Period· The columns of time
Early Modern
1500 → 1800
Three centuries in which ships join the continents, and what happens on one becomes the fate of another. It is the period when the history of the species stops being several histories in parallel.
What the evidence shows
The spread of printing in Europe, oceanic navigation, the exchange of crops and diseases between hemispheres, the first joint stock companies and the first global silver economy all fall between about 1500 and 1800. So does the demographic catastrophe of the Americas, where epidemics carried across the Atlantic killed a majority of the population within a century of contact. The two belong to the same movement and cannot be separated: the connection that made a world economy possible is the connection that emptied two continents.
Bounds and conventions
Both ends, around 1500 and around 1800, are classroom dates and nothing more. Historians dispute them, and a few deny the period any coherence beyond the convenience of having somewhere to put three centuries that fit neither neighbour.
1500 to 1800. A European historiographical convention.