Hello, and welcome to the Early Modern era, c. 1450–1750 CE!

Wait, the early what? The Early Modern Era? What’s that? Either these three hundred years are early, or they are modern. They can’t be both, right? Why is this time period given such a weird label?

For some of you, this may be the first era you study in this course. For others, who started the course around 1200 CE, this is the second.¹  But no matter when you begin, this period starting around 1450 is usually called Early Modern. By the end of this introduction, it will make total sense.

For now, though, I want to introduce you to our big stories for this period. Historians who study different regions for this period often focus on slightly different stories, and there are at least two really big ones. For those who study the Atlantic World—the Americas, Europe, and West and Central Africa—the big story is the Columbian Exchange. Meanwhile, those who study the eastern hemisphere of Afro-Eurasia tend to focus on the growth of large, land-based empires built by the Ottomans, Mughals, Qing Dynasty in China, Muscovy, and others. We’ll see in this unit how these seemingly different stories are in fact closely connected. Let’s begin!

The Columbian Exchange

Each of the big stories in this unit can be told through all three frames, but each frame helps us bring different elements of the two stories into focus. For example, let’s begin our study of the Columbian Exchange in the Atlantic world by looking at it through the networks frame.

The Columbian Exchange is named after Christopher Columbus—the controversial figure whose voyages from Europe to the Americas jump-started the first sustained, large-scale connection between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.²  These connections changed a lot of things. Fun fact: there were no horses or cows in the Americas in 1491. Fun fact number two: there were no tomatoes in Italian food or potatoes in Irish food at this time. That’s because tomatoes and potatoes grew only in the Americas. Similarly, at that time, cassava—today one of the leading crops in sub-Saharan Africa—was found only in the Americas. Meanwhile, Ecuador is now one of the world’s leading exporters of bananas, even though in 1491 bananas were exclusively an Afro-Eurasian crop.

This all began to change after 1492, with big results that were great for some, but not for others. Once the two hemispheric systems had a sustained connection, it wasn’t only crops and animals being exchanged. People moved too, and not always by choice. Millions of Africans and Europeans ended up in the Americas, but many of the Africans had been kidnapped or stolen from their homes and enslaved.

As people and animals moved, some nasty germs moved with them. Afro-Eurasian diseases like smallpox, malaria, typhoid, and cholera were all new to the Americas. In the following century, these diseases killed millions of Indigenous Americans. At the same time, the transfer of plant and animal species—which introduced new predators and competitors—may have caused the extinction of thousands of species of animals.

This movement of people, ideas, and species helps us to understand the Columbian Exchange as the linking of two networks, with highly disruptive results for both. At the end of the first lesson, we will begin to study these results by moving from the networks frame to the communities frame. Through the communities frame, we investigate the impact of migration, diseases, trade, and empires brought by the Columbian Exchange on people of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Early Modern empires

At the beginning of our second lesson of this unit, we will continue looking through the communities frame, but now holding it in view of events further east, mostly. In this vast region, large, land-based empires rose to power in the Early Modern period. Huge, powerful empires, including the Mughals, Ottomans, Muscovites, and the Ming Dynasty in China emerged in this period to replace the Mongol state that had collapsed in the wake of the Black Death pandemic.

The leaders of these empires, in many cases, had learned from the example of the Mongols how to rule vast territories. They were all relatively centralized, meaning that they put as much power as possible in their own hands, rather than spreading it out among their followers and allies. They managed this centralization by creating large bureaucracies, employing professionals whose job was to help the state gather taxes and rule. Each of these empires wielded gunpowder weapons to great effect.

These innovative administrative strategies and military technologies allowed different rulers to manage vast, multicultural empires. We will see how each adopted a unique set of policies and practices while sharing some common ideas. But while we will compare and contrast these empires as various communities, we will also shift to studying their connections to each other and the networks they built. Especially in the Indian Ocean area, these networks show that this region shared a lot in common with the Atlantic zone that was first affected by the Columbian Exchange.

Transoceanic connections

In the third lesson, we explore the common world being built as these zones connected—from the Americas, across the Atlantic to Africa and Europe, and overland or overseas into the many parts of Asia. Now we hold up the production and distribution frame to study the creation of this global system. The creation of a single, global economy in the Early Modern period basically gave birth to capitalism as we know it today.

We will focus on three parts of this system. First, we will look at the development of European colonies in the Americas, whose main purpose was to provide raw materials and markets for European-based empires. We’ll also look at the flow of silver from mines in the Americas across the Spanish Empire and into Asia, where it was exchanged for valuable Asian goods. Finally, we’ll study the development of mercantile companies, in particular the Dutch East India Company, which tied the world together in a single economic system.

The transatlantic slave trade

In the final lesson, we’ll study one consequence of the global economic system that emerged in the Early Modern period, and one of the greatest atrocities of world history: the transatlantic slave trade. Yes, this brutal system of enslaving people is often called a “trade” because it was part of the new economic system you just studied. This system treated human beings as trade commodities and currency. It led to the enslavement and forced deportation of more than twelve million Africans to work under brutal labor conditions on plantations and mines, and as forced domestic labor, in the Americas.

Partway through this lesson, we will leave the production and distribution frame behind to take a dive deep into how this system dramatically transformed communities. Through the communities frame, we will study how the Atlantic slave trade helped lead to the development of modern systems of racism and racial hierarchy, particularly in Europe and the Americas. We will also study its impact on societies in Africa.

Early and modern

By the end of the unit, you should be able to answer the question of why this period is often called Early Modern. By studying the development of racism, empire, and new economic systems in this period, you will begin to understand how all of these transformations laid the ground for the development of the modern world—that is, the world we live in today. What you will learn is that while these modern experiences were rooted in the past, they were also all “early” episodes in the making of the “modern” world.

1 That’s right! Different states, and different schools, start studying modern history at different historical times. In New York and California, they start at 1750!
2 We say “sustained, large-scale” because some people had already made small connections before this, including people from South America who had settled on islands in the Pacific, Basque fishermen from Spain, Vikings, and possibly some others.