Alternative Non-Western Modernization Theory
Discussion
Was Modernity Global and Non-European ?
Venkatesh Rao:
“Modernity began not in the 16th century, with the Age of Exploration, as in conventional accounts, but in the 13th (which was also an age of exploration1). Apparently I’m not alone in thinking this. Sachin Benny referred me to a book, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350: that makes one possible argument for this case, based on the rise of cities and urban culture. This is compatible with, but narrower than, the case I want to make.
This 400-year rewind isn’t a trivial act of revisionism. Moving the birth of modernity this way locates it temporally in the Islamic and Mongol phases of globalization, rather than the Western phase, and constructs it primarily in political and socio-economic terms rather than philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological terms. It identifies modernity with the rise of a particular cognitive mode that appeared globally and independently at multiple loci, driven by a few shared causes like the Black Death and the Mongol expansion. It reframes the European experience of 1200-1600 as a specifically European experience of modernization, rather than a prototype for a global one that spread mimetically through a pre-modern world. It reframes the scientific and technological revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries as largely decoupled leaps that irrupted into already modern societies (and minds) worldwide, rather than acting as modernizing forces that simultaneously Europeanized (or westernized) the societies and minds they acted on. And finally, it reframes the philosophical-cultural strand of the European experience — comprising the (artistic) Renaissance and (philosophical) Enlightenment, which predated the scientific-technological strand, but came after the global birth of modernity — as a making of the specifically European mind, which did not in fact go global at all, and has remained restricted to the West.
In the model I want to lay out, non-Western populations globally became technologically modern through the effects of scientific and technological revolutions acting on a landscape of regional early modernities that took shape 1200-1600. The science-technology strand, being far more weakly attached (if at all) to the European historical experience (and to a lesser extent, the Islamic historical experience), acting alone without the presumed force of the philosophical-cultural strand acting in concert, arguably increased philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic distances rather than decreasing them, driving a long 400-year divergence of early modernities rather than a convergence of pre-modernities into a western mode of being.
This might feel like a very contrarian point, but it feels increasingly compelling to me. One strong point in favor of this conclusion is that the religious map of the Old World, ie not counting the Americas and Australia, has remained largely unchanged since 1200 (the last significant change being the replacement of Buddhism by Islam in Central Asia, which was mostly complete by 1200). The geographic contours of religion, understood as a complex assemblage of philosophy, culture, and aesthetics, have only marginally shifted since 1200. Almost the entirety of the shaping of religious “market shares” through evangelism or war was complete by then. An interesting data point is that Christianity in India, after centuries of evangelism by European denominations, still features a significant pre-modern fraction (Syriac, at 18%) that does not derive from the European experience of Christianity. Europe did not even succeed in fully westernizing non-Western Christians, let alone displacing other religions. Science and technology, on the other hand, are approaching 100% penetration.
In other words, philosophical/cultural/aesthetic “westernization” over the centuries has been largely cosmetic, restricted to suits and ties. Science and technology, on the other hand, have sunk deep everywhere (in the process losing any path-dependent memories from early Europe and Islam), creating a diversity of technologically modern, but only cosmetically westernized civilizational regions.
…
The case I want to make is one based on an idea of psychological modernity, in the same sense that physical anthropologists make a case for anatomical modernity. Sometime between 1200 and 1600, psychologically modern humans emerged (not counting a possible earlier leap to unicameral minds that Julian Jaynes argued for). And we know this not just from the ways humans began to think through that period (as evidenced in their writings worldwide), but from the ways they began to organize politically, socially, culturally, and religiously, worldwide, and in parallel.”
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)
Protecting Non-Western Modernization from Traditionalists
Venkatesh Rao:
“Traditionalists worldwide, and reactionaries in particular, want to unwind approximately 700 years of the making of their own minds, to recover historical versions of themselves who are both pre-modern, and largely decoupled from the rest of the planet, genetically and memetically. It is no accident that all traditionalists seem to want to rewind to roughly 1100 or so. That is roughly when, by their reckoning, everything started going to hell in an unending orgy of global cultural entanglement, miscegnation, secularization, and technological transformation. Islam is a convenient motif for the global transformation, since it was often the proximal cause due to its geographically central origins, but is not ultimate cause. One bit of evidence: Islamists themselves, of course, want to rewind to the First Caliphate. They are no more attached to the modernity they midwifed into existence than traditionalists from other cultures.”
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)
The New Timeline for Modernization and Post-Modernization
Venkatesh Rao:
1. “First off, I think we’re at the beginning of a new long arc. If 1200-1900 was the arc from early modernity to modernity, the arc from roughly 1960 on is going to be a similarly long one from modernity to post-modernity. Given technological acceleration, it might take 350 years instead of 700 for the wound-up clockwork machine to wind down, but it won’t happen in 5, 10, 30, or 100 years. The world has accelerated, but not by that much. And there are rate-limiters in how fast new sorts of mind, harboring a new consciousness can diffuse.
2. This means that just as we currently view “modernity” as being visibly born in the 17th century but really born in the 13th, I suspect future generations, in say the year 3000, will view “postmodernity” as having been visibly born in say 2500, but really being born right now(and starting to take shape as early as 1600). And just as I have characterized what happened in 1200-1600 as the birth of psychologically modern humans, I suspect what we’re seeing the beginnings of what will eventually be recognized as sociologically modern humans, who can associate with each other in ways far more complex and technically sophisticated than we can imagine.”
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)
The Alternative Timeline by Mark Whitaker
Synthetic Hypothesis: The Unbalancing of Humanity's "Dual Heritage"
The core proposition is that the current "global systemic mass extinction" is not a recent or solely industrial phenomenon, but the culmination of a macro-historical process that began with the rise of a truly global trade and state system in the mid-first millennium CE.
This process can be understood through a tripartite framework of human-environmental relationships during the Holocene:
Phase 1 (c. 3500 BCE – c. 2000 BCE): The "Softer" State
Environmental Context: A more lush and well-watered global climate.
Socio-Political Character: Early state formation was less scaled, less harsh, and more oriented toward ecological concerns. It lacked the tools for widespread oppositional networking (simple scripts were scarce) and the military technology (horse-based aristocratic elites) for large-scale territorial conquest. This was a period of localized, relatively sustainable state architectures.
Phase 2 (c. 2000 BCE – c. 500/600 CE): The "Dual Heritage" of Regional Balance
Environmental Shift: A major desiccation of the global climate made agriculture more precarious, increasing the incentive for extractive military conquest.
Socio-Political Character: This harsher climate fostered the rise of horse-based elites and unrepresentative states that relied on conquest to shore up budgets. However, this dynamic was counterbalanced by the emergence of more representative and sustainable forces at the regional level. This created a "dual heritage"—a tension between degradation and sustainability—that, while not perfect, maintained a relative equilibrium within distinct regional civilizations.
Phase 3 (c. 500/600 CE – Present): The Global Unbalancing
The Catalyst: The expansion of Islam (and subsequently the Mongols and Europeans) created the first global state presence and trade system, transcending the previous regional confines.
The Rupture: This new global scale of interconnection and state power fundamentally unbalanced the "dual heritage." The forces of degradation, which had previously been held in check regionally, were now amplified to a systemic, planetary level. The mechanisms for representation and sustainability, which had their strength in regional contexts, were overwhelmed or co-opted by this new globalized framework.
Intellectual Genealogy of the Hypothesis
This synthetic view is built upon a specific revision of world history, influenced by the work of Marshall Hodgson:
Rejection of the Standard Two-Part World History: The hypothesis challenges the conventional division (e.g., "pre-modern" and "modern").
Islam as the First Global Modernity: It adopts Hodgson's view that the Islamic expansion (c. 500s/600s) was not a regional event but the first phase of a globalizing modernity, marked by universities, cosmopolitan cross-cultural exchange, and an extensive trade network from Morocco to Southeast Asia.
A New Three-Part Periodization: Therefore, the hypothesis frames world history in three sections:
- Pre-Islamic Regional Civilizations: A period of regional civilizations and their interlinkages.
- The Islamic (and Mongol) Expansion: The first globalizing phase, which creates the systemic scale that ultimately breaks the regional "dual heritage."
- The Era of European Hegemony and its Multipolar, Technocratic Aftermath: The continuation and transformation of this global system.
In essence, the hypothesis argues that the ecological crisis is a product of a specific historical "scaling up"—the transition from a world of balanced regional systems to a unified but ecologically unmoored global system.
Mark W. adds:
"However, the scale of a more balanced dual heritage opposition is catching up once more, due to two factors:
(1) a growing more balanced and nested public sphere of discussion of billions of digitally decentralized nodes of communication worldwide, equally distributed worldwide. Thus, our changing media (just like in the past after the invention of simple scripts after 1000 BCE onward) changes the context of the dual heritage and makes the oppositional side more possible, and far stronger. This revives the balance of a long-unbalanced dual heritage (with that unbalanced quality starting about 1500 years ago (around 500/600BCE)). Plus,
(2) the ending of all global hinterlands pushes such a dual heritage to be stronger still, due to a greater context of complete "voice" over past "exit", for the first time in world history. [Hirschman, "Exit, Voice, Loyalty"]
(summary by DeepSeek of email by Mark Whitaker, June 2026)
See also: Alternative World History Timeline by Mark Whitaker
Examples
The European Modernity Machine
Venkatesh Rao:
“I’d argue that the pivotal event was Philip IV’s decisive strike against the Templars in 1307, followed by the relocation of the (French-pwned) papacy to Avignon in 1309. The run-up to this event, and the aftermath, effectively created the European edition of what I want to call the modernity machine, which emerged in roughly similar forms worldwide, through the next couple of centuries. The main elements of the modernity machine (European edition) are:
1. A secularly shifting balance-of-power configuration of political actors governed by negotiated contractual relationships that systematically favored previously weaker parties, rather than theological axioms
2. The beginnings of what we’d call a technocracy in the form of the culture of medieval knights (the rung below the Baronial class which negotiated the Magna Carta) as well as the clergy.
3. The beginnings of secular pluralism, in the wake of the Crusades, which prefigured the modern patterns of religious co-existence that would get fully worked out and realized via events like the Reformation (and comparable events worldwide) and the Peace of Westphalia.
4. The beginnings of accountability to individuals, via mechanisms besides popular insurrections and revolts, most clearly visible in the rise of free cities as a category of geographic organization distinct from agrarian estates or royal courts. All this started about 400 years before most people assume it did. This scheme is roughly similar to, and compatible with, the one Francis Fukuyama sketched out in The Origins of Political Order.
…
Imagine this machine, taking shape starting around 1250, being wound up like a clockwork toy, and being allowed to run for 700 years, and you get what we currently living generations recognize as our modernity. In terms of a technological metaphor, the machine was shifting steadily from one equilibrium point to another in a surprisingly controlled rather than revolutionary way. Philosophy, art, science, and technology were to some degree merely fuel for this machine that had been set in motion, and generated by it, rather than constitutive forces determining its fundamental character. I’m perhaps overstating the argument for effect, but not by as much as you might think.”
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)