In today’s class we talked about the reading The Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks. We started by looking at the 4 interrelated themes that Marks thinks define the modern world. Those themes are industrialization/capitalism, nation-states, the gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, and the impact of humans on the environment. 

We then discussed the idea of eurocentrism and the rise of the West. Eurocentrism is the view that Europe is historically advantaged with some special quality(‘s) that have allowed them to progress further than the rest of the world and become the main agent of world history. This idea that the West was uniquely gifted or special was also used to justify and explain the colonization of other countries through a narrative called the rise of the west. We then went on to talk about what is wrong with eurocentrism and how the terms contingency, accident, and conjecture are related to the dominance of the West.