Empires, Exploration, and Enlightenment

We’re now going to jump about a thousand years forward in the human story to the late Middle Ages. What did we miss? The fall of many of the great empires discussed in the previous tile, such as the Persians, the Romans and the Egyptians; the rise of Islam in the Middle East, and the Islamic golden age; the spread of Buddhism from India through South East Asia; great cultural development under the Han, Jin, and Tang dynasties in China.

These were all essential steps forward in the human story, and worth full pathways in their own right (some of which you can already find on Kinnu!). But for the next true paradigm shift in human civilization, we’ll be looking at how the Early Modern period came into being.

The centuries that came before this period were known as the Middle Ages. At this time the dominant powers in the world were mostly in the Middle and Far East.

However, a train of events occurred in the subsequent centuries that would lead to the balance of power tipping westwards, towards Europe, for the first time.

To understand the roots of the Early Modern period, let’s first look at 13th century China. Some major upheavals occurred in the great Chinese empire that would have far-reaching impacts.

At the beginning of the century, Mongol leader Genghis Khan led an extraordinary campaign of conquest that left him at the head of the largest contiguous empire in history.

Genghis died in 1227, leaving an empire to govern. Over the subsequent decades, the empire would become fragmented between his many descendants.

One of the most important and influential of these would be Kublai Khan, Genghis’s grandson.

In 1271, Kublai Khan took over as ruler of China, establishing the Yuan Dynasty in the process. This was the first Chinese dynasty that had foreign origins – Kublai Khan was a Mongol by birth.

As Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai had ties to lands that lay far beyond the reach of China. In fact, his grandfather’s empire stretched as far as Eastern Europe.

One of the major ways that Kublai Khan influenced the course of Chinese and world history was through the opening up of relationships between China and this wider world, including Europe.

Kublai Khan invited foreign delegates to visit in his new capital city of Beijing. One of these was an intrepid young Venetian merchant by the name of Marco Polo. Polo spent 17 years in the court of Kublai Khan.

When he returned to Europe, he wrote about the mysterious empire and advanced civilizations he had witnessed in China, as well as the Silk Road – the trading route that traversed Central Asia and allowed for travel and trade with China. This was astonishing to Europeans, who had no direct accounts of the great empires that lay on the other side of the world.

At first, his accounts were met with skepticism. However, gradually other Europeans came to realise how much opportunity and wealth lay in the East, far beyond the boundaries of Europe.

Over the 14th and 15th centuries, trade increasingly opened up between Europe and Asia. However, for various reasons, access to the Silk Road in Europe was controlled by Venice. If the other European nations wanted to access the wealth that lay in the East, they’d have to find another way.

This problem would trigger the seafaring nations of Western Europe to seek out ways of sailing to Asia. Portugal and Spain were locked in a race to be the first to sail to ‘the Indies’, as the Indian subcontinent was known. The winner would be guaranteed great wealth, by opening up new routes for spice trading.

The Portuguese won the race, with Vasco de Gama succesfully navigating around Africa to the Indies in 1499.

Spain lost the race to reach the Indies by sea. However, in trying to do so, they became the first Europeans to explore a new continent – America.

On August 3, 1492 Christopher Columbus set off from Spain with three ships, with the aim of establishing a new route to India. As you probably know, he never made it to India. Instead, he landed in America, ushering in a new era of world history in the process.

Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1492 heralded the onset of European expeditions to the New World, driven by the desire to establish trade networks and colonies, to extract wealth (often in a deeply exploitative way), and to spread Christianity.

The major sea powers of Europe, notably Portugal and Spain, led these expeditions. The Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by Pope Alexander VI, apportioned the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Spain and Portugal, dividing them along a meridian west of the Cape Verde islands.

The Spanish and Portuguese, through their voyages, claimed vast territories in what is now Latin America, with Spain focusing on areas rich in precious metals, such as Mexico and Peru, clashing with cultures such as the Aztecs and the Incas.

These were places where the Spanish crown established viceroyalties to administer the regions. Portugal, on the other hand, directed its colonial effort towards Brazil, capitalizing on its sugarcane production powered by imported African slave labor from its own West African possessions.

As the colonial wealth of these Ibero-American realms swelled, other Western European nations, including the Dutch, French, British, and Danish, aspired to replicate Iberia's colonial model. This led to their seizure of some Caribbean islands from Spain and the establishment of sugar plantations, using the same enforced labor model, in territories that Iberians had not densely settled.

Colonialism came at an extraordinary cost. The expansion of European power around the world was usually at the expense of the indigenous populations. The introduction of unknown diseases to these populations, as well as the appalling treatment they received at the hands of the European colonialists, led to the destruction of entire cultures, and massive numbers of deaths.

It’s estimated that some 55 million indigenous Americans – 90% of their existing population – perished in the 17th century, as a result of diseases introduced by Europeans. The colonialist ideology was also the main driver of, and benefactor from, the Atlantic slave trade, in which many millions of Africans were captured, shipped across to America and forced to work as slaves.

The European colonial expansion was a tale of brutal exploitation, creating vast wealth in Europe at the cost of millions of lives in other parts of the world.

Colonialism also marked several changes in how the world was governed. Europe had always been a minor power in comparison to the great empires of the Middle and Far East. The rapid influx of wealth, and military advantage, that came from occupying great swathes of the world, shifted that balance of power for the first time.

This global reach also laid the foundations for two of the great forces that would come to define the modern world – capitalism and globalism. The international trade brought about by the new colonial empires led to innovative trading practices such as the establishment of the first private limited companies, shareholder structures, and stock markets.

Colonialism also opened up pathways for international exchange – both commercial and cultural – to a level that had never existed before. As technology developed over time, this led to the development of globalism, one of the defining elements of the modern world.

At around the same time that Spain and Portugal were kicking off the era of colonialism, a religious and cultural upheaval was taking place in Germany, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The invention of the printing press and the subsequent Protestant Reformation were landmark events in the history of Europe that altered the religious, cultural, and political landscapes of the entire world in profound ways.

These developments in the 15th and 16th centuries facilitated widespread dissemination of knowledge, challenged the hegemony of the Catholic Church, and eventually led to the ascendancy of liberal, secular humanism as a globally recognised value-system.

The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century transformed the way knowledge was shared and disseminated across Europe. Prior to its invention, books were copied manually, a laborious process that limited their availability and made them prohibitively expensive for most people.

Gutenberg’s movable type printing press significantly reduced the cost of producing books and made them accessible to a broader segment of the population.

This was an innovation similar to the invention of the alphabet. For the first time, ideas could be disseminated rapidly and cheaply, and the ability to read was a realistic prospect for a large portion of the population. The speed and efficiency with which information could be encoded and shared grew by an order of magnitude.

Among the first major works printed using this new technology was the Gutenberg Bible. This was the first time the Bible was printed at a wide scale.

If you were a Christian in Medieval Europe – that means virtually everyone – your relationship with religion would be highly indirect. You probably wouldn’t be able to read, and even if you could, the chances are that the only book within twenty miles would be the Latin bible in the local church, which you wouldn’t be permitted to read.

After the printing press was invented, it became possible and relatively cheap to have a bible in your own home. You might even be able to get one in your vernacular language, as opposed to Latin, Greek or Hebrew.

This meant that far more people became familiar with what was written in the Bible, as opposed to what they had been told about it by the Catholic Church, who held a complete monopoly on religion in Europe, and who were corrupt on many levels.

As more and more people became literate and capable of having their own relationship with the Bible, there were stirrings of dissent across central Europe.

These would come to a head on October 31st, 1517, when an eccentric young monk called Martin Luther sent out a declaration, known as the 95 theses, to many important German clergymen and political leaders. This was a formal rejection of many of the key tenets of the Catholic Church. The Reformation had begun.

The key point that Luther was making was that religion was primarily an individual endeavour – individuals would make it to heaven through their own private faith, rather than their adherence to the dogma set by the Catholic Church.

The impact of the Reformation was wide-ranging. There were first-order effects: several nations, such as England and the Netherlands, adopted Protestantism as their national faith. This set them in conflict with other European powers such as France and Spain, who remained loyal to the Pope. This conflict had a global reach, since these countries all held significant overseas territories. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics was fought across the world, from Ontario to Osaka.

The Reformation also had a huge impact on the colonisation of America. The earliest permanent European settlers were Puritans – radical Protestants – from England, whose main reason for departing their homeland was that they saw it as irredeemably corrupted by the influence of the Catholic church.

There were also second-order impacts from the Reformation that would have a subtle but profound global impact. Luther’s reforms shifted the emphasis of religion away from the collective and towards the individual.

This fostered a sense of personal responsibility and autonomy that influenced not only religious but also political and social thought. This change contributed to the development of modern concepts of democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law, elements that would later be pivotal in shaping the modern world.

The reformation in Early Modern Europe may seem at first like an obscure debate about religious dogma. But the ideology it gave rise to has massively defined the world we see around us today.

The birth and growth of capitalism as a dominant economic system in Europe during the early modern period was another huge development in world history that would shape the world as we know it today.

Capitalism is characterized by private ownership of the means of production. That means that businesses can be owned by individuals, and that wealth can be created through the ownership of capital.

In the systems that preceded capitalism, the only real predictor of wealth was the position you were born in within the social hierarchy. Under a capitalist system, anyone could theoretically become wealthy, by making the right investments and putting their capital to work.

Before the full establishment of capitalism, Europe witnessed the mercantilist period, an era where the economy was increasingly dominated by the activities of merchants. This was especially true in seafaring colonial nations such as England and Holland, and also in some of the extremely wealthy city-states that made up what is now Italy.

In these countries, the ‘bourgeouisie’ – meaning the property-owning middle classes – grew increasingly rich and powerful through trade. In the past, the most powerful people in society had always been aristocrats, who had essentially retained their power in feudal societies through their military dominance.

The colonial ventures, especially those initiated by powers such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, opened new avenues for trade and investment. Where previously you had to be a land-owning aristocrat to be rich, there were now merchants amassing huge fortunes as middle-men selling the fruits of the New World.

The transition from feudal agriculture to a money-based economy, particularly in 16th-century England, marked a significant shift towards capitalist economy. This shift was characterized by changes in land ownership and labor systems, laying the philosophical and economic foundations for capitalism.

Workers started to be employed within a broader money-based economy, and landlords sought to improve agricultural productivity for profit, leading to an increased competitive labor market.

Subtly, for the first time since the Agricultural Revolution thousands of years earlier, the primary driver of the economy was ceasing to be agriculture. Instead, people were figuring out how to create wealth through investments and services.

The Industrial Revolution, occurring in the late 18th century, accelerated the development of capitalism by introducing technological advancements and the factory system. This period saw the rise of industrialists who eventually replaced merchants as the dominant force in the capitalist system.

Economic theorists like David Hume and Adam Smith challenged mercantilist doctrines, arguing against the zero-sum perspective of wealth and advocating for free trade and market deregulation.

This intellectual shift, along with the practical economic changes during the Industrial Revolution, steered Britain and subsequently other parts of the world towards industrial capitalism, characterized by the manufacture of goods in factories, extensive division of labor, and routine work tasks.

Two other major developments in the early modern period were the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. These were monumental movements that reshaped European thought, influencing areas ranging from the sciences to politics and beyond.

The Scientific Revolution, spanning from approximately 1543 to 1687, initiated this transformation.

The publication of Nicolaus Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" in 1543 is often cited as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. In it, Copernicus correctly identified that the earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around.

This statement, which might seem obvious to us, turned the whole world on its head for many people at the time. Copernicus taught the world that we, the human race, were not the centre of the universe – literally or in terms of our importance.

The century and a half that followed Copernicus’s discovery saw a flourishing of extraordinary scientific discoveries. There were many of these. Kepler identified that the planets were orbiting the sun in ellipses, and that their orbits were consistent. Galileo figured out that the moon was reflecting the sun’s light, and also proved Copernicus’s theory by observing the movements of Venus.

However, the most major and lasting achievement of the Scientific Revolution lies in the work of Isaac Newton. Newton's 1687 publication, ‘The Prinicipals of Natural Philsophy’ laid down most of the laws of classical physics, including the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

Newton’s achievement was extraordinary – the laws of physics that he identified could explain how everything in the (then) known universe worked, from the tiniest grains of sand to the stars in the sky.

We’ve followed the story of the universe from its earliest moments. It’s incredible to think that, out of those disparate hot clouds of hydrogen isotopes, there were now walking, talking clumps of carbon molecules who were starting to understand the laws that had gotten them there in the first place.

Hot on the heels of the Scientific Revolution, and in many ways overlapping with it, was the period known as the Enlightenment. This carried the principals of the Scientific Revolution – the belief in rationality and disregard for dogmatic ways of doing things – into broader social and political arenas.

It was an intellectual and philosophical movement that spanned the 17th and 18th centuries, promoting ideas centered on reason, liberty, and progress. Enlightenment thinking was significantly shaped by the revolution in science, with figures such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes influencing the movement’s development.

Bacon’s empiricism and Descartes' rationalist philosophy established a new critical thinking framework, emphasizing observation and reasoning as the primary sources of knowledge. This shift from reliance on tradition and authority to evidence-based inquiry was a defining feature of the age.

The world’s first major encyclopaedia, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert between 1751 and 1772, exemplifies Enlightenment thought. These two writers aimed to collect as much of human knowledge as possible into a single book, that could be used as a reference point for anyone to understand a topic.

Nowadays it’s obvious to us that this would be useful. But at the time, this was a revolutionary idea. In a sense, Diderot and d’Alembert were echoing Luther’s beliefs from two centuries earlier. Just as Luther’s version of Christian worship was about democratising access to religion, the Encyclopédie was a sign of the increasing democratisation of knowledge, as something that could and should become accessible to all.

This idea of democratisation would come to have an even more marked impact in the political realm.

Another major outcome of the Enlightenment was the decline of monarchies and the rise of the modern, liberal-democratic nation state.

This was a multifaceted process intertwined with the broader intellectual and political currents of the Enlightenment. This period saw a profound reassessment of governance, the role of the monarch, and the rights of individuals, leading to transformative changes across Europe, which would ripple across the rest of the world in the subsequent centuries.

One of the core principles emerging from Enlightenment thought was the notion of 'consent of the governed,' a philosophy deeply espoused by thinkers like John Locke.

Locke's ideas, delineated in his ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (1689), represented a paradigm shift from the old governance paradigm under feudalism, which was rooted in the so-called ‘divine right of kings’ – the belief that the monarch’s power was God-given.

The Enlightenment advocated for reason, liberty, and equality, challenging the hereditary and divine justification for monarchial rule. In England, these ideas were not entirely new; interest in the Magna Carta and the establishment of the Bill of Rights in 1689, following the English Civil War, had already begun to limit the power of the crown, setting a precedent for constitutional monarchy.

The engagement of monarchs with Enlightenment thinkers varied. While some rulers, known as ‘enlightened despots,’ sought to incorporate Enlightenment ideals into their governance – including Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and others – their efforts often resulted in mixed outcomes. For instance, Joseph II's overzealous reforms led to revolts.

The Enlightenment's push for reforms intertwined with the rise of liberal democracy, challenging the very foundations of absolute monarchy. The ideas of the Enlightenment, spread by philosophers like John Locke, argued against monarchical absolutism and advocated for a government based on the consent of the governed.

These were pushed further than ever before in the French and American Revolutions, where the concept of a monarch was done away with altogether, in favour of democratic republics.

These were two major watershed moments in human history. The form of democratic government that was instituted in these nations would become the blueprint for almost every national constitution on earth – to varying degrees of success – in the following centuries.