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Notes -
This makes me think of ACOUP on the industrial revolution. Now, I think Bret Devereaux goes too far in his claim that virtually nowhere but 18th-century northern England could possibly have begun the industrial revolution (it doesn't take too much imagination to think of possible substitutes for ingredients he considers necessary, and the fact that there has been only one historical industrial revolution isn't that strong as evidence that it could have begun nowhere else, considering the speed of its spread means that there was little opportunity for independent industrial revolutions after the first.)
-But I do think that the overall point that the course of history is contingent on a lot of steps needed to get everywhere, and as such, I would expect annihilating the population of medieval Europe to produce a path of global technological development that would be at least substantially delayed. (No printing press, no telescope, and no need for Europeans to seek alternative to Ottoman-conquered trade routes takes a good deal of the oomph out of mid-2nd-millennium development.)
So is this book's Modern Age at least a couple centuries delayed relative to reality? I'd hope so, as the alternative suggests an untenably-strong view of historical inevitability.
Nope. Not in the least. It moves in lockstep, we get the Middle Ages, a Renaissance+Industrial Revolution, and a 20th century that's pretty similar to our own. At the start of the 21st century, they're practically identical, barring a reduced prevalence of consumer electronics since they use standalone desktop computers instead of mobile devices.
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