Short answers, pulled from the story.
The early modern period was a historical era running from about 1500 to somewhere between 1700 and 1800, sitting after the Middle Ages and before modernity. Its divisions are based primarily on the history of Europe and the broader concept of modernity, and there is no exact date marking its beginning or end.
The medieval historian Lynn Thorndike first proposed early modern as a distinct period of European history in his 1926 work A Short History of Civilization. He offered it as a broader alternative to the Renaissance, though the first known usage of the phrase dates to 1895.
Proposed starting points include the Renaissance, the printing revolution of the 1440s, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Age of Discovery, and the start of the Reformation. The Columbian contact between the Old World and the New World is another marker historians use.
The Mughal Empire, usually dated from 1526, is believed to have held the world's largest economy during the early modern period, worth a quarter of global GDP and larger than all of Western Europe combined. It ruled most of the Indian subcontinent as Hindustan and left brilliant literary, artistic, and architectural results.
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries replaced older methods of studying nature with empiricism and modern science. Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric work in 1543, and Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica of 1687 is often used to mark the end of the Revolution.
The early modern period is taken to end with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire at the Congress of Vienna. By its close the British and Russian empires had emerged as world powers, while Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Qing China entered stagnation or decline.