Notes

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Introducing the Early UNIT 1 INTRODUCING EARLY MODERN Modern West
WEST
Structure
1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Problems of Defining Early Modern West
1.3 The Defining Features of Early Modern West
1.3.1 Lack of Single Power Centre
1.3.2 Strong Tradition of Civil Society
1.3.3 Contest between Individual and Collective
1.4 Cultivation of a Global Orientation and the Age of Geographical Exploration
1.5 Trade, Colonies, and Mercantilism
1.6 The Growth of Slave Trade
1.7 Printing and Networks of Information
1.8 The Social Structure in Early Modern West
1.9 Commercial Revolution and its Consequences
1.10 Social Institutions and Universities
1.11 Let Us Sum Up
1.12 Key Words
1.13 Answers to Check Your Progress Exercises
1.0 OBJECTIVES
After reading this unit, you should be able to:
understand the term ‘early modern west’;
understand different features of the early modern west;
understand the different features of the polities and the civil society of the
early modern west;
understand how the relationship between the individual and collective was
shaped in this period;
understand how the printing and commercial revolution shaped up in this
period; and
understand the nature of social structure of this period.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The term ‘early modern’ gained currency in historiography in 1970s. The famous
works of historians Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1972),
and Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe (1978) and Natalie Zemon
Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975) clearly indicate the
wide use of the term. It describes a period between medieval and modern period
of history in the context of European history and is a response to problem of
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The Rise of the Modern West periodisation. It may appeal more to those interested in the study of society,
economy and popular culture which cannot be satisfactorily examined and
explained within the narrow boundaries of monarchical reigns or national events.
Although, we still study ‘Renaissance’ but many scholars objected to the use of
term which they argued often had more elitist or literary/artistic connotations
and which was seldom used in main European countries (England, Germany,
France). Reformation, as a religious reform movement, was more truly a European
phenomenon, which engulfed and spread over large geographies in Europe. How
does ‘modernity’ unfold in Europe? It is generally seen by the historians as a
long period of change between Middle Ages and the Rise of Modern West. It
involved a transition from feudalism to capitalism, from hand crafts to mechanised
industrial production, use of animate form of energy to inanimate fossil fuels as
source of energy, from religious uniformity to secularism and freedom of worship,
from dark ages to scientific rational age, from decentralised polities to centralised
nation states and empires and from restricted, elite dominated politics to notions
of natural rights, freedom, equality, popular politics and creation of a ‘public
space’. These themes give some coherence to term ‘early modern’ but problems
persist as we will see.
1.2 PROBLEMS OF DEFINING EARLY MODERN
WEST
The term ‘early modern’ relates to the problem of periodisation. How do the
historians divide the long span of past time into specific ages or periods? Periods
are divided in different ways. The reign of a monarch or family is one way, for
example, ‘Tudor England’ refers to the time when England was ruled by monarchs
from the Tudor family. Historians also talk about particular chronological periods
in their descriptions as a narrative tool to generalize about that specific period,
such as ‘the Sixteenth Sixties’, which refers to the decade of the 1660s – and this
sense duration of time may stretch to say to include the late 1650s and the first
years of the 1670s. A key feature of periodisation is, thus, that each historical
period has some elementary features of society, culture, politics and ideas that
give the time an underlying unity and set it apart from earlier and later times.
These traits of time may not fit neatly into the historians demarcation of time
period. This attempt to fix convenient dates of a beginning and an end dates is
not easy. For example, who can say with certainty that when does the Middle
Ages end and when the Early Modern age begin. The beginning of the early
modern and thus the end of the medieval period (also called the Middle Ages)
has been associated by historians with a set of terms. The first book in English to
have ‘modern’ in its title was Leonard Digges’s. Elemental changes occurred in
the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Speaking linguistically, we may
also say that The ‘early modern’ was the period when ‘modern’ was introduced
and assimilated into English usage. The first publication was Arithmetical Military
Treatise (1579) which included a long section on ‘modern military’ matters.
Before we look into the main attributes of the early modern period in the West,
there is another conceptual difficulty related to space or geographical dimension.
What do we mean by the ‘West’? It is difficult to know exactly where to draw the
boundaries of ‘the West’. Oceans, seas, mountains and rivers define natural
geographical boundaries but there is no natural, geographical feature that clearly
marks the East and the West. Can we define it in the same way just as we can
define the dates of the early modern period by certain historical social attributes?
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Introducing the Early
Modern West Each European national history has different trajectories, at least, in terms of
political history and episodes and their colonial histories or history of empires
are different again. So where are the point of convergence? History of the West
is a history or rather histories of many different countries. Instead of one coherent
history, there are a series of discontinuities and divisions. If we speak of
transnational or global history, separating the West from the rest of the world is
not possible. European overseas colonialism from the sixteenth century to the
late nineteenth century has been formative of the history of the West. The two
cannot be separated.
1.3 THE DEFINING FEATURES OF EARLY
MODERN WEST
In the field of ideas, this time saw a rekindling of interest in the writings of
scholars from ancient Greece and Rome and a new weight given to the use of
observation as the basis of knowledge. This series of developments, called
the Renaissance, in turn led to new idea of liberal humanism that defined men
(not women! but White men of the West or Europe and not the Asian and the
Blacks !!) as the engineers, maker of their own history, creators of empires, and
masters of language and knowledge. The new way of observing nature and
experimenting as tool of knowledge, though still in rudimentary form in the
early modern period, also emerged as is evident in the model of the solar system
with the sun at the centre while the planets revolved around it, proposed by
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The spread of these new ideas was aided by
the development of printing using movable type, devised by Johannes Gutenberg
(c.1398–1468) in the 1450s. There was also a significant change in the economy,
with a decline in the number of people holding land under the feudal system.
Instead of getting access to land in return for military service or unpaid labour,
farmers paid rent in goods or money. In religion, the power of the Catholic
Church was challenged through criticism of its theology and practices, which
ultimately led to the emergence of new Protestant churches. Finally, around the
same time, Europeans discovered cultures beyond Europe; the best-known voyage
was that led by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) which began the colonisation
of the Americas.
1.3.1 Lack of Single Power Centre
When we speak about the history of the West either in early modern phase or
later when full-fledged modernity emerged, it can be argued that no single power
ever gained supremacy for long. This left permanent, long-lasting imprint on the
making of the West. There were a number of power centres and no political
entity with a common purpose. The historical experience of the Western World
has been one in which a plurality of city states, small regional states, territorial
empires, and later nation-states dominated with none ever gaining total supremacy
and none enduring for long. These polities had differences in terms of economy,
social structure and culture but they also exhibited significant similarities. There
were frequent wars between the various powers of the West but some sort of
balance of power system also evolved since 1648. There were conflicts between
church and state in various countries But they were also able to achieve an
accommodation between their respective claims. It was an accommodation in
which the state got an upper hand at least in a few powerful absolutist states in
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The Rise of the Modern West the early modern period. But as there was no single centre in inter-state
relationship, There was also a lack of single institution/centre within society
which could control the entire society.
1.3.2 Strong Tradition of Civil Society
The absence of a powerful institution within societal order was due to a strong
tradition of civil society which became quite pronounced in the early modern
West. This was a legacy of the Middle Ages itself. Feudalism could not prevent
the local powers from winning rights against the nobility and setting limits to
the centralization of power. Feudalism was based on decentralized power structure
and a polity of mutual obligation. So, even after the emergence of absolute
monarchs in a few states, the ruling elites had to negotiate and share power with
organized civil society groups, such as merchants, craft workers, the intelligentsia,
and later organized workers. This segment was most developed particularly in
the autonomous cities. There the demands of organized guilds and civil society
held back the growth of absolutism. The structure of power institutionalized by
feudalism gave a foundation to legal and symbolic relations of mutual recognition
whereby the ruler had to grant rights to those lower down in return for their
obligations. This was a legacy which could not be wiped out in the early modern
West. The history of early modern West demonstrate this continuity in the form
of civil society movements which played a major role in shaping the direction of
societal development. The legality of any political order was always open to
questioning from those who did not accept its legitimacy. This undoubtedly had
a democratizing effect in the long term.
Moreover, the relation between the present time and the past was from very
early on in the history of Modern West can be seen in terms of continuities and
discontinuities. There are many legacies that can be traced back to the Middle
Ages. But there are also periodic ruptures which produce change. Within
Christianity disputes over the scriptures and ecclesiastical authority were not
new. Primary domain of the Church was supposed to be spiritual but it was
enjoying wide powers in medieval period in terms of landownership and worldly
privileges. So as a powerful social institution entangled in profane world, tensions
were bound to emerge, which Max Weber claimed to provide the West with the
basic momentum towards rationalism. The movements that shaped the later history
of The West, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Enlightenment,
shared this propensity towards the disconnection of the present from the past. To
be sure, the Reformation and the Renaissance saw the present as deriving its
legitimacy from the revival of an older past that if retrieved would allow the
present to break free from the recent past. This spirit of rebirth or revival of a
more ancient mentality was nonetheless a denunciation of the preceding age.
The later and more utopian movements of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
in bringing a more future oriented dimension in the form of idea of progress to
the forefront. This is how continuity was achieved to a large degree through
rupture, which made possible the reconstruction of the past in new forms.
1.3.3 Contest between Individual and Collective
Then there was a contestation between quest of individual and collective liberty.
It has been widely regarded that the idea of the individual was invented in the
West. It was central to Christianity, in the pursuit for individual salvation; it was
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Introducing the Early
Modern West the basis of the Western philosophy and ethics. While the notion of the individual
as such cannot be exclusively attributed to the West, since similar ideas can be
found in other ancient civilizations, what is perhaps more characteristically
Western were the political implications that followed from the discovery of the
individual. The emphasis on the individual later lent itself to the philosophy of
liberalism and to the capitalist ethic. But the kernel of idea was discernible in the
Calvin’s idea of the Calling during Reformation. The concept of the Calling was
a religious conception, that of a task set by God. However, Weber argues that the
concept of the Calling was a new idea, a product of the Reformation, and a
Protestant notion. The concept of Calling that was new involved the valuation of
the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral
activity of the individual could assume. This gave every-day worldly a religious
significance and the individual was to fulfill the obligations of his or her position
in the world in order to be acceptable by God. According to Weber, while the
concept of Calling was first developed by Luther, he was not all that friendly to
capitalism or the capitalistic spirit, and a more traditional view of economic
activity came to dominate Luther’s teachings – opposition to capital and profitmaking and acceptance of one’s occupation and work as a divine ordinance.
Such a view was not conducive to a radical shift in approach to economic activity,
in contrast, the teachings of Calvin, Wesley and others were also concerned with
the salvation of the soul, but these teachings had consequences that were
unforeseen. Weber argues that for reformers such as Calvin, the Puritan sects,
and for men like Menno, George Fox, and Wesley saw the clearest expression of
the Calling in a manner that had connections to the development of the capitalistic
spirit. That is, the teachings of these writers were not directed toward ethical
culture, humanitarianism, social reform, or cultural ideals. But the unintended
consequences of their teachings included spurring on the development of the
capitalistic spirit. The most widely known groups in this tradition are the
Huguenots of France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the Reformed churches of
Holland, the Puritans of England and New England, and the Presbyterian Church
in Scotland and North America.
Check Your Progress 1
1) How do you define the early modern west?
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2) What were the implications of different power centres for the early modern
west?
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The Rise of the Modern West 3) How do you see the individual and collective in the early modern west?
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1.4 CULTIVATION OF A GLOBAL ORIENTATION
AND THE AGE OF GEOGRAPHICAL
EXPLORATION
The Early Modern West saw a trend towards the cultivation of a world orientation,
a kind of cosmopolitan outlook. Gradually, people were moving towards a
conception of globe as a political and cultural entity, larger than their own
homeland. It was still marked by a need to negotiate with “others” and has
reflected tensions between home country and colonies. At least, some sections
of elites were becoming familiar with what was different, and outside home
country. Although the ‘other’ was often seen as something to fear, to attack, to
colonise, to dominate or to keep at bay. The Western powers were not the only
ones who developed an interest in other peoples, but it is arguably the case that
curiosity about other cultures was taken further in the West. There was extensive
borrowing of the culture of others, as has been much documented in recent years
by the global historians. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the most salient aspects
of the Western science and technology were derived from other civilizations.
The Western civilization was itself constituted through centuries of crossfertilization from other cultures, especially those of the East and the
Mediterranean. Central to all of this was of course colonial expeditions and
expansion of the Western Powers. While not all of European ventures to the
furthest corners of the world were colonial ones, many were and this was one of
the main ways in which the West related not only to the non-Europeans world
but also to itself. The map was not a West European invention, but it was in
Early Modern West that sophisticated cartographic techniques were developed
that made it possible to think of the world as a globe. The European discovery of
what became known as America was the single greatest event that shaped the
formation of the Western worldview. Unlike the encounter with Asia, the encounter
with America took the form of a ‘discovery’ that challenged the assumptions of
a world ordered by Eurasian civilizations. It opened the way for the emergence
of the wider category of the West, which ultimately reduced the place and
significance of Europe. The explorations began by the Portuguese and Spanish
sailors aided by the kings of their country. Beside wealth in the form of silver
and gold and control of spice trade, military glory and spread of Christian beliefs
were their main motives. A number of technological factors contributed to their
success. With the help of instruments like magnetic Compass, Astrolabe and
with better cartography ( a science of map-making) and shipping, they were able
to reach new lands where they fulfilled their ambitions. The caravel, was a kind
of improved ship designed by the Portuguese. Its triangular sails allowed the
ships to sail against the winds. This technique was learnt from the Arabs. The
magnetic Compass was invented by the Chinese and Astrolabe by the Greeks.
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Introducing the Early
Modern West The Age of Exploration as it was called also suggest that religious and worldly
affairs were closely connected in the Early Western mind. This found expression
in the phrase ‘God, Glory and Gold’.
1.5 TRADE, COLONIES, AND MERCANTILISM
Led by Portugal and Spain, European nations in the 1500s and 1600s established
many trading posts and colonies in the Americas and the East. A colony is a
settlement of people living in a new territory, linked with the parent country by
trade and direct government control. With the development of colonies and trading
posts, Europeans entered an age of increased international trade. Colonies played
a role in the theory of mercantilism, a set of principles that dominated economic
thought in the seventeenth century. According to mercantilists, the prosperity of
a nation depended on a large supply of bullion, or gold and silver. To bring in
gold and silver payments, nations tried to have a favorable balance of trade. The
balance of trade is the difference in value between what a nation imports and
what it exports over time. When the balance is favorable, the goods exported are
of greater value than those imported. To encourage exports, governments
stimulated export industries and trade. They granted subsidies, or payments, to
new industries and improved transportation systems by building roads, bridges,
and canals. By placing high tariffs, or taxes, on foreign goods, they tried to keep
these goods out of their own countries.
1.6 THE GROWTH OF SLAVE TRADE
Another offshoot of the Age of Exploration was emergence of large scale slave
trade. During the last half of the fifteenth century, for example, about a thousand
slaves were taken to Portugal each year. Before the age of exploration, there
were slaves who served as domestic servants. The demand for slaves changed
considerably, however, with the discovery of the Americas in the 1490s and the
establishment of sugarcane plantations. Cane sugar was introduced to Europe
from Southwest Asia during the Middle Ages. During the sixteenth century,
plantations, large agricultural farms, were set up along the coast of Brazil and on
islands in the Caribbean to grow sugarcane. It led to an increase in demand for
labour. The small indigenous or AmeriIndian population had been wiped out
died of epidemic diseases imported from Europe. Thus, African slaves were
shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean to work on the plantations. In 1518, a Spanish
ship carried the first boatload of African slaves directly from Africa to the
Americas. During the next two centuries, the trade in slaves multiplied and became
part of the triangular trade that marked the emergence of a new world economy.
The pattern of triangular trade connected Europe, Africa and Asia, and the
American continents. European merchant ships carried European manufactured
goods, such as guns and cloth, to Africa, where they were traded for a cargo of
slaves. The slaves were then shipped to the Americas and sold. European
merchants then bought tobacco, molasses, sugar, and raw cotton and shipped
them back to Europe to be sold in European markets. An estimated 275,000
African slaves were exported during the sixteenth century. Two thousand went
every year to the Americas alone. In the seventeenth century, the total climbed to
over a million and jumped to six million in the eighteenth century. By then the
trade had spread from West Africa and central Africa to East Africa. Altogether,
as many as ten million African slaves were brought to the Americas between the
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The Rise of the Modern West early sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. This institution was considered
to be natural until Quakers, a group of Christian reformers, began to oppose it.
1.7 PRINTING AND NETWORKS OF
INFORMATION
Then there was a new system of spreading information already in existence. Two
of the key events which defined the beginning of the early modern period were
linked to ideas. The first was technological: the development of printing using
type. Ideas had been circulating in manuscript for centuries, but the printing
press provided an additional means of reproducing texts in very large numbers.
Books were produced in both cheap and expensive editions. The production of
cheap editions, coupled with the increasing numbers of people who were able to
read and write meant that people from across society were reading – the rich, the
middling and even some working people had access to books and ideas. Printing
affected all areas of life. For example, the availability of cheap books would
have had a big impact on religion and culture. For the spread of the Protestant
ideas, books and pamphlets were crucial. Reading and writing had existed in the
European Middle Ages and Asian Empires but they remained restricted activities,
largely limited to the clergy and the medieval scribes’ who tirelessly copied and
re-copied. The peasantry and most of the populace still lived by orality, although
they did have what Illich calls “lay literacy,” which was an awareness of the
existence and importance of books and deference to the authority of written
documents, even if they themselves could not read them. Literacy remained an
elite privilege, and until 1500 CE, most likely not more than 10% of the world
population could read or write.. What changed then, in the Early Modern West,
of course, was the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press and movable type. Until
Gutenberg’s invention, the only way to reproduce text was copying by hand, a
laborious task. The printing press made books a mass commodity, and for precisely
that reason, literacy became a mass phenomenon. The social history of ‘Book’
has been traced by Roger Chartier. Standardized typefaces made reading an easier
activity, because readers no longer had to deal with the idiosyncrasies of another
person’s handwriting. The errors so frequently made by scribal copyists were
eliminated, and thus thousands of people could have access to the same,
presumably error-free “standard edition” of a text. This introduced new modes
of production, transmission and reception of written word. It also brought into
life new categories of ‘author’, ‘book’ or ‘work’ and helped to create ‘communities
of readers’ and ‘libraries’. Although measuring literacy in pre-industrial societies
and early modern Europe is a daunting task, but spread of literacy cannot be
doubted although the same ‘text’ could have been appropriated and understood
differently by different social groups. The geography of literacy indicate higher
literacy in North and North-West Europe, however, there were inequalities across
gender, occupations and estates. literacy was predominantly linked to a person’s
work and status. Then, the Early Modern West had interlinked system of
communications. West Europe was considerably more networked than other parts
of the world due in part to its navigational rivers, trade routes, centres of learning
from monasteries to universities, translations, map making, the early development
of printing and the techniques for the manufacture of paper etc. The bourgeois
culture of modernity, as Seigel shows, was based on networks that facilitated its
diffusion.
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Introducing the Early 1.8 THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN EARLY Modern West
MODERN WEST
The Society constituted of three major social orders in the Middle Ages — the
clergy, the nobility and lower rank of the peasant or serf-cultivators and artisans..
The estates or orders of medieval Europe were unequally ranked and this hierarchy
of ranks was legally recognized and approved by religious-normative order of
the society. It is an over simplified view of social structure as there were significant
variations within each social strata in terms of access to wealth, power and
resources. Nobility was differentiated from within which included kings with
big, estates, many castles and palaces to minor nobles with a small estate and
may be a single house. It also leaves out merchants, traders and manufacturers:
groups which grew in numbers and importance over the early modern period.
But contemporaries thought in terms of ranking of society in these terms. Here
are two definitions of the structure of society. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), a
novelist and social commentator, in an eighteenth-century newspaper. described
it poetically as follows showing finer variations in terms of wealth or social
produce one has entitlement to in society:
The great, who live profusely.
The rich, who live very plentifully.
The middle sort, who live well.
The working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.
The country people, farmers, &c., who fare indifferently.
The poor, that fare hard.
The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.
Although nobles continued to dominate the social elite in the Early Modern
Western society, owning much of the land and wealth, they were also joined in
the social elite by wealthy merchants and bankers. Some merchants were much
richer than the nobles. The society started undergoing a slow, long transformation.
This transition process has evoked a lively debate within the scholars but one
thing is certain that the institution of serfdom weakened in Western Europe and
peasant cultivators were no longer a homogenous social group. Society was also
divided along gender lines. Early modern Europe was a patriarchal society, where
men held greater power than women but it depended on class location also. Men
dominated the worlds of trade and of politics, but women were confined to
domestic domain and kitchen. As mothers, they may have exercised some
emotional power over their children. Wealthy women of nobles and rich
merchants ran large households, and some of the wives of nobles looked after
their husbands’ estates while they were away on business or at war.
1.9 COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES
The Commercial Revolution of late Middle Ages had profound impact on the
society as is evident from the rise of fairs, to the physical expansion of cities, the
increased output of books, and the growth of population and urbanization. It is
estimated in 900 C.E. Western Europe had only about 1% of its population living
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The Rise of the Modern West in cities with more than 10,000 people; by 1500, the urbanization rate for Western
Europe stood at over 8%, with peaks of over 10% and 20% in the Netherlands
and in Belgium, respectively. The medieval “commercial revolution”—was simple
expansion of trade but it should not be confused with the Early Modern
commercial or financial “revolutions” in the Low Countries and England
(involving the long term development of the bourse, exchange banks, joint stock
companies, and so on). The invention, diffusion, or earliest perfection of holding
companies, of cashless transactions using bills of exchange, of contracts for marine
insurance, and of advanced bookkeeping techniques including so called “double
entry” accounting, practices facilitated the expansion of long distance trade,
international banking, and commercial and industrial partnerships. The desire
for merchant credit and decreased transaction costs in long distance trade led to
the use of moneys of account and the creation of the earliest instruments of
international finance; the most fundamental of the latter was the “bill of exchange”.
It was a multi party payment order executable in a foreign currency in a distant
location. This was invented in Northern Italy, widespread already in the fourteenth
century, and in use — largely unchanged — until the eighteenth. Cashless
exchanges had occurred at the fairs, on the basis of obligatory letters. The bill of
exchange was revolutionary because the issuer could thereby order a distant
third party to pay the debt in another currency, which allowed the bills to circulate
widely and function as instruments of both credit and transfer in international
trade. Now, merchants pooled capital and shared risk to enrich themselves and
their polities, utilizing the infrastructure and markets that they helped to make,
and creating new legal and financial instruments to facilitate their ventures.
1.10 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND UNIVERSITIES
Then the role of institutions and institutional change is always important as an
underpinning factor in any social change. The Early Modern period saw not only
economic transformation in Western Europe, but also the establishment of the
first universities — first one was established in Bologna in the 11th century. Then
fifty more in the emerged following four centuries. There was also the
development of formal legal institutions and state administrative systems.
probably, these educational and legal institutions played some role in promoting
economic activity. Huff (2003) argues that the European university was an
institution that was uniquely suited to promoting technical change, and that the
rise of universities can be seen as an important institutional turning point in the
history of European science. But it is a doubtful conjecture and perhaps an
exaggerated statement. The initial universities such as Bologna had close affinity
with Medieval Islamic centres of learning, although they had acquired some
corporate features and privileges and legal status. Outside Universities, academic
degrees accorded by them were not an entitlement to practice any particular
profession. For example, the study of theology was not a pre-condition or
eligibility for priesthood in Church. Only gradually, university degree became a
marker of professional elites engaged in the cure of souls, legal practice,
government administration and medical care and education. Universities in Early
Modern period provided education mainly in arts, theology, law and medicine
and not in disciplines like architecture, ship-building, agriculture, veterinarymedicine and military technology.
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Introducing the Early
Modern West Check Your Progress 2
1) Did the invention of printing bring about changes in the way knowledge was
shared and circulated?
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2) What was the impact of the commercial revolution on the early modern west?
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1.11 LET US SUM UP
We have seen that how with the end of Middle Ages in the Western Europe, a
period of transition set in. This period of transition to modernity was long and
slow and the pace of change varied from country to country. It entailed changes
in almost all aspect of social life-religious beliefs, trade and human settlement,
economy, social institutions, mode of communications and relationship with nonWestern world. In the Early Modern times in the Western Europe, trade had
expanded, towns had grown in number and size, and a new, more sophisticated
society had emerged. In large parts of western Europe feudalism, with its
fragmented power-structures, began to erode. The Unit has highlighted some
singular features of this change. In later units we will learn more about this
social metamorphism in greater detail.
1.12 KEYWORDS
Renaissance: Literally means ‘rebirth’.Refers to the period in early modern
Europe when there was a revival, development and flourishing of classical arts
and learning.This led to notions of humanism and individualism which challenged
the medieval and feudal world views.
Reformation: The process of reform in organised Christianity where the
hegemony of orthodox church and the pope were challenged.
Periodisation: The notion of dividing a particular phase in history in terms of its
well defined characteristics.This can lead to debates and controversies as different
scholars highlight different features of a period and adopt different classificatory
terms. For example the controversy over the term feudalism in India.
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The Rise of the Modern West 1.13 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS
EXERCISES
Check Your Progress 1
1) See Section 1.2
2) See Sub-section 1.3.1
3) See Sub-section 1.3.3
Check Your Progress 2
1) See Section 1.7
2) See Section 1.9
1.14 SUGGESTED READINGS
Cameron, E. (ed.) (1999) Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Kamen, H. (2000) Early Modern European Society, London, Routledge.
Laslett, P. (1971) The World We Have Lost, London, Methuen.
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