Page 247 - Encyclopedia Of World History

early modern world 597

an overture to expansion. In addition to an increasing orders predominated—the great Protestant missionary
European presence worldwide, Qing China (1644– societies would be founded only in the 1790s. Sufi broth-
1912) invaded Xinjiang, Mongolia, Nepal, Burma, and erhoods such as the Naqshibandiyah expanded Islam in
Formosa, and during the seventeenth century Romanov Africa, India, China, and southeastern Asia.Tibetan Bud-
Russia stretched out to the Pacific. dhism pushed into northwestern China, Manchuria,
The new unities led relentlessly to new fragmentations Mongolia, Buryatia, and to Kalmikya, on the shore of the
and hierarchies, and resistance to such centralizing polit- Caspian Sea, which remains today the only Buddhist
ical forces was equally universal. During the century republic in Europe.
between 1575 and 1675, for example, uprisings occurred The increased emphasis on orthodox and textual con-
in China, Japan, India, Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan, ventions of Latin Christendom’s Reformation had a par-
Ukraine, the Balkans, the German lands, Switzerland, allel in the Raskol schism of the Russian Orthodox
France, Catalonia, Portugal, England, Ireland, and Mex- Church during the 1650s. Elsewhere, Muhammad ibn
ico. At the end of the period, the French Revolution Abd al Wahhab (1703–1792) founded the Wahabbi
(1789) would enjoy global influence as the first revolution movement to reform Sunni Islam under strict Quranic
modern in its progressive, absolute, and sudden nature. interpretation.
Many people believed that the era that historians call
Intensification “early modern” would be the last. Franciscan apocalyptic
of Land Use thought inspired Columbus, and the belief that the god
The concurrence of population growth, global markets, Quetzalcoatl would return from the East in a One Reed
and aggressive states led to wider and more intensive use year led the Aztec sovereign Montezuma II to regard the
of land. Displacing or subordinating indigenous peoples, Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and his comrades as
pioneers backed by aggressive states drained wetlands divine envoys. A Jesuit at the court of Akbar in 1581
and cleared forests to create new lands for intensive found the Mughal ruler open to the idea of the imminent
commercial, agricultural, and pastoral regimes. (Similarly, end because that year was eleven years from the thou-
commercial hunters pursued various species of flora and sandth anniversary of the Hijra, which was the journey
fauna to extinction for sale on a global market.) Oblivi- the Prophet Muhammad took from Mecca to Medina in
ous to any land claims held by indigenous peoples, 622 CE. The Jewish Sabbatian movement expected the
states would offer pioneers low taxes in exchange for set- end of the world in 1666. In late eighteenth-century cen-
tlement and land rights. For example, the Mughal empire tral China the White Lotus Society awaited the return of
provided land grants, Hindu merchants provided capital, the Buddha to put an end to suffering. All these devel-
and Sufi (Muslim mystic) brotherhoods provided leader- opments might best be understood in the context of
ship for the communities of Muslim pioneers who trans- notions of history in which significant change was either
formed the Bengal wetlands into a key rice-producing absent—or sudden and awesome.
region. These efforts compensated for the extended dis-
obliging weather patterns that plagued temperate zones Outlook
throughout the Northern Hemisphere—a “little ice age” Neither a deductive nor an inductive approach to the
affecting climate throughout the early modern world. early modern world is entirely satisfactory. A deductive
approach expects to see the entire world following a
Religious Revival Eurocentric roadmap to modernization (one that Europe
The most distinctive religious characteristic of this era was itself might not have followed). An inductive approach
the global expansion of Christianity. Indeed, the impetus respects the diversity of historical experience, but this
driving the creation of global sea passages was religious diversity itself can frustrate attempts to delineate a dis-
as well as commercial. The efforts of Catholic religious crete list of unifying features.