Modernity's year 1500 is a convenient European fiction that stuck
The modern era usually names history after medieval centuries, often from around 1500 in Europe—Reformation, print, and Atlantic expansion—though periodization resists clean edges. Science, politics, warfare, technology, discovery, and globalization define the package Western empires later exported.
Historians first used the label for European events after antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the word modern itself was coined shortly before 1585 to announce a new age. Since the 1990s it has become more usual to call the stretch from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century early modern and to reserve modern for the nineteenth century onward. Justus Nipperdey showed that American historians were already using early modern around 1900, earlier than the 1930s or 1960s origin once assumed.
Why 1500? A cluster of shocks sits around it: the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg's movable-type press in the 1450s, Columbus reaching the Americas in 1492, Vespucci's 1503 letter arguing those lands were a separate continent, Machiavelli's The Prince around 1513 and Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517. Copernicus put the Sun at the centre in 1543, and the Council of Trent opened the Catholic Counter-Reformation two years later.
The following centuries piled on further markers. Tycho Brahe saw an impossible new star in 1572, Kepler described elliptical orbits in 1609 and Galileo published telescope observations in 1610. The Thirty Years' War ravaged Europe from 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 set out the principle of state sovereignty, and Newton's Principia of 1687 laid down laws of motion and gravitation. The Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763, fought across Europe, North America, India and the Caribbean, counts as the first truly global war.
The package also carries baggage. Individualism, capitalism, socialism, urbanisation and faith in progress travel with the term, and so do its critics: postmodernism, a word first used in 1949 for an art movement, attacks the optimism, while postcolonial theory attacks Western dominance. Outside Europe, in China, India and the Islamic world, the vocabulary is applied differently, usually in relation to contact with Europeans during the Age of Discovery.
Source: Modern era
