The Great Waves of Industrial Innovation

Here is a great and profound question:

"How did the world of lord and serf, horse and carriage, superstition and disease, turn into the world of boss and worker, steam and steel, science and medicine?"

Jonathan Steinberg asks us to ponder this in his lecture series “European History and European Lives: 1715 to 1914.” We can add to his question, among countless other things previously unimaginable, “and the world of jets and space probes, computers and Google searches, antibiotics and automatic washing machines, and sustained long-term economic growth per capita?” Relative to all previous human life, this new world, the one we live in, is truly astonishing. As Steinberg asks us to wonder, “How and why did what we call the modern world come about?”