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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

What is Early Modern History? offers a concise guide to investigations of the era from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and an entry-point to larger questions about how we divide and organize the past and how the discipline of history has evolved. Merry Wiesner-Hanks showcases the new research and innovative methods that have altered our understanding of this fascinating period. She examines various subfields and approaches in early modern history, and the marks of modernity that scholars have highlighted in these, from individualism to the Little Ice Age. Moving beyond Europe, she surveys the growth of the Atlantic World and global history, exploring key topics such as the Columbian Exchange, the slave trade, cultural interactions and blending, and the environment. She also considers popular and public representations of the early modern period, which are often how students - and others - first become curious. Elegantly written and passionately argued, What is Early Modern History? provides an essential invitation to the field for both students and scholars.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Series Title

Title Page

Introduction

Creating “early modern”

Disputing “early modern”

Aims and structure of the book

Notes

1 Economic and Social History

Economic history

Social history

Notes

2 Religious, Intellectual, and Cultural History

Religious history

Intellectual history

Cultural history

Notes

3 Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Women

Gender

Sexuality

Notes

4 The Atlantic World

Explorations and exchanges

Colonization and creolization

Political developments and the Atlantic revolutions

Notes

5 The Global Early Modern

Interactions

Warfare and military history

The environment and environmental history

Notes

6 Popular and Public History

Popular history

Public history

Notes

Afterword: The Future of Early Modern History/Studies

Notes

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

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Series Title

What is History? series

John H. Arnold,

What is Medieval History?

2nd edition

Peter Burke,

What is Cultural History?

3rd edition

Peter Burke,

What is the History of Knowledge?

John C. Burnham,

What is Medical History?

Pamela Kyle Crossley,

What is Global History?

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie,

What is African American History?

Shane Ewen,

What is Urban History?

Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia,

What is Migration History?

J. Donald Hughes,

What is Environmental History?

2nd edition

Andrew Leach,

What is Architectural History?

Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic,

What is Military History?

3rd edition

James Raven,

What is the History of the Book?

Sonya O. Rose,

What is Gender History?

Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani,

What is the History of Emotions?

Hannu Salmi,

What is Digital History?

Brenda E. Stevenson,

What is Slavery?

Jeffrey Weeks,

What is Sexual History?

Richard Whatmore,

What is Intellectual History?

What is Early Modern History?

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

polity

Copyright Page

The right of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4056-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4057-0(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wiesner, Merry E., 1952- author.

Title: What is early modern history? / Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks.

Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: What is history? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A pivotal introduction to early modern history’s approaches and methods”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020027011 (print) | LCCN 2020027012 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509540563 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509540570 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509540587 (epub)

Classification: LCC D206 .W54 2021 (print) | LCC D206 (ebook) | DDC 909/.5072--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027011

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027012

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Introduction

In the twentieth century, historians invented the term “early modern” to refine an intellectual model of time first devised many centuries earlier. During the 1330s, the Italian scholar Petrarch had looked back longingly to classical antiquity, describing ancient Greece and Rome as a period of light, followed by a long period of darkness. He understood himself to be still living in darkness, but anticipated a better future: “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age.”1 By a century later, scholars in the thriving cities of northern Italy understood themselves to be in the bright and better era Petrarch predicted, one in which the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome were being revived. Starting with the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People (1442), they began to divide European history into three parts, with one break at the end of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century, and the second somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.2 In the sixteenth century, this new era and the cultural shift that underlay it were given the label we use today – the Renaissance, derived from the French word for “rebirth.” That word was first used by the art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) to describe the art of “rare men of genius” such as his contemporary Michelangelo. Through their works, Vasari judged, the glory of the classical past had been reborn after centuries of darkness. Over time, the word “Renaissance” was broadened to include aspects of life other than art, although because the new attitude had a slow diffusion out of Italy, the Renaissance happened at different times in different parts of Europe.

Writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries increasingly used the word “middle” – middle season, middle centuries, middle age – to describe the period between the fall of ancient Rome and their own era. Following Bruni, they divided European history into three parts: ancient (to the end of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century); medieval, a word that comes from medium aevum, Latin for middle age (from the fifth century to the fifteenth); and what they usually called “new” (novum in Latin, from the fifteenth century forward). This three-part division became extremely influential, and is still in use today to organize course offerings, library and bookstore holdings, museums, and even how people think of themselves. On introducing themselves at a conference, scholars often say, “I’m a medievalist” or “I’m an ancient historian.”

The word “modern” comes from the Latin modernus, a word invented in the sixth century ce to describe the new Christian age in contrast to pagan antiquity (antiquus). “Modern” was generally juxtaposed with “ancient” into the eighteenth century, but at the end of that century “modern” was increasingly used for things judged to be radically new, and became oriented toward the future rather than contrasted to the past.3 What the humanists had called the “new” period of history became the “modern,” with its origins not only in the Renaissance, but also in the first voyage of Columbus (1492), and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (1517). These three developments – and others, depending on who was writing – were understood to usher in the modern world, or at least to begin the process of ushering it in.

Dividing history into units of time is called “periodization.” This rather clunky word is at the heart of what historians do to make meaning of the past. They decide – and discuss, debate, and argue over – which events and developments should be brought together to form some sort of coherent whole, and what the key turning points are between one era and another. Periodization is a fundamental historical methodology and analytical skill, essential to the chronological reasoning and consideration of change and continuity that are the basis of historical thinking. Most often this is done after the fact; no one living in tenth-century Europe knew they were living in the “Middle Ages,” just as no one fighting in France in the fourteenth century knew they were fighting what would come to be called the Hundred Years’ War. In more recent history, people in the 1920s knew the economy was generally prospering and lifestyles were changing, but only after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 did they know it would be the decade of the 1920s, and not a shorter or longer period, that would be called “roaring.” And only after the economic downturn ushered in by the Crash was over would people know it was the deepest and most widespread ever, hence the “Great Depression.”

Periodization is something that historians do, but so do ordinary people when thinking about their own lives. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, people debated how many stages there were in a human life. They increasingly accepted the notion that there were seven, at least for men, corresponding to the seven known planets (the planets out to Saturn plus the moon). Discussions of what were called the “ages of man” abounded.4 They were depicted in manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, wall paintings, and cathedral floors so that people who could not read were also familiar with them. Sometimes these showed women as well, though the female life-cycle was more often conceptualized and portrayed as a three-stage one: childhood to age twelve, adulthood peaking at age twenty-five, and old age beginning at forty, often described as virgin/wife/widow.5 For us today, life stages are more personal and idiosyncratic. We decide – again usually after the fact – which changes mark dramatic breaks, and which years of our lives form an intelligible grouping. We decide that an event experienced when we are forty marks a “mid-life crisis,” or perhaps that something experienced when we are thirty or fifty or even sixty does. We may use period labels for ourselves given by others – “I’m a boomer,” “I’m a millennial,” “I’m middle-aged” – but also dispute these. Periodization is always an interpretive act.

Whether personal or historical, certain period labels contain clear value judgments, which leaves them more open to dispute than others. “Renaissance” is among these. Vasari clearly understood the rebirth of classical culture he saw happening around him as something important, and something good. Historians and others since then have disputed both of these judgments. They have pointed out that the cultural and intellectual changes that were at the heart of the Renaissance affected only a tiny group, mostly relatively wealthy, well-educated men who lived in cities. More than forty years ago the historian Joan Kelly posed the question, “Did women have a Renaissance?” to which her answer was no.6 There were far more continuities than change for most people, male and female, and many social groups saw decline rather than advance. In addition, because the Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement rather than strictly a time period, it fit somewhat awkwardly into the ancient/medieval/modern scheme. Yes, it was understood to be one development that had led to the modern world, but the Renaissance in Italy overlapped the later medieval period, and the Renaissance in northern Europe the beginning of the modern period. The dividing line between medieval and modern was increasingly set at about 1500, with the Renaissance viewed as a bridge period, or limited only to cultural history.

Creating “early modern”

Among those who had doubts about the significance of the Renaissance was the medieval historian Lynn Thorndike. In his A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he explicitly rejected the idea that the “so-called Italian Renaissance” (his terminology) by itself had brought anything new.7 He introduced a new, and what he saw as a broader and better term: “early modern.” In the 1940s, several articles used the term to discuss economic issues related to early English colonization and the English Civil War, two topics that had never fit very well under the rubric “Renaissance.” By the 1950s, “early modern” was being used more widely in economic history, especially in surveys, but it was not well known beyond this. J.H. Elliott reports that when he and H.G. Koenigsberger proposed a series to Cambridge University Press in the early 1960s with the title “Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History,” it was turned down because no one knew what “early modern” meant, though by 1966 CUP had agreed, and the series was launched.8 Increasing numbers of social and political historians picked up the term in the 1970s and 1980s. At this point, using it in scholarly writing generally signaled an interest in theory derived from the social sciences, and particularly what is often called the Annales “school,” a group of French historians associated with the journal Annales, which had begun publication in 1929 but became especially influential after World War II. (For more on Annales, see Chapter 1.)

In the 1990s, the term spread more widely in scholarly research, publishing, and learned societies. Several other presses also began book series with “early modern” in their titles, and journals adopted it as well. The Sixteenth Century Journal added the subtitle “The Journal of Early Modern Studies” to its title; scholars in Canada started an online journal Early Modern Literary Studies; historians at the University of Minnesota launched the Journal of Early Modern History: Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts; and the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies changed its name to the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In terms of scholarly organizations, scholars of German history and literature in the United States started the group Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (The Interdisciplinary Early Modern), cultural studies scholars formed the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (which later set up the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies), and scholars of women and gender formed the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (which also later began publishing a journal, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal). Some historians of areas other than Europe also began to use “early modern,” often viewing increased global interactions and connections as the defining characteristics of the era.

Each of these journals and organizations defines the period slightly differently: The Sixteenth Century Journal as roughly 1450 to 1660, Early Modern Literary Studies as 1500 to 1700, Early Modern Women as 1400 to 1700, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies as roughly 1550 to 1850, and the Journal of Early Modern History as even longer, roughly 1300 to 1800. The varying definitions of the period reflect the perspectives and aims of scholars and editors, but also reconceptualizations of the field. In the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, the break between medieval and modern was seen as 1500, with Columbus and Luther the most important figures. In most recent research and teaching materials, it has moved backward at least to 1450, to take into account the invention of printing with movable metal type, the effective use of gunpowder weaponry, the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, and the earliest European voyages down the African coast. In a few cases it has moved still further backward, fully encompassing the Renaissance in Europe and the end of the Mongol Empire in Asia. Thus in this longer periodization the Renaissance is once again seen as part of the modern era and not a bridge period.

Map 1: Europe in 1450

The end of the early modern era tends to vary by discipline. In literature, especially in the English literature that dominates the field, it is generally set at around 1700. In history, it is almost always 1789 or 1800. The former date, that of the French Revolution, privileges the political history of western Europe, though there were other significant changes in the decade: Edmund Cartwright invented the steam-powered loom and opened the first cloth-making factory using his new machines, and the first fleet of convicts set sail from Britain to Australia, carrying about a thousand people. Thus the 1780s saw new processes in industrialization and colonization, two developments that are markers in most literature of the break between “early modern” and what we might call “truly modern.” In his influential The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, for example, Christopher Bayly begins with that decade.9 But 1800 works just as well to mark this break, and is widely used.

Disputing “early modern”

At the same time that “early modern” swept the academic landscape, there were also critiques and disputes. Some of these were about continuities. The voyages of Columbus may have marked the beginning of intensive European exploration and colonization, but there was plenty of earlier contact between Europeans and other cultures, and Columbus himself was motivated more by religious zeal – generally regarded as “medieval” – than by a “modern” desire to explore the unknown.10 The Protestant Reformation did bring a major break in western Christianity, but Martin Luther was seeking to reform the church, not split it, just like medieval reformers, of which there were many. Other developments traditionally regarded as marks of modernity, such as the expansion of capitalism, the growth of the nation-state, or increasing interest in science and technology, were also brought into question as scholars found both earlier precedents and evidence that these changes were slow in coming. Though many Anglophone followers of the Annales school called themselves “early modernists,” Annalistes themselves saw no dramatic break, but posited a longue durée stretching from the eleventh century to the nineteenth, a period the French historian and Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie termed “motionless.”11 The French medieval historian Jacques Le Goff argues for a “long Middle Ages” that saw a number of “renaissances,” and that lasted until the mid eighteenth century, when industrialization allowed people to “leave one period behind and leap forward to the next.”12 Among women’s historians, Judith Bennett used examples from women’s work experiences and other areas of life to challenge what she termed the “assumption of a dramatic change in women’s lives between 1300 and 1700.”13

Map 2: Europe in 1763

Other debates have revolved around the whole idea of modernity. Not only was “Renaissance” value laden, but so was “modern.” The humanist historians who first thought of themselves as “new” saw this as a good thing, as did the eighteenth-century philosophers who created the Enlightenment and saw themselves as “moderns” racing toward the future. Most of the social and political theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who developed theories about the progress of history, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, saw this as beneficial or inevitable.

More recent commentators have not necessarily agreed. As concepts, “modernity” and “modernization” are teleological and totalizing, implying that history developed on a single linear trajectory with a final act. Over the last fifty years, master narratives of all types, including a single path to modernity, have come into question.14 Scholars of medieval literature have sharply critiqued what Lee Patterson termed the “crude binarism that locates modernity (‘us’) on one side and premodernity (‘them’) on the other,” a binarism Kathleen Davies links to ideas about secularization, in which the Middle Ages are seen as trapped in theology.15 The historian of early modern England Garthine Walker has similarly highlighted problems with modernization theory, which generally contrasts “traditional” and “modern,” because “societies are far too variable to be captured in a simple dichotomy” and “meaning arises not from the movement of history, but from the social and cultural beliefs and actions of human beings in a given context.”16 Scholars have also pointed to issues specifically with the notion of early modern, which suggests that this era is best understood as on the way to somewhere else but not quite there yet. J.H. Elliott, for example, notes that the term “runs the risk of suggesting that the period is no more than a staging-post on the road to contemporary society.”17 In an article titled “the early modern muddle,” the historian of Italy Randolph Starn comments that the term is “saddled with a teleological modernizing directory,” and “formed by the backfill from the debris of the collapsed breakthroughs to modernity that had not (quite) come about.”18

“Modernity” was (and often is) also explicitly or implicitly western, and connected with colonial domination.19 Reflecting sentiments that are widely shared, the historians of Southeast Asia Leonard and Barbara Andaya comment, “especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal … the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a ‘modern Europe’ against a ‘yet-to-be modernized’ non-Europe.”20 The world beyond Europe joins the Middle Ages as a “them” as compared to “us,” consigned to what the historian of South Asia Dipesh Chakrabarti calls the “waiting room of history,” on the same path but not arrived.21 Such critiques mean that scholars of areas outside of Europe who use “early modern” have tended to explain their use of the term more than those who focus on Europe do. (For more on scholarship on areas outside of Europe, see Chapters 4 and 5.) More philosophical issues also emerged: What exactly do we mean by “modernity”? Will it ever end? Has it ended? What comes afterward?

Aims and structure of the book

Despite these critiques, “early modern” seems here to stay, as a handy through problematic term. The aim of this book is thus to sort out the early modern muddle, and introduce key topics and theories in the field as these have emerged over the last several decades. The book surveys various subfields of history, discussing the marks of modernity that have traditionally been seen as emerging in them, and ways in which they have been questioned, nuanced, and rethought. As you explore the concept of modernity, you will also gain a sense of broader issues and concerns in early modern studies, how these have changed, and how they relate to developments within history as a discipline.

Because “early modern” began as a concept in economic history, Chapter 1 surveys economic and social history of the era, including Marxist historiography, quantitative analyses, debates about how and why capitalism and industrialization emerged, studies of consumption, the Annales school, historical demography, and family history, as well as the history of the body, medicine and health, the emotions, and the senses. Chapter 2 discusses scholarship on the religious, intellectual, and cultural movements that have long been viewed as central to the West’s modernizing trajectory, including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, and highlights history’s material and linguistic/cultural turns. Chapter 3 focuses on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, incorporating key directions in literary studies, art history, and queer theory to discuss scholarship on women’s ideas and actions, debates about female rule and gender difference, notions of masculinity, and the emergence of “modern” sexuality.

Moving beyond Europe, Chapter 4 examines the growth of the Atlantic world as a unit of study, surveying changing views of exploration and the Columbian Exchange, slavery and the slave trade, cultural blending in religious and marital practices, and the development of racial hierarchies. Bringing politics into the story, the chapter discusses trends in the analysis of nation-states, nationalism, empires, and the Atlantic revolutions – American, French, and Haitian. Chapter 5 widens the scope further still, surveying work that explores topics increasingly being investigated on a global scale: how goods, people, and ideas moved around the world, the relationship between warfare and the expansion of states and empires, and the impact of environmental change, especially the Little Ice Age, along with the broader intersection between humans and the natural world. Chapter 6 explores popular and public presentations of the period, and how these have changed – or not – in the last several decades as a result of new research, changing public interests, new technologies, and other factors. The chapter suggests that “what is early modern history?” is a question that matters not just to historians, but also to the wider public. The book ends with a brief afterword discussing the future of early modern history within the context of the extraordinary events of 2020 caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Notes

Francesco Petrarch,

Africa

(1343), IX, 451–7. Quoted in Theodore E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’,”

Speculum

17/2 (1942): 226–42.

Leonardo Bruni,

History of the Florentine People

, ed. and trans. James Hankins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–7). On Bruni, see Gary Ianziti,

Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Reinhart Koselleck,

Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); a new English translation is

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Elizabeth Sears,

The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Silvana Seidel Menchi, “The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women’s Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies,” in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds.,

Time, Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe

, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 52 (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2001), 41–76.

Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz,

Becoming Visible: Women in European History

(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977), 137–64. This article was widely reprinted and led historians of women who study other places and eras to question the applicability of chronological categories derived from male experience alone.

Lynn Thorndike,

A Short History of Civilization

(New York: Crofts, 1926). His phrase regarding the Renaissance appears on pages 186, 295, 386, and 434.

J.H. Elliott,

History in the Making

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 59. The series published nearly fifty titles from 1970 to 2002, and now Cambridge has several other active series with “early modern” in their titles.

C.A. Bayly,

The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914

(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).

See Janet Abu-Lughod,

Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jerry Bentley,

Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Motionless History,”

Social Science History

1 (1977): 115–36.

Jacques Le Goff,

Must We Divide History Into Periods?

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

Judith Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in David Aers, ed.,

Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing

(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 147–75.

Bruno Latour,

We Have Never Been Modern

, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Fredric Jameson,

A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present

(London: Verso, 2013).

Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,”

Speculum

65 (1990), 87–108; Kathleen Davis,

Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Garthine Walker, “Modernisation,” in Garthine Walker, ed.,

Writing Early Modern History

(London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 25–48, at 45.

Elliott,

History in the Making

, 60.

Randolph Starn, “The Early Modern Muddle,”

Journal of Early Modern History

6/3 (2002): 296–307, at 299.

For reflections on this by several historians, see “AHR Roundtable: Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity’,”

American Historical Review

116/3 (June 2011): 631–751.

Leonard Y. Andaya and Barbara Watson Andaya, “Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period: Twenty Five Years On,”

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

26/1 (1995), 92–8.

Dipesh Chakrabarti,

Provincializing Europe

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.

1Economic and Social History

The phrase “early modern” began to be used first in economic history. Along with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the voyages of Columbus, the transformation of the European economy through investment in new, larger-scale processes of trade and production, what is usually called the “rise of capitalism,” has long been viewed as a central factor in the development of the modern world, which fully emerged with industrialization. Another traditional mark of modernity is the increasing importance of persons as individuals rather than members of social groups. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), who really created the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period of time, saw “individuality” as one of its defining features.1

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