The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910 -- Week 1 Video Lecture Summary
The following are my lecture notes for Week 1 of the Coursera course The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910 . Video 1: The Study of History Figuring out the facts of history is challenging and not straightforward. Answering the questions about what happened isn't easy. In this course, we'll explore why things happened, and not just what happened. The facts are the circumstances, but the interesting things are the choices people made, as well as examining what didn't happen. Video 2: The Great Divide The traditional life = rate of change is slow. Modern life = rate of change is high. The rate of population growth dramatically changes in the late 1700s. Before and after = the great divide. The world was very populated first in Europe, and then the Americas and Africa became more populated. The Malthusian trap = more people but less stuff to go around. The amount of stuff is constant (really?), so overall poverty increases. This was the case until around