ABSTRACT
The process of modernization, manifest as a threat to history and traditions, has been enduring for at least 500 years. Yet during the first half of the nineteenth century the experience of modernization had unique characteristics. Around 8085 per cent of people lived on the land as farmers working almost exclusively with their own muscle power and subjected to the insecurities of poverty, famine, illness, war and old age. Yet the biggest change that humanity had experienced since its transition to agriculture, many millennia before, was underway. The Industrial Revolution, the rapid conversion to a fossil fuel based economy, was a truly global phenomenon1, encompassing all but a few million people in remote areas. 1 The global effects of the Industrial Revolution were most spectacularly felt in the growth of world population, which up to 1700 had increased slowly to 610 million, had grown to 900 million during the eighteenth century, and had exploded to 1.6 billion by the end of the nineteenth century.
