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Early Modern Period

EPOCH FOUR OF SIX · 1500 – 1800

Ocean voyages connect landmasses that had been separate for ten thousand years, while a revival of classical learning and a religious split remake European thought from the inside. Absolute monarchs and colonial companies extend the reach of a handful of states, and a new method for testing ideas against evidence starts to outcompete every older way of knowing.

Almost everything in this period cuts two ways. The same ships that carried Copernicus's ideas across Europe carried enslaved people across the Atlantic; the same presses that spread the Reformation spread the pamphlets that justified empire. None of it reads as cleanly as it's usually taught.