Prof. Dr. Thomas Maissen Early Modern History

The designation and delimitation of epochs are always somewhat arbitrary, often ethnocentric or eurocentric and also rouse the suspicion of teleology. Nevertheless, early modernity or pre-modernity are useful names for diverse and contradictory processes since the late 15th century: the communications revolution following the invention of printing, voyages of discovery overseas and the conquest of America, the establishment of the Spanish and Habsburg empires under Charles V, the religious schism during the Reformation, Catholic reform and religious war, state formation and the state system after the Thirty Years' War, humanist, scientific and Enlightenment scholarship, the courtly absolutist society of Louis XIV and the bourgeois republican counter-culture of the Netherlands, long-distance trade and slavery, the rise of Great Britain as a world power and of Prussia in the European balance of power. The Industrial Revolution and the political revolutions in North America and France, spread across the continent by Napoleon, already point to the ‘Sattelzeit’ (1750–1850), when enormous political, social, economic and cultural upheavals transformed the entire world.