Robert Marks’s “Introduction–The Rise of the West

Compose a summary of Robert Marks’s “Introduction–The Rise of the West?” in The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century.
An appropriate summary should give an overview of the entire chapter of the book and not just the opening pages. An acceptable summary should not need extensive quotations. However, it is important to note that you must put the author’s ideas in your own words. Simply retyping sentences from the book or superficially altering a word or two is not acceptable–it is plagiarism–so please be careful to avoid this pitfall.