Early modern is a European timeline stretched worldwide
Historians roughly bracket 1500 to 1800 as early modern, a hinge between medieval and modern framed first for Europe. Starting guns vary—printing in the 1440s, Constantinople's 1453 fall, Columbus, or the Reformation—because no single year fits every region.
Since Petrarch and the Renaissance humanists, European history has been cut into ancient, medieval and modern. The phrase early modern first appeared in 1895 but only as a loose description; the medievalist Lynn Thorndike proposed it as a distinct era in his 1926 Short History of Civilization, as a roomier alternative to Renaissance. Economic historians adopted it in the 1940s and 1950s, and it became standard among scholars in the 1990s, more readily in North America than in Europe with its strong national traditions.
By the 1980s historians were testing it on Asian societies such as Tokugawa Japan. In 1985 Joseph Fletcher argued that Eurasian societies shared forces including rising urban merchant classes, religious revivals, rural unrest and the decline of nomadism. Global historians now treat the spread of globalisation, launched by Columbian contact between Old and New Worlds, as the era's defining feature, along with mercantilism, the Scientific Revolution and better maps and ships.
In Europe feudalism faded and Catholic unity shattered. The Reformation provoked an expanded Inquisition and the wars of religion, including the savage Thirty Years' War, which ended in the Westphalian peace that set up the modern state system. Russia reached the Pacific in 1647, and the Great Divergence began as Western Europe pulled ahead of China in technology and wealth. Across the Atlantic, colonisation, the Columbian Exchange and the slave trade transformed the Americas.
In the Islamic world the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal realms, called the Gunpowder Empires, rose on firearms but also on bureaucracies, taxation and control of trade routes. Mughal India is thought to have had the world's largest economy, about a quarter of global output. The era closed amid industrial mechanisation, the American and French revolutions and the Congress of Vienna's redrawn map after Napoleon.
Source: Early modern period
