Europe entered the 1600s without calculus or telescopes and left it with both
Europeans started the 1600s with no telescope, microscope, calculus or law of gravity. By 1700 they had all four, plus logarithms, air pressure and calculating machines. The same hundred years brought the first megacorporation, Japan's long seclusion, and a Manchu conquest that swept away China's Ming dynasty for good.
The scientific roster is astonishing: Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Boyle, Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Newton and Leibniz all worked within roughly a single lifetime of one another. Between them they supplied calculus, universal gravitation, the laws of motion and the instruments to see both moons and microbes. Culture flourished too, in the Baroque style and in the Dutch and late Spanish golden ages.
Trade took a new corporate form. In 1602 rival Dutch merchant firms merged into the Dutch East India Company, often called the first public company, and its profits helped fuel the Dutch Golden Age. In 1619 its forces destroyed Jayakarta on Java and built their headquarters, Batavia, on the ruins. A Dutch captain, Willem Janszoon, made the first recorded European landing in Australia in 1606, sailing the Duyfken out of Java.
East Asia reorganised itself. Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, opening the Edo period that ran until 1868, and from the 1630s Japan largely closed itself to foreigners. In China, Nurhaci's Manchu campaigns began toppling the Ming in 1618, a conquest finished by his grandson, the first Qing emperor. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci's 1602 world map was used across East Asia for centuries.
Europe itself was hardly calm. The Thirty Years' War devastated the continent from 1618 to 1648. England's crowns merged with Scotland's in 1603, and quarrels between king and Parliament ended in civil war. France's Louis XIV turned Versailles from a hunting lodge into a gilded cage for his nobles. A Russian famine early in the century killed perhaps a third of the population, and in 1699 the Treaty of Karlowitz marked the Ottomans' first major loss of European territory.
Source: 17th century
