Ij the reader were to take a map of Europe, set a compass on the city of Paris, and draw a circle with a radius of 500 miles, a zone would be marked out from which much of modern “Western” civilization radiated after about 1640. It was within this zone that a secular society, modern natural science, a developed capitalism, the modern state, parliamentary government, democratic ideas, machine industry, and much else either originated or received their first full expression. The extreme western parts of Europe—Ireland, Portugal, and Spain—were somewhat outside the zone in which the most rapid changes occurred. But within it were England, southern Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, western and central Germany, and northern Italy. This area, for over two hundred years beginning in the seventeenth century, was the earth’s principal center of what anthropologists might call cultural diffusion. Although the economy and culture of Western Europe were deeply influenced by the expanding trade and contacts with people outside Europe, the growing power of western European states, trading companies, science, and cultural institutions had a profound and spreading impact on the rest of Europe, the Americas, and ultimately the whole world.
World History
