Image: Queen Elizabeth I, a leading sovereign of the early modern period.
Historians are troubled by “periodization.” Periodization means dividing history into chronological eras such as the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, and the dither is about the early modern period. To some of my readers, this fuss may be about as exciting as the grammarians’ debate over the Oxford comma (whether to put a comma before “and” in a series). But I can assure you it is more complicated and possibly more important. If you’re willing to come along for the ride, let’s begin.
In the nineteenth century, Renaissance scholars (who held a lot of sway) decided that the Renaissance launched the modern era. They divided European history into “ancient” (from about 776 B.C.—the first Greek Olympic games—to the sack of Rome in 476 A.D.) and “modern” (from the Renaissance —1300 to 1500 or so—to today. Between the two they squeezed in the Middle Ages, which were not considered worthy of much attention.
But that “periodization” wasn’t satisfactory as time went on. Around the 1970s, the term “early modern” crept in. According to historian Jerry Bentley, the cause was the expansion of American higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the production of many Ph.D.s and a tendency to specialize in smaller and smaller topics. ”The notion of early modern Europe was a principal beneficiary of this specialization,” he says. [1]
“Modern” was just too big, especially when it came to textbooks. American historians had to figure out how to divide up college curricula. With two world wars, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, how can you cover history from the Renaissance to today in one course? Impossible. The first textbook specifically naming early modern history appeared in 1970.
The early modernists received encouragement from two additional quarters. First, historians were discovering the vitality of the Middle Ages—the expansion of literacy, the growth of towns and cities, the stimulation of trade. This undermined the uniqueness of the Renaissance—”pulling out the central pillar holding up the dramatic organization of western history,” as Jan de Vries wrote in 1994.[2] The medieval era was no longer just in the “middle”; it existed in its own right.
Second, as de Vries also explains, the Industrial Revolution soon met the fate of the Renaissance. Initially viewed as a sudden event that began in the English cotton industry around 1750, the Industrial Revolution was found to be a much more gradual process.[3] Terms like “proto-industrialization,” “pre-industrialization,” and the “industrious revolution” cropped up. In fact, de Vries calls the rethinking of the Industrial Revolution “the revolt of the early modernists” because it revealed that the early modern age was a rich, complex period—like the Middle Ages, important in its own right.
Okay, so what is the fuss about? To put it simply, historians worry that writing about the early modern period makes them Eurocentric. That is beyond the pale for most historians today.
The early modern period was the time when Europeans explored the globe, discovered the Western hemisphere, dramatically expanded international trade, including the slave trade, and began colonies. Is it possible to write about it without giving preferential attention to Europe? Historians keep hoping.
Fear of Eurocentrism has led to heroic efforts to make the early modern period more global, less European. Victor Lieberman selected six “disparate” geographical areas, from France to Burma, to compare their “state and culture” formation. [4] But choosing them meant finding themes on which to compare them—again, a dangerous nod to the idea that European history sets the standard for world history.
Another idea: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter say there are “multiple modernities,” and the early modernities in each realm can be “analyzed not only in terms of their approximation to the West but also in their own terms.”[5] Yet Eisenstadt and Schluchter, too, had to choose the points of comparison. They chose nation-states (and nation-based empires), plus “types of rulership or political order, the types of public spheres, and the types of collective identities.” [6] Got that?
So, periodization is a problem. It affects the early modern period the most because that was the beginning of major and expanding global connections. As early modern historian Randolph Starn wrote, “Early modernity is a period for our period’s discomfort about periodization.”[7]
[1] Jerry H. Bentley, “Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World,” in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, eds. Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 13-31, at 15.
[2] Jan de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (June 1994): 249-270, at 250.
[3] Indeed, the economy of France may have been growing faster than that of Britain during the Industrial Revolution! See an earlier post on this blog.
[4]Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East–West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed. Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 19-102.
[5] Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities: A Comparative View,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 1-18, at 7.
[6] Eisenstadt and Schluchter, 17.
[7] Randolph Starn, “Review Article; The Early Modern Muddle,” Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 3 (2002): 296-307, at 296. Thanks to Professor Keith Luria for collecting these essays for his students.
I confess I don’t understand how periodization is Eurocentric. Historical periods are defined at beginning and end by changes to the status quo. If the rest of the world was essentially stagnant at a time when one culture made major changes, then what is the problem with defining the period according to the culture that changed? Voyages of discovery, the commercial revolution, industrialization, and other world-changing events happened in the West while nothing as earth-shattering was happening in the rest of world. Are we supposed to downplay world turning points merely because they occurred in Europe and not elsewhere?
Isn’t part of the problem the use of the word “modern”? Normally we think of modern as current. So speaking of the past as modern is inherently problematic. That gives us our current time as post-modern. What’s the next age to be called post-post-modern or pre-next-modern?
Do I declare my preference for linguistics or my ignorance when I say I still find the Oxford comma question more important than how to divide history into periods?
I suspect the most important reason for periods is pedagogy–those 13 week semesters. (Once 15 weeks and much cheaper but I don’t think the content of history courses changed much.)
Consider this fact, that we can teach the same period of history in courses that differ by 15% in instructional hours. I propose we could teach all of human history in 13 weeks. Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari relate some 80,000 years of human history in single volumes.
It depends on granularity. And isn’t it granularity that blurs the distinctions between periods of history? The finer the detail, the more dividing lines are stretched and periods appear like beads on a string.
Only academic categorizers could pretend that foraging ended Monday and agriculture began Tuesday and the Industrial Revolution Thursday, and the digital age Friday Of course, no one really believes next come sabbath Saturday or Sunday. (Perhaps Huxley did predict something like that in Brave New World, written in the 1930s!)
This sequence also suggests that the slower the change, the easier to divide history into periods. The full blown Renaissance is separated from the medieval world by a couple of centuries, but the digital from the machine age by only decades.
I feel ignorant in asking why one must divide history into periods at all, other than suggesting it is for the same reason we have chapters in novels.
As to Euro-centric history, if the most recent intensification of globalization and interchange of values and merging of cultures is the subject, certainly the European powers have been the most important agents in the last 500 years. For the 700 years prior to that, the Middle East, and in Asia China.
With China taking the lead in some technologies and forging far ahead in editing human beings genetically (the new eugenics), there will be a China period beginning soon.
Wallace:
A great point: “The finer the detail, the more dividing lines are stretched and periods appear like beads on a string.” Historians are continually discovering that a lot of things are going on at the same time and therefore it is hard to generalize. They like to show how complex any period of time was, even in a single country, and certainly in the entire world. Usually they work on places or subjects as if they were doing embroidery, getting the picture more and more detailed, but perhaps forgetting to look at the fabric as a whole.
Economists, by the way, are much more comfortable with the big picture, but few are attracted to the painstaking investigation that historians conduct.