Historians can't agree when 'late modern' even ends
Many periodizations start the late modern period with the French Revolution in 1789 after the early modern age, then either close it in 1945 with World War II's end or let it swallow contemporary history to the present. American and French revolutions plus an Industrial Revolution around 1760 mark the hinge.
The starting line is fairly settled; the finish is not. One camp closes the era in 1945, another says it never closed at all, and a third hands the present to a successor with its own label. Candidates include the Information Age, which from the mid-twentieth century moved economies from factory industry toward information technology, and the post-industrial society, a term coined by Alain Touraine for a stage when services earn more than manufacturing. Some researchers even date the break to around 1950, when worry about the environment undercut modern confidence in mastering nature.
Inside the period, historians carve smaller units. Eric Hobsbawm argued the Industrial Revolution erupted between 1789 and 1848, whereas T. S. Ashton placed it roughly from 1760 to 1830; either way, steam engines built to pump water out of British coal mines set it moving. A conventional nineteenth century runs from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to 1914, while Hobsbawm's long version stretches from 1789 to 1914. The Cold War, usually dated from the Truman Doctrine of March 1947 to the Soviet collapse in December 1991, forms another block.
Empires rose and crumbled across these decades. Spain, weakened by Napoleon's invasion, lost most of its American colonies in wars of independence between 1808 and 1829, keeping only Cuba and Puerto Rico until 1898, and Brazil became an independent empire in 1822. Britain, facing no serious rival after Napoleon except Russia in Central Asia, came to govern about a quarter of the world's people by the end of the First World War. Queen Victoria's reign, from June 1837 to January 1901, gave its name to a long spell of British prosperity and a growing educated middle class.
Source: Late modern period
