The Early Modern World, 1450–1800: When the Oceans Became Roads

In the 1590s a silver coin dug out of a mountain in what is now Bolivia could be carried down to a Pacific port, shipped to Mexico, loaded on a Manila galleon, and spent in Fujian. The mountain was Potosí, where Indigenous labourers were drafted to mine, the buyers were Chinese merchants who needed silver for taxes, and the ship's captain was Spanish. Three continents, one coin. That is the early modern world in a sentence: for the first time, a single economic system touched every inhabited continent, and it did so unequally, sometimes terribly.

Historians of this period have the richest paper trail of any so far: ship registers, parish books, customs ledgers, tax surveys in Istanbul and Beijing, notarial archives in Seville and Amsterdam. They also have the loudest arguments. A graduate of this course keeps the map of empires in parallel, the numbers with their error bars, and the four debates worth knowing: what the "gunpowder empires" label hides, how to count a slave trade, how many people the Americas lost, and why some places grew rich before others.

Atrocities in this period are told plainly. Scholarly consensus is named as consensus, and contested numbers are given as ranges with their sources. This describes how the field works and is not a position on any current political question.

Land empires in parallel: Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and the label that hides them

Between about 1450 and 1550 three great Muslim-ruled states took shape across southern and western Asia. The Ottomans took Constantinople on 29 May 1453 under Mehmed II, conquered Mamluk Syria and Egypt in 1516–17 and, under Suleiman (1520–66), reached Hungary and besieged Vienna in 1529. The Safavids began with the young Shah Ismail taking Tabriz in 1501; he made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion in Iran, a choice that still shapes the region. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) moved the capital to Isfahan around 1598. The Mughals began when Babur won at Panipat in 1526 and reached their height under Akbar (1556–1605) and his successors; Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal from about 1632. Aurangzeb ruled from 1658 to 1707, and the empire's central power faded after.

Marshall Hodgson coined the phrase "gunpowder empires" for these three, and William McNeill popularised it, arguing that cannon and muskets made centralised states possible. The label is useful and contested. Critics say it makes weapons the cause when administration, cavalry, revenue systems and religion mattered at least as much; and it lumps three very different states. Each also left a different record. The Ottomans surveyed land and people in tax registers and kept the court records of local judges. Akbar's minister Abu'l-Fazl compiled the Ain-i-Akbari (c.1595), a statistical and administrative handbook of the empire. Safavid sources are thinner and rely heavily on chronicles and foreign travellers.

Beside them were Ming and Qing China (next section), Tokugawa Japan (from 1603), Russia's expansion across Siberia, the Songhay empire and its Moroccan conquerors in West Africa (1591), the Kongo, Benin, Oyo, Asante and Dahomey states on the Atlantic coast, and Habsburg and French monarchies in Europe. Slide through them.

China and the arithmetic of growth

The Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (from the Manchu conquest of 1644) ruled the world's biggest society. Under the Yongle emperor the treasure-fleet commander Zheng He led seven voyages as far as East Africa between 1405 and 1433, then they stopped; why is argued, with fiscal cost and politics both proposed. Through the 1500s Chinese demand for silver drew in American bullion by way of Manila (from 1565) and Macau, and the Ming tax system moved to silver. After the Qing took Beijing, the Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1735–96) reigns brought peace, new lands in Central Asia and a population surge. The official count of 1794 gives about 313 million people; the figure for around 1700 is a rough 150 million, with serious scholars giving ranges from 100 to 200 million.

Those two numbers are a lesson in growth. A population does not need to boom: a rate of under 1% a year, kept up for a century, more than doubles it. The new crops from the Americas (maize, sweet potato, peanut) opened hillsides that rice would not grow on, and the peace did the rest. Feel the arithmetic.

Without JavaScript: 150 to 313 million over 94 years is about 0.78% a year and doubles in about 89 years. The Americas figure (60 to 6 million over 108 years) is a net fall of about 2.1% a year, halving every 32 years.

The Atlantic and the slave trade, counted

The Portuguese worked down the African coast in the 1400s, reached India in 1498, and founded the sugar economy of Brazil in the 1500s. Spain, after Cortés's campaign (1519–21) and Pizarro's at Cajamarca in 1532, built silver-and-labour empires in Mexico and Peru; the Dutch and English founded their East India Companies in 1602 and 1600 (the Dutch one issuing tradeable shares); the French, Dutch and English settled the Caribbean and North America. The sugar and tobacco plantations of the Americas depended on a forced migration from Africa.

This is the best-counted atrocity of the premodern world, thanks to a database built by historians over decades. SlaveVoyages (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, led by David Eltis and others) pools ship records, insurance and customs documents and newspapers from some 36,000 voyages and uses statistical methods to estimate the rest. Its estimate is about 12.5 million people embarked in Africa between the early 1500s and 1866, and about 10.7 million who arrived in the Americas, so roughly 1.8 million (about 14%) died on the Middle Passage. (Some recent summaries put the embarked total slightly higher, near 12.7 million, as the database is revised; check the site for the current figures.) The Portuguese and Brazilians carried the most people, then the British, then the French, and the Portuguese, British and French together carried about nine in ten of those taken in the 18th century. About 40% of the whole trade ended in Brazil, which was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. Even after Britain banned its trade in 1807, around 3 million more were carried across the Atlantic.

Without JavaScript: 12.5 million embarked minus about 1.8 million deaths at sea leaves about 10.7 million who arrived.

Two things the database cannot do. It counts only the Atlantic; slave trades across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean existed too, and their totals are far less certain (Nunn has estimated about 18 million enslaved people exported in four trades from 1400 to 1900 in all, of which the Atlantic is by far the largest). And a count of people is not their story. The voices of the enslaved survive thinly, in memoirs such as Olaudah Equiano's (1789; the question of whether he was born in Africa or South Carolina is argued), in the petitions and court cases of freedom suits, and in the work of historians like Saidiya Hartman who read the silence in the ledgers. A ledger records a cargo; a historian has to be told, and has to remember, that each entry is a person.

The Columbian exchange: counting a catastrophe

Crops, animals and diseases crossed the Atlantic after 1492 in both directions; The Columbian Exchange (06/09) tells that story. The most argued number in it is the first: how many people lived in the Americas in 1492? Early 20th-century scholars said 8 to 13 million (Alfred Kroeber 1939: 8.4 million; Ángel Rosenblat 1954: 13.4 million). Henry Dobyns (1966) proposed 90 to 112 million. William Denevan (1992) settled on about 54 million. A 2019 study by Alexander Koch and colleagues combined regional estimates with a dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide around 1610 in Antarctic ice cores, which they read as farmland reverting to forest; they put the pre-contact number at about 60 million and the low point at around 6 million by 1600. Critics of the high estimates (David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere, 1998) argue that they extrapolate from thin early counts.

The mechanism is also debated. Smallpox, measles and other Old World diseases hit populations with no immunity and travelled ahead of the Spaniards; but war, forced labour, enslavement, famine and displacement mattered too, and they varied by region. In central Mexico, where tribute lists survive, estimates of the fall run from about 20 million (some give 25 million) to roughly a million around 1600, and not everyone accepts the starting point. Pick an estimate and a low point and see the range.

Without JavaScript: the 1492 estimates run from 8.4 million (Kroeber) through about 54 million (Denevan) and about 60 million (Koch and colleagues) to over 90 million (Dobyns). With a low point of about 6 million, the net fall in the middle estimates is on the order of 90%.

On the other side of the ledger, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian (2011) estimated that the potato accounted for about 12 to 25% of the population and urban growth of the Old World between 1700 and 1900.

The Great Divergence: when did Europe pull ahead, and why?

By 1800 northwestern Europe, above all Britain, was richer per person than almost anywhere else, and by 1900 the gap was huge. When did it open, and why? Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence, 2000) argued that the richest parts of Europe and China, such as the Yangzi Delta, were comparable until about 1800, and that Britain broke away because it sat on coal near its factories and drew resources from its American colonies, which freed its own land. Robert Allen emphasised high British wages and cheap energy, which made it worth inventing machines to save labour. Critics from the other side, such as David Landes, stressed culture and institutions; Joel Mokyr stressed a European "market for ideas" among rival states; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson emphasised property rights and the Atlantic trade. Prasannan Parthasarathi argued that India was comparable and that British policy undid it. A group of economic historians (Stephen Broadberry and co-authors) place the divergence earlier, about 1700, using reconstructed national accounts.

Part of the argument is about data. Compare two datasets for the same question.

Without JavaScript: Bairoch's numbers make China slightly richer than Western Europe in 1800 (ratio about 1.07). Maddison's make Western Europe about twice as rich as China in 1820 (ratio about 2.0). The same question, opposite answers, from different assumptions.

That is how a field with plenty of evidence can still argue: not about whether the numbers exist but about which are right. A graduate holds the positions apart, knows who holds them, and does not mistake a debate over dates for a debate over worth.

What a graduate just sees

• "Gunpowder empires" is a handy label with real critics; administration and revenue mattered at least as much as cannon.
• A growth rate under 1% a year more than doubles a population in a century.
• The slave trade is best counted by the voyage: about 12.5 million embarked, about 10.7 million arrived, roughly 14% died at sea, and that is the Atlantic alone.
• Contested numbers come in ranges: the Americas' 1492 population runs from under 10 million to over 100 million in different studies.
• Disease, war, labour and displacement all contributed to the Americas' collapse, and their shares differ by place.
• The Great Divergence is a debate about dates, causes and datasets, and no one answer has won.
• The unit of ledgers is a person; ask whose voice the record leaves out.

Where it shows up next

• Revolutions & Empires, 1750–1914 (35/89): the French, Haitian and Latin American revolutions come out of this world, and industrialisation is the Great Divergence's later act.
• International Relations (35/14): the first state system, the first joint-stock companies and the first global trade wars begin here.
• Political Economy (category 31): mercantilism, silver, slavery and the debates about capitalism's origins.
• Epidemiology (35/58) and Genetics (35/46): why populations without prior exposure suffer so much, and what ancient DNA now adds.
• In the world: museum restitution, reparations debates, the names of places, and the long shadow of plantation economies, discussed in Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91).

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Jerry Bentley, Herbert Ziegler and Heather Streets-Salter, Traditions & Encounters (McGraw-Hill), or John Richards, The Unending Frontier (University of California Press, 2003), on early modern environmental history.
• 📘 Gentler. Charles C. Mann, 1491 (2005) and 1493 (2011); and Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created.
• 🌐 Free resource. SlaveVoyages lets you search the database yourself.
• 🌐 Free text. OpenStax World History, Volume 2 is free online and runs from about 1400.