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Industrial and Global Integration

Part Five of this text corresponds to Period 5 of the AP^® course outline and constitutes 20 percent of the AP^® exam. The 150 years addressed in these chapters have great historical significance in many ways. Environmentally, they mark the advent of the Anthropocene era, when human activity began to affect the planet in ways that will be apparent for centuries to come. Much of this activity was occasioned by the Industrial Revolution (IR), a thorough transformation of economic life that began in Europe but grew to global dimensions. That economic transformation, in turn, lay at the heart of what we have come to call “modernity,” as new kinds of social life and new cultural outlooks began to take shape. In political terms, all of this led to a mounting influence of European peoples and countries, amounting to an unprecedented, albeit temporary, dominance of one part of the world over the entire globe.

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