DEFINING THE MODERN WORD The early modern era is said to have been between the years 1500 and 1800. It's held to have begun during the Late Renaissance period and ended about the time industrialization changed the face of the world. It was an amazing time of scientific discovery, an age of exploration and a time where the very boundaries of knowledge were expanded since the end of the Roman Empire. One of the first things a student of the time is struck by is how similar the arguments at the dawn of this age are with the ones faced by contemporary people. Before analyzing that, it may be a good idea to get an idea of what the world was like, how people thought and what the hopes and dreams of the people of the time were. To do this, we first need to understand how that Europe came to be.
The Black Death was the pivotal event of the High Middle Ages. In the span of a few short years the entire face of Europe changed. The plague began with the end of the Medieval Warm Period, which ran from the tenth century to the fourteenth. This shift to colder weather in Europe leads to widespread famine and years of uncertainty. Up until this time, Europe had enjoyed a rising population as well as a rising standard of living. People will increase their population to the limit of their food production. When people can no longer expand food production, then a day of reckoning will occur. Most good arable farmland was under cultivation and most of the marginal farmland was cultivated which produced much less food than the good arable farmland. The change to colder wetter weather proved devastating to the population. This, of course, had economic effects. As food production became more erratic, malnutrition flourished. In addition there is scholarship that suggests that three field crop rotation was not as effective in Northwestern Europe as it was in the Mediterranean climate, so the effects of new farming techniques and technologies was not as pronounced in France and England as it was in Italy. Malnutrition led to less productivity. In a preindustrial society, labor is done by people, not machines, so anything that saps people's strength is deleterious to the economy. As a result, landowners began raising rents, which has an effect on further damaging the economy. Since people at that time had less cash on hand to due to higher rents and since the price of food was increasing due to poorer and poorer harvests and less productive workers, a vicious cycle emerged that dragged the economy down into what we now call a depression. The previous centuries saw the revival of ancient trade routes to the East through Central Asia and the Near East. It was along these routes that the Black Death traveled. It's estimated that up to half of the population of Europe perished in this cataclysm. This had profound social and economic effects that would shape the world of a person living in the Early Modern Era. One of the events of modern era that shape how western Europeans define it was the economy effect of plague years. After the mass destruction, death and devastation of two World Wars in the last century, the deaths of the plague years dwarfs anything a modern person can understand. The Black Death led to the end of serfdom, rise of the Protestant Reformation and loosened the stranglehold the elites of the time had on society. With half of its population gone, the pressures to increase food production were gone. The serf now had a sort of economic clout as the labor of a serf was worth much more in this devastated world than it had in the previous world that had been teeming with farmers. In an effort to attract workers to their manors, one of the first laws to go was the age old laws tying the serf to the land. This created a free worker and was a prototype of the modern citizen. In addition, the value of a serf was much more now because they were so scarce after the plague years. This led to a decrease in rent and an increase in pay as landlords attempted to entice serfs to work for them. Modern era is all defined by the western Europeans by the war of religion. This was probably the defining event of the Early Modern Era. While this war began as a war over religion, it ended as a war of nations. Many modern European nations were formed in this crucible of war. It ended feudal notions of society and paved the way for absolute monarchs. It was at this time that the Church finally lost all control over Northern Europe, England and the Northeast of Germany. France and England consolidated their hold over territory in their possession and began a series of wars contesting overseas colonies. The failure to stamp out Protestantism also led to the establishment of more universities to meet the new churches needs for trained theologians and further increased the educational opportunities of people living in Protestant lands. One of the problems of the period concerned the merchants, bankers and artisans of Europe's largest cities and towns who resented the fact that local bishops of the Church controlled all of their commercial and economic activities. Although capitalism as a form of economic organization had not yet infiltrated Europe, these producers and money-makers knew that more money and power was theirs if only their lives were less regulated by the Church. Again, I think what we are witnessing here is the development of a bias concept of work and acquisition. Yet another problem facing the Church was that in the 16th century there were numerous reformers who were openly criticizing the Church for its numerous offenses. Priests married and then took mistresses, holy offices were bought and sold for the highest price, incompetence among the clergy became the rule, the congregation of more and more people in towns and cities perhaps exposed the amorality and immorality of the clergy. In a word, the problem was corruption. Also political view take a part in criticizing religion in the sense that they saw no need to reform the Church and Christianity because his secular theory of the state was based on the notion that religion and faith was nothing more than the cement which held society together. Between 1500 and 1789 the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world changed dramatically, as the inhabitants of what had been a poor, remote corner of Eurasia became poised to dominate the world politically, culturally, and economically. The nature and extent of this change can be traced in various ways. A world map of the mid-fifteenth century, for instance, is strikingly different from a mid-eighteenth-century map—not only because of the amount of information available to the later mapmaker, but also in the techniques employed to display that information. The effects of European wars on the world outside Europe also changed significantly during these centuries, as did the relationship between European Christendom and Islam, particularly the Ottoman Turks. Within Europe, new products and crops brought back from other continents significantly changed everyday life. Above all, by the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans controlled the sea, the size and extent of which had been unknown to them in the fifteenth century. Also European began to reshape the world during the Early Modern world when they encounter the Atlantic World The slave trade played a role in the history of the Atlantic world almost from the beginning. As European powers began to conquer and claim large territories in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the role of slavery and other forced labor systems in the development of the Atlantic world expanded (Reilly, 609). European powers typically had vast territories that they wished to exploit through agriculture, mining, or other extractive industries, but they lacked the work force that they needed to exploit their lands effectively. Consequently, they turned to a variety of forceful labor systems to meet their needs. At first the goal was to use native workers. Native Americans were employed through Indian slavery and through the Spanish system. The Indians too often preferred to die of starvation rather than be slaves, so the plantation owners turned to African slaves via the Atlantic slave trade by going to Sub-Saharan Africa. For slaves in Africa life in the plantation was grueling work, with little respect from the tyranny of the master or overseers watchful eyes. Depending on their size, plantations comprised a multitude of buildings: the homes of the master's family, overseer, and slaves, as well as outbuildings, barns, and workshops. Large plantations operated like self-sustaining villages, and thus, were often isolated from the outside world. Work on these plantations was never-ending for slaves. Adult male slaves were primarily relied on to tend the fields, pastures, and gardens. Overseers on horseback equipped with whips monitored slaves, always threatening to punish "stragglers" with a flogging. Plantation owners also exploited the work of skilled slaves, such as blacksmiths and carpenters, for their own ends. Lastly, female slaves and young children usually served as domestics, tending to the master's family as cooks, servants, and housemaids, and were often starved, whipped, and even raped. so that expanded the domination of European and by that they begin to reshape the world.( Reilly, 611) Also the European reshape the rest of the world when the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire in present-day Mexico and the Inca Empire in present-day Peru with ease, assisted by horses, guns, and above all by the devastating mortality inflicted by newly introduced diseases such as smallpox. To some extent the prior emergence of the Inca and Aztec empires as regional powers aided the transfer of governance to the Spanish, since these native empires had already established road systems and systems of taxation and intensive agriculture that were in some cases inherited wholesale by the Spanish. The early Spanish conquerors of these empires were also aided by political instability and internal conflict within the Aztec and Incan regimes, which they successfully derived to their benefit.(Reilly, 612 & 613)