an additional 7 percent each, while only 1 percent comes from geothermal, solar, wind, wood, and waste sources. World energy use has increased seventy-fold since the onset of the fossil-fuel era.

#  **How History Is Really Made**

Schoolchildren are taught that a young genius named James Watt gave birth to the fossil-fuel era and the Industrial Revolution with the invention of a steam engine powered by coal. The steam engine, in turn, ushered in a modern era of material progress and human achievements unrivaled in history.

Well, not exactly. The story of how the world turned to coal and steam power, opening the door to the fossil-fuel era, is a bit more convoluted.

Medieval Europe had long relied on wood as its primary energy source. The dense forest cover across westernand had made the first dominant in the affairs of society while relegating the second to private life.

The Church could continue to advance the faith but would no longer be the overarching organizing schema for society. In its place would be a new institutional model, the nation-state, a secular vehicle tailored to spread "reason"—in the form of modern science, technology, and commerce—to the four corners of the Earth. The new trinity would come to rule the world over the course of the next two centuries, and, everywhere its tentacles reached, Islam would face retreat, subjugation, and, ultimately, humiliation at the hands of the West.

By the late 19th century, many Muslims were beginning to ask what the West possessed in the way of educational models, technologies, and political and