This Fleeting World

Our World: The Modern Era 65
An early twentieth-century industrialized distilling plant. Note the contrast with
the traditional Irish plant shown in the inset.
during the modern era. As yet no general agreement exists on the causes
of the modern revolution or, indeed, on the general causes of innovation
in human history. However, widespread agreement exists on some of the
more important contributing factors.
Accumulated Changes of the Agrarian Era
First, the modern revolution clearly built on the accumulated changes of
the agrarian era. Slow growth during several millennia had led to incremental
technological improvements in agriculture and water management,
in warfare, in mining, in metalwork, and in transportation and communications.
Improvements in transportation and communications—such as
the development of more maneuverable ships or the ability to print with
movable type—were particularly important because they increased the
scale of exchanges and ensured that new technologies, goods, and ideas
circulated more freely. Methods of organizing large numbers of humans
for warfare or tax collection also improved during the agrarian era. In
ways that are not yet entirely clear, these slow technological and organizational
changes, together with a steady expansion in the size and scale
of global markets, created the springboard for the much faster changes of