The chapter recalls and summarizes the principal arguments made in the book.

By the end of the eighteenth century the plural language of liberty was under widespread attack, denounced by radicals as a denial of innate human rights and a tool of monarchical despotism. This evolution was partly powered by the consolidation of nation-states that picked up speed in the sixteenth century, but this centralization was long incomplete. In this situation the terms “liberties” and “privileges” were almost universally regarded as equivalents, even by so radical a movement as the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. The dissolution of this equivalence took place in France, first as the monarchy’s political and fiscal shenanigans sapped people’s faith in the system, and then as the Revolution mounted a full-scale attack on privilege as a source of inequality and despotism. Supporters of the Revolution followed its lead, but the old language still played a role in Britain and Germany, a reminder that the old language, even with its equivalence of liberties and privileges, long persisted in fostering self-government and resisting oppression.

In the nineteenth century, European attitudes, both among intellectuals and the public, shifted toward widespread support for imperialism, but the tensions between such views and long-standing values sometimes gave this support a tortuous and melancholy character. This was the case with two eminent liberal imperialists, both famous as champions of liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Each rejected the other’s justifications for foreign expansion and described his own country’s policies in terms so negative that they might have served better to justify opposition, testifying that there was a destabilizing tension in the backing both gave to imperial expansion. One occasion on which harsh and direct criticism of empire was voiced was expressed was at the outbreak of the “Opium War” in 1839, a conflict whose complex origins belie the old myth that it was undertaken to stuff the dangerous drug down Indian throats. The chapter ends by examining reasons why this opposition was unable to hold back the imperial juggernaut and notes that a significant number of non-European anti-imperial activists found London and Paris hospitable places for their activities.

The cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century saw the establishment of physics and astronomy as autonomous spheres. The Ptolemaic universe was a hierarchy of dignity – sun and stars above, lowly earth at the bottom – supported by a hierarchy of disciplines that set theology and metaphysics at the apex of intellectual life. The advancing belief in heliocentrism that undid the first was paralleled by challenges to the second, starting with the humanist celebration of rhetoric and moral philosophy and carried further by Copernicus’s exaltation of astronomy, hitherto assigned the lowly place of a mere computational aid, as a source of truth. The authority of the Church was often restricted by political and cultural divisions, so that many heretical ideas could not be stamped out, and Galileo long found support from Jesuits and even the pope. As he lost it, he sought backing in a wider audience, publishing his writings in Italian rather than Latin, and in a popular style. Newton and his followers would similarly seek to substitute horizontal connections for the vertical ones around which intellectual life had long been organized, demonstrating elements of their theories to popular audiences and explicitly describing the kind of science they favored as “public.”

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

The Church’s victory in the “Investiture Controversy,” throwing off the domination achieved over it by secular powers following the death of Charlemagne, made it the first domain to successfully assert the right to manage its activities in accord with its own principles. But victory was only partial, leaving spiritual and secular powers facing each other across a field of constantly shifting relationships, giving heterodoxy more room to survive than elsewhere. An early example was the contrast between European universities, established as associations of teachers and students formed to assert autonomy from town authorities, and Islamic madrasas subject to direction by their elite patrons. When the corpus of Aristotelian texts became available, first in Arabic and later in Latin, it was first greeted with enthusiasm by readers of both, followed by suspicion because Greek materialism posed threats to religious doctrines. In Muslim lands, this led to a widespread rejection of philosophical inquiry as a path to truth; in Europe, attempts to impose similar restrictions failed, because university faculties resisted the claims of churchly conservatives to limit what could be taught. In this situation, scholastic speculation generated radical ideas about cosmology and physics, foreshadowing the break with traditional cosmology two centuries later.

Although Europe deserves condemnation for the ethnocentric and racist notions and attitudes that flourished within it both before and during the era of imperialism, these were preceded, accompanied, and countered by a singular interest in and openness to other peoples and cultures. The marks of this openness were an exceptional interest in travel and writings about it, in learning non-European languages and translating and circulating texts written in them, in correcting their own forbears’ calumnies and defamations of others by exposing myths and legends for what they were, and by acknowledging the historical and cultural achievements of other peoples. The notion that Asian governments were despotic spread chiefly because those who adopted it feared the spread of autocracy in their own countries, and it drew forth harsh criticism. Images of other countries or regions, especially China and the Near East, became mirrors in which Europeans contemplated the limitations and narrow prejudices of their own way of life.

That the industrial innovations which ushered in the modern economy made their appearance first in Britain has often been understood in relation to economic “factors” such as wage rates, size of work force, and cost of labor and materials, capable of being compared over a variety of situations. But the historiographical field created by this literature is a jumble of opposing claims. While it may be possible to show that certain of these factors contributed to economic growth in particular situations, the transformation that began in Britain in the 1760s was a unique historical event. Any of these factors that may have contributed to it only did so by operating in that specific time and place. We need therefore an account that focuses on what made Britain a fertile site for such a transformation and then on the actors who effected it. The chapter stresses two such determinants, first the overall economic development that gave Britain an unparalleled national market and connections to international ones, and second, a “culture of science” within which technical innovation was encouraged. Both these domains developed a high degree of autonomy by the eighteenth century, and James Watt emerged at the intersection of them.

Although debate has long raged about how to understand the emergence of modern industrial society, it has generally been agreed until recently that Europe’s (and especially Britain’s) pioneering role was enabled by certain distinctive features of its history, economy, or society. Today, however, certain scholars deny this, arguing that other societies had reached a level of development from which a transition similar to Britain’s could have emerged, and that the special trajectory Britain followed was enabled only by accidental or incidental factors or circumstances. The two proposed candidates are China and India, and this chapter takes up and seeks to refute the claims made in regard to each, in the process developing comparisons that show the utility of the categories of autonomy and teleocracy employed throughout this book for the history of industry. The impressive achievements of both countries are acknowledged and described, but growth and sophistication are shown to be insufficient without the structural features that made British society the special case it was.

Although France and Germany would acquire modern industrial economies after 1850, neither was in a position to do so even a few decades earlier. Only the coming of railroads would give either country the kind of national market that was so important in Britain. The same was true for science in France, but not in Germany, for reasons that had to do with the same fragmentation that kept its economy traditional. The impact of railroad construction made up for that absence in making economic transformation possible, so that organizing spheres in accord with principles derived from the activities carried on within them would come as a concomitant of industrial transformation rather than a precondition for it. Its most striking expression would be the organization of national professional organizations, dedicated to giving doctors, engineers, chemists, and academic researchers control over their own domains, and providing essential services for modern industrial societies.

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Committed to the same Aristotelian and Ptolemaic principles as their European counterparts, Arab astronomers produced highly accurate records of celestial motions and sought solutions to the same discrepancies between observation and theory. But none of these involved questioning geocentrism; astronomy was often pursued as an aid to religious observance, giving accurate times for holidays and rituals. Copernicus drew on Islamic writings as on many others, but claims that his heliocentrism in some way depended on them are unacceptable, given their unquestioning geocentrism. In his great work on Chinese science, Joseph Needham showed that it was often superior to Western natural philosophy both empirically and in its understanding of basic natural processes. He attributed its failure to produce a Copernican-Newtonian revolution to various external factors. But the notion that it had such potential rests on the false assumption that its strengths were the ground out of which a science capable of overturning the bases of its own practices might emerge. Such a capacity depends instead on the presence of conditions favorable to rendering the sphere of science autonomous. Only in the nineteenth century, spurred by modern chemistry, biology and physics brought by Western medical missionaries, would Chinese science take this turn.