industrial revolution

Christensen C.S. Anthropogenic climate change, climate disasters and the role of nature: with special focus on the year 536

Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives. The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over recent millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have produced abundance of gases in the atmosphere that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has earned the ocean and lands, which lead to widespread and rapid changes in the environment. In this paper there are analysed anthropogenic changes, nature’s own role and climate disasters in comparing the results obtained into perspective with incidents in the year 536.

Mykhaylenko M.V. Controversy of late industrialization: the land-based empires argument for East Central Europe

The article ponders upon the social science controversy of late industrialization and therefore modernization with concern to imperial nations between the 18th and 20th centuries in an attempt to look for the explanations of why they didn’t fit into both waves of the industrial revolution. The research attempts to consider the case of the states that fell out of the first and second industrial revolutions, but were not the part of the traditionally understood developing world in terms of the difference in capabilities of land-based and naval-based empires. It’s also studied the ability of land-based empires to overcome the modernization challenge and the influence of Eurocentric stereotypes on this discussion. The examples of Habsburg Austria, Romanov Russia, Japan and Turkey are also analyzed. The descriptive comparison points to other factors responsible for relatively laggard modernization of these states.