The Early Modern World

The world reshaped by transoceanic contact, roughly 1400 to 1800 CE: the Age of Discovery and its consequences, the European Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific Revolution, and the contemporaneous golden ages of the Mughal Empire and the Inca Empire before its conquest. Belongs here: any era whose defining dates fall in this window, including the Enlightenment's eighteenth-century political and scientific thought, which this scheme groups with the world it grew out of rather than with the political revolutions that follow. Does not belong here: the medieval world before transoceanic contact, grouped under The Post-Classical and Medieval World, or the nineteenth-century political and industrial order that follows, grouped under The Long Nineteenth Century.