'Hinge moments' in history: how change happens
IDEAS explores five years that profoundly shaped the modern world in a series, The Shock of the New
*This series originally aired in November of 2022.
In his essay collection Languages of Truth, Salman Rushdie proposed that there are "hinge moments" in history, when "everything is in flux … [and] the future is up for grabs."
"When one lives at a hinge moment in history, as we do, as Shakespeare did when he wrote his protean plays … then it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do, because all must be remade, all, with our best efforts, must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten," he wrote.
His writing about hinge moments is what inspired our five-part series The Shock of the New, recorded at the 2022 Stratford Festival.
We picked five years — 1600, 1789, 1833, 1913 and 1947 — each of which signified new beginnings in politics, science, human rights, and which illuminate the obvious, and the not-so-obvious, forces that continue to shape our world.
The series explores how change happens, how we feel the effects of social change years or centuries later, and how our own society is changing today.
The Year 1600: The Birth of the Modern?
Empires are expanding, the British East India Company is born, and the silver trade between South America and China begins to stitch the world into a global economy. Shakespeare is writing Hamlet, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar, and Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake for his scientific discoveries.
Guests in this episode:
Jyotsna Singh is a professor of English at Michigan State University. Her focus is early modern literature and culture, including the Renaissance, Shakespeare, travel writing, postcolonial theory, early modern histories of Islam, and gender and race studies. Her books include A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion.
Chris Smeenk is a professor of philosophy at Western University and Director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. His main research interests are in history and philosophy of physics, the philosophy of science, and seventeenth century natural philosophy.
Amitava Chowdhury is a historian and Chair of the Department of History at Queen's University, where he directs the Global History Initiative. Much of his research is about global histories of diasporas within the British Empire. He's also interested in colonialism, as well as issues of identity and nationalism.
The Year 1789: More Than One Revolution
A revolution in France heralds a change in political order everywhere. The revolution upends ideas about everyday life, gender, time and more. New definitions of freedom and equality emerge — and are fiercely contested. As empires expand, enslaved people and anticolonial leaders push back.
Guests in this episode:
William Nelson is a professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He specializes in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. His research focuses on ideas about time, race, and biopolitics that emerged in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world, and the development of early modern globalization. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France 1750 to Year One and co-edited The French Revolution in Global Perspective.
Darryl Dee is a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University. He specializes in 17th- and 18th-century French history, particularly the reign of Louis XIV, and in military history. He also produces a podcast, Great Battles in History.
Karen Valihora is a professor of English at York University. She specializes in the history of ideas, and she teaches courses on the English Romantics, Milton, 18th century literature, and literary theory. She is the author of Austen's Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury.
The Year 1833: Evolution and Entrenchment
Britain abolishes slavery — but consolidates and expands its empire, especially in Africa and the Caribbean. Industrialization transforms the nature of work, communication and travel. The inventors of the computer meet for the first time, and Charles Darwin has a revelation that will revolutionize science and challenge religions.
Guests in this episode:
Maydianne Andrade is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Toronto and President and co-founder of the Canadian Black Scientists Network. She studies conservation, ecology, evolution, neuroscience and behaviour.
Padraic Scanlan is an assistant professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, cross-appointed to the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. His research focuses on labour, enslaved and free, in the British empire during the 18th and 19th centuries. He's the author of Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain and Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution.
Sandra den Otter is a professor of history and Vice Provost International at Queen's University. She researches and teaches in the area of late 18th, 19th and 20th century British history, with a particular expertise in the history of colonial legal cultures, intellectual history, ideas of social welfare and humanitarianism, and the history of the social sciences. She co-edits The Journal of British Studies.
The Year 1913: The World on the Brink
Storm clouds gather in Europe. The Ottoman Empire is at war in the Balkans. There's a revolution in Mexico and a coup in Istanbul. Women worldwide agitate for suffrage. Modernism bursts onto the artistic stage, raising new questions about the nature of reality, and Rabindranath Tagore becomes the first non-western writer to win the Nobel Prize.
Guests in this episode:
Deborah Neill is a professor of history at York University. Her teaching interests are focused on the history of modern Europe since 1789 and include imperialism, WWI and WWII, the Holocaust, modern Germany, modern France, European colonialism in Africa, war, revolution and society in the 20th century, and globalization.
Sandeep Banerjee is a professor of English at McGill University. His teaching and research includes postcolonial, global anglophone and world literature, literary geography, the environmental humanities and the cultural Cold War, Realism, Modernism and South Asian literature. He is the author of Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony.
Adam Hammond is a professor of English at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on British modernism — specifically, the relationship between technology, politics, and artistic expression in the period. His most recent book is The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of JETT.
The Year 1947: Fractures and Tectonic Shifts
The Partition of India creates the largest mass migration in human history. The newly-created United Nations votes to partition British Palestine. The Cold War divides the world into opposing camps, and empires collapse and retreat.
Guests in this episode:
Cindy Ewing is a professor of history at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focus on the international history of the Cold War in postcolonial South and Southeast Asia. Her scholarship examines the interconnections between decolonization and other global processes of the twentieth century, including nationalism, postcolonialism, human rights, neutralism and non-alignment, and the development of international institutions such as the United Nations.
Sanjay Ruparelia is a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair. He studies the politics of democracy, equality and development in the postcolonial world, as well as the role of parties, movements and institutions in politics.
Bessma Momani is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. She works in the fields of international organizations, international political economy, gender and diversity, and the geopolitics and political economy of the Middle East.
*This series was produced by Philip Coulter, Pauline Holdsworth and Nahlah Ayed, with production assistance from Naheed Mustafa.
