Early modern period
The early modern period has no birthday. Historians cannot agree on when it began or when it ended, and its borders shift depending on which corner of the world you study. In a European frame it sits after the Middle Ages and before modernity, roughly from around 1500 to somewhere between 1700 and 1800. The first known use of the phrase early modern dates to 1895. Yet the medieval historian Lynn Thorndike was the one who first proposed it as a distinct era, in his 1926 work A Short History of Civilization. So why does a period this slippery matter? Because something was knitting the planet together for the first time. New World met Old World, silver crossed oceans, gunpowder reshaped armies, and reason began to displace inherited dogma. The questions that follow are simple to ask and hard to answer. What made these centuries hang together as one story? Who were the rulers, the rebels, and the thinkers who lived inside it? And why did the world look so different when it closed?
Lynn Thorndike pitched early modern as a broader alternative to the Renaissance, but the label did not catch fire at once. Economic historians picked it up during the 1940s and 1950s, and it spread gradually to other scholars before becoming widely known in the 1990s. It proved more popular in North America than in Europe. The historian Jerry H. Bentley explained why, noting that strong traditions of national historiography discouraged scholars from exploring a larger European past. By the 1980s, scholars began applying the term beyond Europe in a serious way. Some used it for Asian societies such as Tokugawa Japan that underwent comparable developments. Joseph R. Fletcher, a historian of Central Asia and China, argued in 1985 that early modern Eurasian societies shared similar demographic, economic, and social forces, including the rise of urban commercial classes and the decline of nomadism. Bentley went further still, defining the early modern world as the era from about 1500 to 1800, when cross-cultural interactions increasingly linked the fates of peoples worldwide. He named three engines of that linkage: the connection of the world by sea, global biological exchanges, and the creation of an early capitalist global economy. Those three processes are the thread that the next chapters follow across continents.
Feudalism declined in Europe as the early modern period opened, and the Crusades came to an end. The Protestant Reformation destabilized the old order, provoking a backlash that expanded the Inquisition and ignited the European wars of religion. Among them was the especially bloody Thirty Years' War, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia and the birth of the modern international system. The same span held the Commercial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Golden Age of Piracy. Globalization showed itself early in the North Italian city-states and maritime republics, particularly Genoa, Venice, and Milan. Russia reached the Pacific coast in 1647 and consolidated its grip on the Russian Far East in the 19th century. As Western Europe surged past China in technology and per capita wealth, a Great Divergence opened between them. The Columbian Exchange that linked the Old World and the New World greatly altered the human environment. The Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Indigenous peoples of the Americas began in these years. By the period's close, Western Europe held an advantage that the three great Asian empires could not match.
Around the beginning of the Han Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644, China led the world in mathematics and science. Europe caught up and then surpassed it. The historian Colin Ronan suggested China's Confucian bureaucracy and traditions left it with fewer scientists willing to break orthodoxies in the way Galileo Galilei did. China had invented gunpowder in the 9th century, yet Europe formed the classic handheld firearms, and China was using matchlocks by 1540, after the Portuguese brought theirs to Japan. Silver poured into Ming China through maritime trade with the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, filling the void left when its paper money system crashed by the mid-15th century. The Ming fell around 1644 to the Manchu Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of China, which ruled from 1644 to 1912. When Li Zicheng's peasant rebels captured Beijing, the Chongzhen Emperor, the last Ming emperor, killed himself. The Manchus allied with the former Ming general Wu Sangui and seized Beijing as their new capital. In Japan, the Sengoku period began around 1467 and lasted roughly a century of warring states. Contact with the Portuguese on Tanegashima Isle in 1543 brought the arquebus, Christianity, and even tempura and refined sugar. Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi reestablished central government, and Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of shogun in 1603. The Edo period ran from 1600 to 1868, its society built on a strict class hierarchy of daimyos, samurai, farmers, artisans, and traders. In Korea, General Yi Seong-gye founded the Joseon dynasty in 1392 with a nearly bloodless coup and moved the capital to modern-day Seoul. When Japan invaded twice, in 1592 and again in 1597, Admiral Yi Sun-sin destroyed hundreds of ships using armored turtle ships armed with cannons. In 1637, King Injo was forced to surrender to the Qing, who would soon take over China itself.
Mughal India is believed to have held the world's largest economy, worth a quarter of global GDP and larger than all of Western Europe combined. The rise of the Mughal Empire is usually dated from 1526, an Islamic Persianate power that ruled most of the area as Hindustan. Its monuments are its most visible legacy, products of an age of brilliant literary, artistic, and architectural results. The Maratha Confederacy surpassed the Mughals as India's dominant power from 1740, expanding rapidly until the Third Battle of Panipat halted it in 1761. The Ottoman, Suri, Safavid, and Mughal empires grew in strength after the fall of the Timurid Renaissance, and three of them earned the name gunpowder empires for the military technology behind them. The Ottomans seized Egypt in 1517 and established the regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripolitania between 1519 and 1551, while Morocco stayed independent under the Sharifan dynasty. The Safavid dynasty was founded about 1501, and from its base in Ardabil it established control over all of Persia. It became the first native dynasty since the Sassanids to build a unified Iranian state, and it spread Shia Islam across the Caucasus and West Asia even after its fall in 1722. In Central Asia, the Uzbeks ruled under Muhammad Shaybani, Khan of the Uzbeks. The Afghan Pashtuns traced their lineage to the Hotaki dynasty and later formed the Durrani Empire. Far to the southwest, the Songhai Empire seized Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, building its regime on trade revenue and the cooperation of Muslim merchants, before making Islam its official religion and bringing scholars to Gao.
Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar in Germany, challenged the Church with his Ninety-five Theses, which criticized practices like the sale of indulgences. His movement developed at the University of Wittenberg, where he became a professor, supported by the Electorate of Saxony. The Diet of Worms in 1521 declared Luther a heretic, but Emperor Charles V, busy with external threats, let German princes decide whether to enforce the Edict of Worms. Protestant denominations multiplied, from Lutheranism to the Reformed tradition, and in England the movement produced Anglicanism. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 ended the idea of a united Christian church through the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, letting rulers choose their state's religion. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 solidified that framework and marked the birth of the modern concept of national sovereignty. Against the Reformation rose the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition ran from 1478 to 1834, prosecuting baptized Catholics for crimes such as sorcery, blasphemy, and witchcraft. The Portuguese Inquisition followed from 1536 to 1821, and the Roman Inquisition covered most of the Italian peninsula. The Counter-Reformation began in 1545 with the Council of Trent. New religious orders drove the revival, and the Jesuits especially strengthened rural parishes and set examples for Catholic renewal. The final crusade, the Crusade of 1456, lifted the Siege of Belgrade under John Hunyadi and Giovanni da Capistrano, forcing Sultan Mehmet II to retreat. Pope Callixtus III ordered the noon bell that still commemorates that victory across the Christian world.
Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the universe in 1543, when he published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and began modern astronomy. The Catholic Church resisted the heliocentric theory, and the Inquisition imprisoned Galileo Galilei for promoting it. Tycho Brahe's precise observations let Johannes Kepler show that planets move in ellipses rather than perfect circles. The 1687 publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is often used to mark the end of the Scientific Revolution, having established the fundamental laws of physics. Andreas Vesalius revolutionized human anatomy with his 1543 work De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, correcting errors in Galen, and in 1628 William Harvey advanced knowledge of the circulatory system. Robert Boyle argued for corpuscularianism in his 1661 book The Sceptical Chymist and discovered Boyle's law of gases. Pierre Fauchard founded modern scientific dentistry in his 1728 work Le Chirurgien Dentiste. The smallpox vaccine was invented in the 1770s and popularized by Edward Jenner in the 1790s. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek made early observations of microorganisms in the 1670s, and Carl Linnaeus published the first modern taxonomy in Systema Naturae in 1735. Nicolas Steno proposed the law of superposition in 1669, and Coulomb's law described the force between electric charges in 1784. Beyond the sciences, the Age of Enlightenment made reason the central source of knowledge. Newton's theory of gravity, alongside the contributions of John Locke, Pierre Bayle, and Baruch Spinoza, fueled it. Descartes gave it the proposition Cogito, ergo sum in 1637. French salon culture spread these ideas, culminating in the Encyclopedie of 1751 to 1772, edited by Denis Diderot with contributions from Voltaire and Montesquieu. The Enlightenment flourished until around 1790 to 1800, when reason gave way to Romanticism.
Infant mortality haunted these centuries, and the data that survives comes mostly from European towns. In Tommy Bengtsson's book Life Under Pressure, the figures count infant deaths in the first month for every 1,000 births. What is now Germany averaged 108 such deaths, while Bavaria reported 140 to 190. Venice averaged 134, Geneva 80 to 110, and the Swedish town of Vastanfors just 41. Bengtsson named climate as the most important factor, and in Italy a newborn in the first 10 days of life was four times more likely to die in winter than in summer. He suspected insufficient heating and the exposure of newborns to cold during the baptism ceremony. As the Age of Revolution dawned with revolts in America and France, political change spread to other countries. The Thirteen Colonies rebelled against British rule from 1765 to 1783, proclaiming independence on the 4th of July 1776 and becoming the original 13 United States of America. The 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized that independence. The period ended amid mechanization, the American Revolution, and the first French Revolution, with the map of Europe redrawn by the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna. As it closed, the British and Russian empires emerged as world powers, while Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Qing China all entered stagnation or decline. The historian Schoppa offered a date that reframes the whole story, arguing that a beginning of modern China around 1780 is closer to historical reality and gives a better baseline for understanding the precipitous decline that followed.
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Common questions
What was the early modern period and when did it take place?
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.
Who first proposed the term early modern as a distinct historical period?
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.
What events are proposed as the start of the early modern period?
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.
Why was the Mughal Empire important during the early modern period?
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.
How did the Scientific Revolution shape the early modern period?
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.
What events marked the end of the early modern period?
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.
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