The couple of centuries that have passed since the Napoleonic Wars saw the origin and growth of what we like to call "modernity." Modernity, among other things, means near-exponential growth in the world's population (from 950 million to 6,000 million). All those people, and the unavoidable clashes between them due to the mass migrations from countryside to city, from war zones....and the limited space they share, generate a vast cultural multiplicity that has no equivalent in previous history. For this reason it is not easy to find an adquate graphical representation of this age.

I have chosen to focus on three limited aspects of modernity (technological innovations, artistic expression, mass migration), which are set against a background of the great wars of the time and the resulting death of the European empires, and the emergence of new, non-European empires.

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