This course is about the developments that led to the emergence of our modern world. Various factors have been highlighted by historians as responsible for this, including government reform, agricultural practices, empirical rationality, consumption patterns, military conflict, property rights, family arrangements, territorial conquest, land administration - and sheer accident. Although scholarly consensus on the leading-edge factors still eludes us, there is broad agreement that the polities of the regions centred on northwestern Europe, eastern China and northern India played critical roles, and that the fateful changes occurred between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.