We look back now to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the time of origins of modernity -commercial and industrial revolutions, demographic transition, imperial expansion, the rise of working-class and artisan radicalism, and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. But this time of origins and transitions was also cast in contradictions and conflict: riches and poverty; markets and slaves; gender divisions; private life and public virtue; consumers and criminals; enlightened rationalism and religious enthusiasm, oligarchic government and popular radicalism. The eighteenth century was the great time of possibilities, opportunities, new directions and identities, but no certainties of what these were to be. This course provides an overview of these and other themes of a society creating itself anew.