AHR Forum History and the “Pre” DANIEL LORD SMAIL AND ANDREW SHRYOCK THOUGH COINED IN 1635, THE WORD “modernity” trickled into the habits of English diction only toward the end of the nineteenth century. (See Figure 1.) “Modern” itself is a word of venerable antiquity. In its original meaning, it did not denote an era so much as the front edge of the advancing wave of time. In the faintly derisory usage typical of ancient and medieval texts, “modern” gestured to institutions or patterns that were newfangled or gaudy, to kings and queens, princes and popes, who were forgetful of what they owed to the past. The understanding of modernity that is statistically noticeable by 1900 was very different, and not only because the derision had faded. In its more recent meanings, “modernity” represents a new way of think- ing about time. The threshold of modernity is not located in the space around us; it is instead a point that lies on a receding horizon. Everything visible on this side of the horizon partakes of modernity, with the exceptions and anomalies we now take (and often mistake) for the residue of earlier times. Invisible over the horizon is the “pre.” By 1980, the pace of usage of “modernity” began to accelerate. The quiet murmur that marked much of the twentieth century became a hum and then, by 2000, a roar. The new enthusiasm produced many studies of the modern and the postmodern, in history as in many other fields. 1 This turn of events is not without justification. Cap- italism, the nation-state, secularism, the corporation, popular sovereignty, mass me- dia, industrialism—these are all associated with modernity, and each is worthy of careful study. But the attention that historians have lavished on this period and its forms has come at a price. When modernity became “the key concept of general history,” as one historian has put it, a subsequent flattening of history was nearly We have presented versions of this article at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, the University of Mich- igan, Duke University, and Indiana University; our thanks to our hosts and to the members of the audiences. A number of colleagues read and made suggestions on prior drafts, and we are grateful to all of them, especially David Akin, Carla Heelan, Engseng Ho, Michael Puett, John Robb, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR . We are especially grateful to Jane Lyle for her excellent editorial work. 1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1980; repr., New York, 1991); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 1991); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Ju ¨rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Boston, 1987); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1990). 709 by guest on June 1, 2013 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from