Introduction to Part II

Summary

Chapter 3 has set out a sufficiently full sketch of CAPE society to provide a good sense of what the nineteenth-century turn towards modernity was a transition from. The questions to be answered in this second part of the book are two. First, what was that transition to? In other words, what is ‘modernity’? And second, what was the nature of the transition itself? It is clear that the CAPE era ended. But it is less clear that modernity has properly or fully begun. Are we still within a transition period somehow parallel to that between the hunter-gatherer and CAPE eras? Or has history accelerated so much that the transition was very quick, perhaps only a few decades, and we are now fully into the modern era? What did the shift out of the CAPE era towards the modern one involve, both materially and in terms of social structure? How did this shift unfold over the last two-plus centuries, and where are we now? This sets up for Part III, which looks at where this unfolding seems to be heading.