Think Big

There is no shortage of ambition in Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made. The latest of Vaclav Smil’s more than forty titles, this book roams impressively around the globe and across five centuries as it asks big questions and searches for big answers. Its first sentence —“What makes the modern world work?”— leaves one cheering at the sheer audacity of the author’s goal but also puzzled at the presumption that any single volume could do the question justice.

Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has a strategy. He identifies five epochal transitions over the last half millennium that, taken together, have made us who we are as a species. For him, this is not about literary trends or philosophy. Nor is it about war or politics, let alone gender or race. It is about the non-event histories of long-term processes — many of them rooted in technological change — that have transformed the ways we live our everyday...