The Late Modern Period

The late modern period runs conventionally from the French Revolution of 1789 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, roughly a century and a half that saw the political order of the Atlantic world remade by revolution, the economic and social transformation of the Industrial Revolution, the rise and competition of European colonial empires across most of the globe, and finally two world wars whose scale and destructiveness had no precedent in human history. The French Revolution overturned the French monarchy and spread ideas of popular sovereignty, nationalism and citizenship across Europe, while the Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, shifted economies from agriculture and handcraft toward mechanized factory production, reshaping where and how most people lived and worked. By the period's end, European and, increasingly, American and Japanese industrial and military power had projected itself across nearly the entire globe through colonialism, and the two world wars of the twentieth century, fought substantially over the resulting imperial and industrial rivalries, killed tens of millions of people and redrew the political map of the world.