Conclusions to Part II

Summary

In the Conclusions to Chapter 3, working with the advantage of hindsight, I focused on the end of the CAPE era, its successful, if tenuous, connecting up of the whole planet by trade, and the precursors of its transition towards a new era of modernity. I looked in particular at the leading role of merchants and commerce in realising dreams of universality beyond the reach of any empire or religion, albeit mainly in the economic sector and not in the political and societal ones. I posited that the great achievement of the CAPE era was to achieve the first conscious globalisation, but that given the limits of technology and energy resources, this could only be done thinly. That pointed forward to the intensification of globalisation as the likely next step for humankind after the CAPE era. The four chapters in Part II could easily be read as fulfilling that expectation. Especially in material terms, globalisation was hugely intensified. The social picture is much more mixed, but can also be read as intensifying globalisation. It is absolutely clear that by the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, the CAPE era was over. The question is how to read what followed it: as the opening of a third era, modernity, or as the opening of a period of transition between the CAPE era and an emergent modernity?