What is Modernity? Answer for Head-to-Head in History Today

Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of Penang Institute and author of Signals in the Noise: Notes on Penang, Malaysia and the World (Faction Press). Featured in “Head to Head” in History Today January 2025: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/what-modernity.

“For most of the world, modernity arrived as a fully formed composite”

MODERNITY HAS TO be considered a global event. It is quite impossible for us today to imagine a geographically limited modernity – confined, say, to Europe – in which technologies and ideas, or capital, goods, and labour, in one territory remain separate and inconsequential to another. If the world is fully connected, modernity is what made the connection.

Originally an explosive expression of European socio-political and philosophical development, modernity has come to be strongly associated with colonisation. For most of the world modernity arrived fully formed in the centuries preceding the Second World War, as a composite of established dynamics into which they were dragged in subjugated roles. For the illustrative example of Japan in the 1860s, modernity was a matter of learning and importing those dynamics – pertinently a modern military and Western scientific thinking. The Japanese thus experienced a ‘modernisation’ from within, embracing the process with haste. Many other countries did not want – or were unable – to go as far as Japan, and sought to limit the spread of modernity.

Modernity, then, was a violent process, revolutionary and disruptive. Only with the independence of the world’s colonised regions since the mid-1900s could modernity be considered a cultural and civilisational phenomenon rather than a political and imperialist one. ‘Localising modernity’, one could glibly say, is what ‘nation-building’ means to those postcolonial states that are now members of the United Nations.

How far they need to go –how ‘modern’ they need to become – remains a plaguing question. Thus we have seen the emergence of tag-on phrases such as ‘with Chinese characteristics’ or ‘with Asian values’. But it is a question that cannot be answered without the realisation that modernity is also tantamount to the establishment of international economics. A city-state like Singapore, established in 1819 to aid Britain’s post-Napoleonic global growth, was, in that sense, ‘modern’ from day one. Despite the ‘localising’ of Singapore since its independence in 1965, it remains the modern phenomenon that it always was: a hub for international economic activity.