Historians in a Dither

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]

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[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.