The last 250 years is a story of increasing globalization, as the world gets smaller and technology joins up more and more parts of the world. 

Seven Key Historical Moments

What happens in 1776—this one remarkable year—is that there are seven key developments that you can see in a particularly intense form.

You have globalization; the Enlightenment, the intellectual development that makes Europeans think that we are the first people to understand the world for itself rather than just being taught what to believe; you have industrialization, which centers on the development of the steam engine and then developments in mining and trains and all the things that flow from it, like electricity; you have enrichment, which is really important because if you looked at a map of how human beings have developed in wealth over the whole of human history, you would see it sort of bumps along like this for 10,000 years, and then somewhere around the 1770s it shoots upwards and hasn’t stopped rising since. And then you have democracy, which of course is the one development most of us do know about because of the American Revolution. You have the move to post-Christianity, or ex-Christianity, where elites in Europe and North America begin to say that they’re going to leave behind Christianity and move beyond it.

And then you have Romanticism, which is the artistic movement that comes out in poetry, music, and art, but it also shapes the way we think about the self and who we are in our image-bearing.

And effectively, those seven developments are all concentrated in this one year, and then they explode out and shape almost everything in modern life. The last 250 years is a story of increasing globalization, as the world gets smaller and technology joins up more and more parts of the world. Actually, the Enlightenment informs the way we think about ourselves and education and knowledge, and the way we think about science and history and women and slavery and all sorts of things are all connected there.

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