swept the academic landscape, there were also critiques and disputes. Some of these were about continuities. The voyages of Columbus may have marked the beginning of intensive European exploration and colonization, but there was plenty of earlier contact between Europeans and other cultures, and Columbus himself was motivated more by religious zeal – generally regarded as “medieval” – than by a “modern” desire to explore the unknown.10 The Protestant Reformation did bring a major break in western Christianity, but Martin Luther was seeking to reform the church, not split it, just like medieval reformers, of which there were many. Other developments traditionally regarded as marks of modernity, such as the expansion of capitalism, the growth of the nation-state, or increasing interest in science and technology, were also brought into question as scholars found both earlier precedents and evidence that these changes were slow in coming. Though many Anglophone followers of the Annales school called themselves “early modernists,” Annalistes themselves saw no dramatic break, but posited a longue durée stretching from the eleventh century to the nineteenth, a period the French historian and Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie termed “motionless.”11 The French medieval historian Jacques Le Goff argues for a “long Middle Ages” that saw a number of “renaissances,” and that lasted until the mid eighteenth century, when industrialization allowed people to “leave one period behind and leap forward to the next.”12 Among women’s historians, Judith Bennett used examples from women’s work experiences and other areas of life to challenge what she termed the “assumption of a dramatic change in women’s lives between 1300 and 1700.”13
Map 2: Europe in 1763
Other debates have revolved around the whole idea of modernity. Not only was “Renaissance” value laden, but so was “modern.” The humanist historians who first thought of themselves as “new” saw this as a good thing, as did the eighteenth-century philosophers who created the Enlightenment and saw themselves as “moderns” racing toward the future. Most of the social and political theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who developed theories about the progress of history, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, saw this as beneficial or inevitable.
More recent commentators have not necessarily agreed. As concepts, “modernity” and “modernization” are teleological and totalizing, implying that history developed on a single linear trajectory with a final act. Over the last fifty years, master narratives of all types, including a single path to modernity, have come into question.14 Scholars of medieval literature have sharply critiqued what Lee Patterson termed the “crude binarism that locates modernity (‘us’) on one side and premodernity (‘them’) on the other,” a binarism Kathleen Davies links to ideas about secularization, in which the Middle Ages are seen as trapped in theology.15 The historian of early modern England Garthine Walker has similarly highlighted problems with modernization theory, which generally contrasts “traditional” and “modern,” because “societies are far too variable to be captured in a simple dichotomy” and “meaning arises not from the movement of history, but from the social and cultural beliefs and actions of human beings in a given context.”16 Scholars have also pointed to issues specifically with the notion of early modern, which suggests that this era is best understood as on the way to somewhere else but not quite there yet. J.H. Elliott, for example, notes that the term “runs the risk of suggesting that the period is no more than a staging-post on the road to contemporary society.”17 In an article titled “the early modern muddle,” the historian of Italy Randolph Starn comments that the term is “saddled with a teleological modernizing directory,” and “formed by the backfill from the debris of the collapsed breakthroughs to modernity that had not (quite) come about.”18
“Modernity” was (and often is) also explicitly or implicitly western, and connected with colonial domination.19 Reflecting sentiments that are widely shared, the historians of Southeast Asia Leonard and Barbara Andaya comment, “especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal … the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a ‘modern Europe’ against a ‘yet-to-be modernized’ non-Europe.”20 The world beyond Europe joins the Middle Ages as a “them” as compared to “us,” consigned to what the historian of South Asia Dipesh Chakrabarti calls the “waiting room of history,” on the same path but not arrived.21 Such critiques mean that scholars of areas outside of Europe who use “early modern” have tended to explain their use of the term more than those who focus on Europe do. (For more on scholarship on areas outside of Europe, see Chapters 4 and 5.) More philosophical issues also emerged: What exactly do we mean by “modernity”? Will it ever end? Has it ended? What comes afterward?
Aims and structure of the book
Despite these critiques, “early modern” seems here to stay, as a handy through problematic term. The aim of this book is thus to sort out the early modern muddle, and introduce key topics and theories in the field as these have emerged over the last several decades. The book surveys various subfields of history, discussing the marks of modernity that have traditionally been seen as emerging in them, and ways in which they have been questioned, nuanced, and rethought. As you explore the concept of modernity, you will also gain a sense of broader issues and concerns in early modern studies, how these have changed, and how they relate to developments within history as a discipline.
Because “early modern” began as a concept in economic history, Chapter 1 surveys economic and social history of the era, including Marxist historiography, quantitative analyses, debates about how and why capitalism and industrialization emerged, studies of consumption, the Annales school, historical demography, and family history, as well as the history of the body, medicine and health, the emotions, and the senses. Chapter 2 discusses scholarship on the religious, intellectual, and cultural movements that have long been viewed as central to the West’s modernizing trajectory, including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, and highlights history’s material and linguistic/cultural turns. Chapter 3 focuses on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, incorporating key directions in literary studies, art history, and queer theory to discuss scholarship on women’s ideas and actions, debates about female rule and gender difference, notions of masculinity, and the emergence of “modern” sexuality.
Moving beyond Europe, Chapter 4 examines the growth of the Atlantic world as a unit of study, surveying changing views of exploration and the Columbian Exchange, slavery and the slave trade, cultural blending in religious and marital practices, and the development of racial hierarchies. Bringing politics into the story, the chapter discusses trends in the analysis of nation-states, nationalism, empires, and the Atlantic revolutions – American, French, and Haitian. Chapter 5 widens the scope further still, surveying work that explores topics increasingly being investigated on a global scale: how goods, people, and ideas moved around the world, the relationship between warfare and the expansion of states and empires, and the impact of environmental change, especially the Little Ice Age, along with the broader intersection between humans and the natural world. Chapter 6 explores popular and public presentations of the period, and how these have changed – or not – in the last several decades as a result of new research, changing public interests, new technologies, and other factors. The chapter suggests that “what is early modern history?” is a question that matters not just to historians, but also to the wider public. The book ends with a brief afterword discussing the future of early modern history within the context of the