The eighteenth century was a time of major global transitions. Movements of religious and intellectual revival challenged established ideas, European colonies emerged in the Western hemisphere, global trade expanded, and political revolutions and revolts in America, France, Russia, and Haiti started to reshape political life. At the beginning of the century, power and wealth were roughly balanced among the major regions of the world. By its end, this balance was upset by the emergence of European imperial nation-states and Western European industrial societies whose evolution was enabled by modern processes of industrialization, globalization, and empires.

John O. Voll highlights key events and individuals in that transformation, from Emperor Kangxi's meeting with Jesuits and Catherine the Great's imperial expansion of Russia, Jonathan Edwards's Great Awakening and Muhammid ibn Abd al-Wahhab's Islam reform movement to Mulla Abdul Ghafur's trade in cotton, Richard Arkwright's textile factories, and Isaac Newton's and Immanuel Kant's contributions to the Enlightenment and modern science. This book shows that the eighteenth century was a time of transition to modernity, a time when the impact of the first globalization was being felt around the world. Old ways of life disappeared as new ways of organizing human activities emerged.