In a sparkling little book with the engaging title Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, social historian Charles Tilly reminded colleagues in the mid-1980s of an awkward situation that is still with us. He pointed out that despite many heroic efforts, scholars have still not sorted out what it was that made western Europe the site of changes that, from about 1500, ushered in the modern era – changes that are still making themselves felt around the globe. As one commentator lately inquired, “Why did a relatively small and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent burst out into the world in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth century become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth?” While the role of western Europeans in giving birth to the first “models of modernity” has been variously portrayed, not to mention regularly decried, it is impossible to dismiss compelling evidence that it was events set in motion within that region that are continuing to transform the world – for good, arguably, as well as for ill. Yet there is still no consensus as to why that was so.

Fernand Braudel, distinguished interpreter of that change as well as an ardent proponent of the vanguard role of western Europe, puts the point boldly in his famous multivolume endeavor to explain just how the contemporary capitalist world took shape in the years from 1500 to 1800.