In 1728, José de Sevilla applied to join the apothecary (pharmacist) guild in Mexico City. The city was already the political and administrative heart of New Spain, governed by a viceroy appointed by the Spanish crown and serving as the seat of colonial power in the Americas. As the commercial hub of a rich territory connected to Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas, its population of around 100,000 was a mix of people with Indigenous, African, and European heritage. As an apothecary, José might become wealthy—not as important as the ruling families of administrators, landowners, and mining magnates, but comfortable and respectable. But José had a problem. Apothecary was an occupation restricted to Europeans, and his baptism had not been recorded in the register for Spaniards, but in the book reserved for people of mixed heritage—mestizos and mulattos.

Sevilla’s case is an example of the way human beings could be caught up in the social changes taking place in the early modern period, as people tried to improve their conditions while the world changed around them. There were many such social transformations. Some transformations were specific to only one place, but several were shared widely. Among the most important changes were challenges that faced the political leaders of states and empires. These included the development of new elites and the challenges of dealing with great diversity.

Empires and diversity

Dealing with a population’s diversity is almost always challenging for leaders of big states. Diversity brings huge opportunities in terms of a wide array of knowledge and culture as well as trade links to other parts of the world. But it is a challenge for a ruler who is trying to promote themselves as the sole leader of a unified state. Historically, societies have dealt with diversity in one of three different ways: co-optation, suppression, or integration.

• Co-optation—Minority or newly-conquered groups are invited to share in government in some way, perhaps being granted special privileges (although often at a price).
• Suppression—The ruler limits diverse groups’ access to power, rights, or recognition, sometimes forcing them to hide, change their identities, or flee.
• Integration—Diverse groups are brought into society on more or less equal terms with the ruling group.

During this period of early modern empires, suppression was a common strategy in many states. For example, the Christian rulers of Spain and Portugal used religion to unify their growing states. After defeating the last Muslim kingdom in Spain (Granada), the Spanish monarchs expelled Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502) who refused to convert to Christianity. Converts—called conversos or Moriscos—were still suspected of secretly practicing their old religions, and the Inquisition persecuted many of them. These policies largely succeeded in creating religious uniformity. However, they led to the loss of important and skilled communities who had made important contributions in trade, scholarship, and finance.

Unlike Spain, the Ottoman Empire generally allowed religious diversity under a system called the millet system. Non-Muslim communities—such as Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Armenian Christians—were organized into separate legal and religious groups, each directed by their own religious leaders. These groups could govern their internal affairs, including marriage and worship. However, they were not truly integrated with Ottoman society, and they had to pay a price: extra taxes. Jews fleeing persecution in Spain often found safety in Ottoman cities like Istanbul and Salonika, where they became active in commerce and crafts. While Muslims held most political and military power, the Ottomans generally tolerated religious minorities as long as they remained loyal and paid their taxes.

On the other side of Eurasia, the Qing Dynasty was founded by the Manchus, an ethnic minority from northeast Asia who conquered China in the 1600s. To keep power, the Qing rulers put policies in place that separated Manchus from the majority Han Chinese. Han people were suppressed in that they were banned from marrying Manchus or traveling to Manchu homelands. Han men were also forced to adopt the queue hairstyle (a long braid) as a sign of submission. But this suppression was not complete. Qing rulers adopted some Chinese customs and Confucian ideas to gain legitimacy, and many Han Chinese served in the imperial bureaucracy. Still, the Qing used ethnic difference to justify elite privileges for Manchus and to manage loyalty in a massive empire.

The Muslim rulers of the Mughal Empire, by contrast, began their rule of the majority Hindu and Sikh populations of their empire through co-optation and inclusion. Early Mughal rulers appointed both Hindus and Muslims to high-ranking positions, allowed religious debates at court, and one—Akbar (r. 1556–1605)—even tried to create a new faith by blending elements of different religions. But this tolerance did not last. In the late 1600s, Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) reversed Akbar’s policies, reimposed Islamic law, destroyed Hindu temples, and taxed non-Muslims. His actions led to resistance, especially from Sikhs, who had grown as a distinct religious group and now faced harsh persecution and the execution of their leaders.

But it was in the Spanish Empire in the Americas that the most rigid and complex hierarchy of these large empires developed to separate rulers and ruled. The colonies of New Spain were created through the conquest of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans, and they were a laboratory for new ideas about racial classification, ideas that in some ways still survive today. In these societies, a rigid system called the casta system was used to classify people by ancestry. Spaniards born in Europe (peninsulares) held the highest status, followed by those of Spanish descent born in the Americas (creoles), then people of mixed heritage (mestizos, and mulattos), and finally Indigenous and African peoples. Legal rights, taxes, and job opportunities were all affected by a person’s racial category. This system reinforced colonial control and a hierarchy based partly on skin color and other identity markers, even as racial mixing became more common.

Elites

To rule their increasingly large, complex, and diverse states, early modern rulers relied on elites. There were lots of similarities to their strategies, and it’s important to point out that every ruler found ways to make alliances with those sectors of society that were almost always important to the state in some way: religious leaders, merchants, and land-owning aristocrats. However, we can also see some differences emerge between different empires and states in this period.

In most cases, perhaps the most established of the elites on which rulers relied were aristocrats—nobles who controlled land and had usually inherited their title and wealth from their parents. In Europe, kings and queens relied on knights, barons, and other nobles to govern areas of the rural countryside and to assist in times of war. To some degree, however, they began to add a new type of noble, one whose title and wealth was not hereditary but had been granted because of their service to the ruler, and who was therefore likely to be more loyal to that ruler.

In the Ottoman Empire, control of newly conquered land was granted under the timar system to cavalry officers known as sipahis, who collected taxes and provided military service in return. These timar holders were aristocrats, but the Ottoman Sultans—like European rulers during this period—tried to make it so that they didn’t automatically inherit their power but instead owed it to the Sultan. Sipahis played a key role in extending Ottoman control, especially in newly conquered territories in the Balkans and Anatolia. They enforced imperial policies, gathered intelligence, and managed justice, forming a bridge between the sultan and the diverse provincial populations. By tying elite status to land and military duty, the sultan maintained a loyal ruling class without building a costly permanent army.

In the Russian state, aristocratic landowners known as boyars had long wielded power through local influence and military service. As the Russian Empire expanded under the czars, especially during and after the reigns of Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and Ivan IV (r. 1547–1584), boyars were both empowered and constrained. In newly conquered areas like Kazan and Siberia, the czars granted land to loyal boyars in exchange for military support, but conditionally—only if these nobles remained loyal to the state and provided military service. Boyars helped fund and lead campaigns, managed rural populations, and were key in collecting taxes.

Military, land-controlling elites were also important to the Mughal Empire and Qing Dynasty, both of which had conquered large populations different from their ruling class. The Mughal aristocratic system, the mansabdars, initially drew from Muslim nobles who had supported the Mughal invasion of South Asia. But Mughal sultans, especially Akbar, incorporated elites from the Hindu states they conquered as well, co-opting them into their system of rule. Like other rulers, the Mughals tried not to let the mansabdars inherit automatically, hoping to keep each generation reliant on the ruler.

The Qing rulers were not as willing to allow conquered Han Chinese elites into their ruling aristocracy. Instead, they relied on bannermen, hereditary military elites of the Qing Dynasty, mostly made up of Manchu warriors who helped the Qing conquer China. Organized into eight banners, these troops and their families were granted stipends and land rights and were settled in garrison towns across the empire. They acted as both an imperial army and a political class loyal to the emperor. The bannermen helped maintain Qing dominance over Han Chinese and other ethnic groups, served in frontier defense and internal security, and symbolized Manchu identity and control at the heart of Qing governance.

However, aristocrats alone could not rule a growing state or empire. Merchants and artisans were needed, especially to provide tax revenues. These groups relied on the state for protection—especially in newly conquered territories—and they paid for the privilege. Laborers were also needed to build the infrastructure of empire, constructing roads, sailing ships, and such. But many large states also found they needed professional administrators. For the Qing Dynasty, this meant co-opting the existing Han Chinese system of expert, trained scholars. The Ottoman state also often relied on conquered people, especially through the devshirme system, in which Christian children from the Balkans were converted to Islam and trained at palace schools to administer the empire. Because they needed to read and write, bureaucrats also often came from religious groups—like the Islamic qadi, judges who served both the Ottoman and Mughal states in this period.

In the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, especially in the Americas, colonial rule depended heavily on bureaucrats sent from Europe and merchants who linked the colonies to global trade. Royal officials such as viceroys, judges, and local magistrates were tasked with collecting taxes, enforcing royal law, and overseeing Indigenous labor systems like the encomienda. Jesuit missionaries and other religious elites also played key roles, both in governing colonial society and in justifying imperial rule through religious conversion. And of course, merchants played an important role in supporting the imperial government. But here, too, identity played a big role. Generally, only those of European birth could serve as official administrators, and entry into even the lower ranks of important professions or government service was restricted by casta.

Conclusion

It is in this context that we can understand José de Sevilla’s case. He wanted to access a profession that was restricted by the colonial government, but he couldn’t become an apothecary because of his racial identity—an identity rigidly established by a document created at his birth. But it turns out that even in this most categorized of societies, the castas were flexible. That’s because they weren’t based on concrete realities, and because the government recognized that a rigid system couldn’t effectively rule a diverse population. So, de Sevilla appealed to local authorities to reclassify him as European. He used a lot of evidence to offset his baptismal document: testimonies affirming his Spanish ancestry, descriptions of his physical features, and his marriage to a noblewoman all served as evidence of his supposed heritage. And eventually the court accepted his appeal.

The example of de Sevilla serves as a great reminder: History is made up not only of the big stories of imperial categories and policies—the generalizations—but also the lived experiences of billions of people, many of which defy or bend the big patterns of the global past.