercise doesn’t reach back to the actual origins of these things, and while I’m interested in the origins that interest is limited to the way in which events and developments way back when shaped the world I found when I entered it a little over half way through the twentieth century.
From that viewpoint I’m inclined to take the existence of these two revolutions as a given and explore their ramifications across other areas because it's fairly clear, or at least it's fairly clear to me, once the social disruptions associated with the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions, the Highland Clearances and the Great Irish Famine had run their course, there was a further wave of revolutionary changes, a secondary shakeout that produced major changes that transformed entertainment and education, and played a major part in shaping the world in which my generation grew up.
Looking at these matters, of course, there’s a tendency to look at these things as something that started here, progressed along these lines and reached its culmination here before other matters came to the forefront. You could, for instance, see the Industrial Revolution as something that had peaked some time in the Victorian era, and was duly supplanted by what you might term the Age of Empire, which was in turn brought unstuck by the two World Wars, after which the era of decolonisation and the Cold War brought about a new world order, which was duly re-shaped by the collapse of Soviet Communism, which in turn...
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