Excerpts: “The Netherlands had an extremely high level of urbanization for the era—as early as 1622, up to 56 percent of the population lived in medium-sized cities and towns. (By contrast, the figure for France even a century later stood at only 8 percent.)” (p. 43).

“This growth was unevenly distributed, initially concentrated in the West, and, we now know, vastly damaging to the environment. But make no mistake. It created the modern world, with all its wonders, its cruelties, its hypocrisies, and its glories” (p. 107-108).

“This energy revolution was the core of the Industrial Revolution, and without it, most of the material advances of the modern age would be impossible” (p. 109).

“Whatever the exact mix of causes, a seismic shift in the way we work and live began in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. It supercharged that small island’s power and influence, enabling the country to undertake another massive round of colonial land grabs and to spread its ideas far and wide. It enriched the motherland, made English a global language, and turned Britain into a model of political and economic liberalism for the world” (p.110-111).

“Women’s liberation may properly be called history’s greatest social revolution, and it was set in motion by industrialization, its greatest economic revolution” (p. 117).

“Rural farming, near the level of subsistence—that is to say, the constant threat of starvation—was the norm for almost all of history up until the twentieth century. Disease, drudgery, and insecurity defined ‘the world until yesterday,’ to borrow a term from the anthropologist Jared Diamond” (p. 117-118).

“Then and now, technological progress did not make identity politics fade—indeed, it had the opposite effect. Having lost land and inheritance as the defining elements of conservatism, many Britons attached themselves to religion and empire. British workers buffeted by destabilizing forces were easy prey for scapegoating arguments that cheap Irish labor was undercutting their wages—the nineteenth-century version of the trope that Mexico and China are stealing American jobs” (p. 138).

“Dumping, intellectual property theft, abundant coal, and cheap labor were key ingredients in the growth of US industry in the late-nineteenth century—just as they have been for Chinese industry in the twenty-first century” (p. 147).

“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, conquest was often the most efficient—and sometimes the only possible—means by which nations could access foreign goods and resources. With the onset of industrial production and mechanized transport, trade became more profitable than war” (p. 172).

“It’s not much of an exaggeration to compare the telegraph with the internet in its seismic impact on the way people communicated” (p. 174).

“In 1956 however, an entrepreneur from North Carolina, Malcolm McLean, catapulted shipping into the future with his invention of the container ship” (p. 183).

“Then, in 1958, Pan Am—the premier global airline through much of the twentieth century—flew its first trans-Atlantic passenger route on a jet airliner, the Boeing 707. The Jet Age had begun” (p. 184).

“Technology in prior revolutions changed the physical world; the digital revolution would change the mental world, expanding information, knowledge, analytic capacity and with it our definition of what it means to be human. Whatever the quantitative impact of the information revolution we are living through, the qualitative impact on the human psyche is vast and ongoing” (p. 205).

“Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Experience, argues that the world has become so complex that the average person doesn’t understand how things work, feels helpless, and comes to resent experts. And with endless information just a click away, people think they can find out the truth for themselves and dispense with the experts” (p. 230).

“Liberalism’s great strength throughout history has been to free people from arbitrary constraints. Its great weakness has been the inability to fill the void when the old structures crumble” (p. 268).

“When scholars speak of liberalism as an ideology in international relations, they don’t mean left-wing policies but rather a respect for liberty, democracy, cooperation, and human rights” (p. 274).

“Accept that compromise is an inevitable aspect of democracy—indeed, that it is a virtue because it takes into account the passions and aspirations of others” (p. 322).

“As is argued earlier in this book, perhaps the most important and enduring change was the emancipation of women, who in almost every society in history had lived as second-class citizens. (The backlash to that dramatic advance infuses all reactionary movements, from Islamic fundamentalism to Christian conservatism.)” (p. 322).

Zakaria, Fareed. (2024). Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.