We are back at our starting point in the frontier zone of the Eurasian system. We see the clear ‘jump-start’ effect in the generation of Machiavelli and the explosion of the Reformation. From this point onwards, the acceleration is pronounced and unflagging until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and generates a revolutionary turbulence, from which emerges the new industrial society we call ‘modern’.

As in the ancient world, the first changes hug the proximity of the earlier age, visible as the (late) Italian Renaissance, and then appear in the outlying areas, moving in south/north direction. The clear appearance of focal intensity in a Northern band of Germany, France, Netherlands, England, is exactly to be expected, and passes immediately to the New World as a great extension of the effect. The overseas expansion and global connection, nationalism and new forms of warfare, the onset of early industrial transformation with a price revolution, a demographic surge, the scientific renewal, the first phases of social revolution, the Reformation as a religious evolutionary transform or ‘re-formation’, the crystallization of the early forms of a new tradition in the rapid appearance of national literatures climax in the passage from a first to a second stage in the seventeenth century. Here in many ways we see the character of the changes begin to reveal the results of their random stirrings in the beginnings of human direction to the transformation: the beginning of the Enlightenment, the real Scientific Revolution, and the generation of the new forms of economy, culture and economy that will initiate a new pattern of world history in the passage through the cauldron of revolution and industrialization. Instead of the ‘rise of the West’ we now have:

‘ET6,…Atlantic sector: Western Eurasia ,…’: After the onset of the Reformation in the sixteenth, the transformation clearly begins to show its truly new character from the middle of the seventeenth century, as if what came before were nothing more than the breaking of ground. The Reformation begins to yield to the Enlightenment, the age of Copernicus to the age of Newton, the forms of governance stir in the English Revolution to generate the forms of the new liberalism, with a ‘socialism’ hiding behind it, and quite underpowered. The final piece of the new world is rapidly taking form before the onset of industrialism in an earthquake of democratic revolution, globalization, and economic expansion.

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