Early Modern Index
Hub
The early modern period — broadly 1450 to 1750 — encompasses the global transformation that reshaped politics, economy, religion, and warfare on every continent. In Europe: the Renaissance, the printing revolution, the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, the rise of fiscal-military states, the Dutch Wars and the line-of-battle revolution, the Wars of Spanish Succession, and the establishment of permanent professional navies. In the wider world: the Iberian and then Dutch, English, and French oceanic expansions; the transatlantic slave trade and the early Atlantic system; the Mughal Empire’s Indian apogee; the Ming–Qing transition in China; the Ottoman Empire’s seventeenth-century crisis and eighteenth-century recovery; the Tokugawa shogunate’s closed-country settlement; the early colonial encounters in the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Ocean rim. The subdomain organises this material as a research domain treating each civilisation on its own terms. The institutional inheritance Nelson’s Navy received — line-of-battle tactics, the standing navy, the dockyards, the Atlantic trade-protection mission — is one product of this longer transformation, not the frame for the period itself. Adjacent to MOC_States_Empires, MOC_Era_Context, MOC_Religion_Church, and MOC_Economics_Commerce (the Atlantic system and its trade flows).
Primary Notes
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Roadmap
(planned notes as red-links — add as research identifies gaps)
Methodology and frameworks
- Periodisation Debates — Where Does the Early Modern Begin and End
- Connected Histories — Subrahmanyam and the Eurasian Lens
Renaissance and Reformation
- The Italian Renaissance — Patronage, Humanism, and Political Thought
- The Printing Revolution — Gutenberg, the Reformation, and Mass Literacy
- The Reformation and Counter-Reformation — Religious Rupture and Political Realignment
- The European Wars of Religion 1562–1648
State Formation and the Fiscal-Military State
- The Tudor and Stuart English State — Foundations of British Naval Power
- Bourbon France — Absolutism, Versailles, and the Long Eighteenth Century
- Habsburg Spain in Decline — From Philip II to the Bourbon Succession
- Brandenburg-Prussia — Hohenzollern State Building under the Great Elector and Frederick I
Naval Revolution
- The Spanish Armada 1588 — Myth, Reality, and Strategic Implications
- The Anglo-Dutch Wars — Line-of-Battle Tactics and the First Naval Revolutions
- Pepys and the Professionalisation of the English Navy — Stuart Naval Administration
- Hawke at Quiberon Bay 1759 — Tactical Precedent for Aggressive Close Action
- The Seven Years War 1756–1763 — Strategic Inheritance for the Revolutionary Era
Atlantic and Global
- The Iberian Empires — Portugal and Spain in the Atlantic World
- The Dutch Atlantic — VOC, WIC, and Caribbean Possessions
- The Transatlantic Slave Trade — Origins, Mechanics, and the Eighteenth-Century Apogee
- The First British Empire — From the Stuart Period to the Loss of America 1783
Asia
- The Mughal Empire 1526–1707 — Apogee and Decline
- Ming–Qing Transition 1644 and the Qing Settlement
- Tokugawa Japan — The Closed Country and Its Limits
- The Ottoman Empire — Seventeenth-Century Crisis and Eighteenth-Century Recovery
Cross-Cutting
- See also: MOC_Era_Context
- See also: _Home