From 1400–1700, older hierarchies survived even as monarchies, commercial elites and state bureaucracies became more important. Change did not happen evenly. Political centralization opened new paths to influence, but distinctions based on birth, occupation, religion or gender remained. The cases below are illustrative; classes may select other appropriate examples.

Social structures and state service

The Ottoman Empire divided society between the ruling military-administrative establishment and the tax-paying population. Through the devshirme, Christian boys from parts of the Balkans were recruited, converted and trained to serve as Janissaries or officials. Some men of non-elite birth could therefore rise through state service, though the system relied on coercive recruitment and loyalty to the sultan.

In Mughal India, Akbar used the mansabdari system to rank imperial officers and assign military obligations. Muslims, Rajputs and other local elites were brought into imperial government through the system. It offered opportunities for advancement, while maintaining dependence on the emperor and substantial inequalities among social groups.

Commercial growth in England strengthened merchants and the urban professions alongside the established nobility and landed gentry. Even so, property, lineage and patronage remained closely tied to political and social status.

Women: authority and restriction

Women’s experiences differed sharply according to class, marital status and location. Most lived under patriarchal household and legal structures. Elite women, however, could gain influence through dynastic connections, property or access to rulers.

At the Ottoman court, Hürrem Sultan became the legal wife of Süleyman I and played an important dynastic and diplomatic role. Later royal mothers, especially the valide sultan, could shape appointments and policy. In Mughal India, Nur Jahan held considerable authority during Jahangir’s reign. She issued orders and participated in court patronage. These women show that exceptional individuals could gain access to power; they do not demonstrate general female equality.

Elizabeth I ruled England from 1558 to 1603, showing that a woman could hold the highest office. Yet contemporary arguments about female rule also reveal how strongly gendered expectations persisted. Ordinary women carried out essential economic work in households, markets and workshops, but this rarely gave them equal legal or political status.

Population change followed the recovery from earlier epidemics, greater political stability, agricultural expansion and migration. Growth could quickly be reversed by war, disease or famine. Forced resettlement often moved communities without increasing their numbers.

Urban growth in England

England’s population grew substantially during the 16th century. London expanded particularly fast as migrants arrived from overseas and the countryside. The city’s rise as a political and commercial centre, as well as a maritime one, created employment. Rapid growth, however, brought overcrowding, strained food supplies and led to repeated epidemic outbreaks.

As the population rose, so did demand for land and grain. Higher prices helped some landowners and commercial farmers, but they put wage earners and poorer households under pressure. The social effects of demographic expansion were therefore unequal.

Resettlement in the Ottoman world

Following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II encouraged and compelled Muslims, Christians and Jews to settle there. The policy rebuilt the city’s population and helped establish Istanbul as an imperial capital. Some movement was voluntary; some was directed by the state.

Urban growth supported specialized crafts and markets, along with imperial administration. At the same time, the city’s diverse population was divided into communities with different religious and legal positions. Migration could create cosmopolitanism while still maintaining separation.

Migration in Qing China

Warfare during the fall of the Ming and the establishment of Qing rule in 1644 caused severe disruption. Several regions suffered depopulation. Later in the 17th century, migrants settled in areas such as Sichuan, where land had been abandoned. The Qing state promoted both resettlement and agricultural reconstruction.

This movement restored production, but it also changed local society. Newcomers introduced different languages and customs, as well as commercial connections. Competition for land could then cause tension with established populations.

Minority and indigenous communities experienced very different forms of rule. Some received limited autonomy or negotiated coexistence; others faced forced assimilation, expulsion and violence. Rulers’ treatment of these groups usually reflected concerns about taxation, political loyalty, religious uniformity and control of land.

Jews in the Ottoman Empire

Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, many Sephardic Jews settled in Ottoman cities such as Salonica and Istanbul. Ottoman rulers valued their craft skills, commercial connections and tax contributions. Within the empire’s wider legal order, Jewish communities regulated many of their own religious and family matters.

Yet relative security did not amount to equality. As a non-Muslim population, Jews remained subject to distinct taxes and restrictions. Their experience shows the practical benefits of toleration alongside the survival of formal hierarchy.

Moriscos in Spain

The Moriscos were Muslims in Spain who had converted, or had been compelled to convert, to Christianity. Authorities often questioned whether these conversions were sincere and linked the Moriscos to possible rebellion or foreign enemies. Restrictions on language, clothing and custom aimed to erase their distinct identity.

Suspicion intensified after the revolt in the Alpujarras from 1568 to 1571. Between 1609 and 1614, Philip III ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos. This policy strengthened religious uniformity, but it also uprooted long-established communities and removed agricultural workers and craftspeople from several regions.

The Ainu and Japanese expansion

The Ainu of northern Japan maintained their own trading, political and cultural traditions. During the late 16th and 17th centuries, the Matsumae domain gained privileged control over trade with Ainu communities. Unequal exchange and expanding Japanese influence gradually weakened Ainu independence.

That expansion did not go unchallenged. Conflict included the uprising led by Shakushain in 1669. After suppressing the resistance, the Matsumae increased their control, although aspects of Ainu society remained intact.

From 1400 to 1700, commerce linked distant markets more closely. Older regional routes still mattered, but merchant companies, overseas empires and new intercontinental connections altered the scale and organization of trade. Alongside goods, merchants and travellers carried information, religious ideas and technologies.

Armenian merchants and Safavid Iran

In 1604, Shah Abbas I forcibly moved Armenian inhabitants from Julfa to New Julfa, outside Isfahan. From there, Armenian merchants built commercial networks that extended into India, Russia, the Ottoman lands and Europe. Their expertise allowed Safavid Iran to export silk and acquire foreign silver.

These merchants received privileges and relied on communal institutions, yet their success grew out of coercive relocation. Their experience shows how state policy, minority networks and private enterprise worked together in early modern trade.

The Manila galleon connection

After 1565, regular shipping linked Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in New Spain. Traders exchanged American silver for Asian products, especially Chinese silk and porcelain. Manila brought together Chinese merchants, Spanish officials, Filipino workers and American resources.

This route shows that changing trade patterns weren’t simply European networks imposed on passive societies. Chinese producers and merchants played a central role, while colonial governments tried to tax and regulate the exchange.

Chartered companies and the Dutch Republic

Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company combined private investment with powers granted by the state. The company could negotiate treaties, maintain armed forces and set up fortified trading posts. Its merchants therefore acted as agents of commerce and territorial power.

Commercial expansion enriched the Dutch Republic and linked European consumers with Asian markets. It also promoted monopoly, military intervention and coercion against rival producers and traders.

Travellers also spread knowledge. The Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi, who travelled widely during the 17th century, recorded cities, customs and government across the Ottoman world. His accounts, like those of other travellers, reflected his own assumptions and purposes.

Artistic and intellectual movements changed alongside systems of patronage, religious belief and political authority. Courts and religious institutions continued to act as major sponsors. At the same time, cities and commercial elites created wider audiences for art and scholarship.

Mughal court culture

Mughal emperors combined Persian, Central Asian and Indian artistic traditions. Akbar established an imperial workshop where artists produced illustrated manuscripts and detailed scenes of court life. During Jahangir’s reign, painters created increasingly precise portraits and studies of animals and plants.

Imperial authority also found expression through architecture. Monumental buildings, gardens and planned spaces presented the emperor as the source of order. Mughal culture grew from cultural exchange, but it also served as a political language of empire.

Scholarship in Timbuktu

During the 15th and 16th centuries, Timbuktu became an important centre of Islamic learning. Scholars connected with institutions such as Sankore taught law, theology, grammar and other subjects. Commercial networks across the Sahara supported manuscript production and private libraries, linking trade with intellectual life.

These institutions were vulnerable to political instability. The Moroccan conquest of Songhai in 1591 disrupted established systems of patronage, while scholars including Ahmad Baba were taken into exile. Intellectual movements relied on learned communities as well as favourable political conditions.

Baroque culture in Europe

From the late 16th century, Baroque art and architecture used dramatic movement, scale and emotion. Catholic patrons used the style to inspire devotion. Rulers, meanwhile, displayed their authority through ceremonial buildings and court culture. Rather than forming one uniform movement, the style developed differently across European states.

Its growth shows how closely artistic change was tied to competition among churches, courts and cities. Patrons influenced what artists produced, while artists developed techniques that transformed the representation of power and belief.

Diplomacy, migration, scholarship, religion and commerce all created opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. Ideas did not simply pass unchanged from one society to another. People selected and adapted them. Power shaped this process: some exchanges were voluntary, while others took place through conquest or unequal relationships.

Translation at Akbar’s court

During the late 16th century, Akbar sponsored the translation of Sanskrit works into Persian. Muslim and Hindu scholars worked together in the imperial translation bureau, where the Persian version of the Mahabharata became known as the Razmnama.

Through this project, Persian-speaking members of the Mughal elite could engage with Indian traditions. It also helped Akbar present himself as the ruler of a diverse empire. The exchange served both intellectual curiosity and imperial integration.

The Kingdom of Kongo and Portugal

Relations between Kongo and Portugal began in the late 15th century. Kongolese rulers adopted Christianity, then incorporated writing, diplomacy and Christian titles into their own political system. Afonso I ruled from 1509 to 1542. He corresponded with the Portuguese monarchy and promoted Christian institutions.

Kongolese Christianity was not merely a copy of European Christianity. Local rulers and communities adapted it to fit existing political and cultural practices. However, relations became increasingly unequal, particularly when Portuguese interests in enslaved people began to undermine Kongolese authority.

Jesuit scholarship in China

Matteo Ricci entered China in 1583 and worked with Chinese scholars, including Xu Guangqi. He adopted the clothing and learned style of a Chinese scholar while introducing European geographical and mathematical knowledge. In 1607, Xu Guangqi collaborated in translating parts of Euclid into Chinese.

Chinese scholars chose knowledge that seemed useful rather than accepting an entire foreign worldview. The Jesuits also adapted the way they presented Christianity to fit Chinese intellectual traditions.

Scientific and technological developments changed warfare, communication, learning and cultural identity. Yet an invention by itself didn’t guarantee widespread transformation. Its impact depended on whether institutions could finance, distribute and apply it.

Ottoman artillery

Gunpowder weapons existed before 1400, but early modern warfare changed as their scale and use expanded. Large cannon helped breach Constantinople’s fortifications during the Ottoman capture of the city in 1453. Artillery later became central to siege warfare, pushing states to fund specialists, foundries and stronger defensive works.

The effects reached beyond the battlefield. Gunpowder armies required taxation and administration, which strengthened some central governments. Even so, artillery didn’t guarantee victory. Logistics, leadership and finance remained decisive.

Hangul in Korea

In the 1440s, King Sejong’s court devised a new Korean writing system. It was promulgated in 1446 and later became known as Hangul. Unlike the Chinese characters used by the educated elite, its letters represented spoken sounds more directly.

Hangul made writing more accessible and supported Korean-language works, including practical and religious texts. Adoption was not immediate. Elite resistance persisted because knowledge of classical Chinese still marked education and status. This writing technology challenged social divisions in literacy, but it did not quickly remove them.

Optical instruments in the Dutch Republic

The first recorded patent application for a telescope was made in the Netherlands in 1608. As telescopes and microscopes improved, people could observe beyond the limits of their unaided senses. Making these instruments relied on skilled craft production as well as theoretical learning.

Such devices shaped culture by building confidence in observation and revealing phenomena that did not fit inherited assumptions. The conclusions drawn from them remained contested, since observations still needed interpretation and costly instruments were not widely accessible.

A figure’s intellectual or scientific significance depends on more than original ideas. Patronage and collaborators matter, as do institutions, communication and the ways later generations use the work.

Ulugh Beg

Ulugh Beg was a Timurid ruler and astronomer who governed from Samarkand. In the 1420s, he founded a major observatory and supported a community of mathematicians and astronomers. Their observations led to highly accurate calculations of stellar positions, which were assembled in a star catalogue completed during the 15th century.

By bringing together political patronage, sustained observation and mathematical scholarship, he played an important intellectual role. However, the observatory declined after his death in 1449. Its fate shows how strongly an intellectual institution could rely on the protection of a single ruler.

King Sejong

Sejong, king of Joseon Korea from 1418 to 1450, sponsored projects in language and astronomy, as well as agriculture and measurement. His court created Hangul to provide a writing system suited to spoken Korean. He also backed the preparation of practical knowledge that could serve the government.

Sejong directed state resources towards these intellectual projects, which accounts for much of his significance. But crediting him personally with every achievement hides the contributions of court scholars, technicians and officials.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a scholar, poet and nun in late 17th-century New Spain. Her writing showed broad engagement with theology and philosophy, alongside literature and natural knowledge. Life in a convent gave her unusual access to books and time to study, though ecclesiastical authority restricted her intellectual independence.

Her career reveals both the opportunities open to an educated woman in colonial society and the limits she faced. Her influence came through writing and patronage, not formal political office.

Religion could give rulers legitimacy, hold an administration together and determine who belonged to a political community. Yet it could also threaten state authority, especially when believers opposed official policy or rulers tried to control religious institutions.

Safavid Iran

Shah Ismail I founded Safavid rule in 1501 and made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion. This set Safavid Iran apart from neighbouring Sunni powers and gave its people a shared basis for dynastic loyalty. The state supported Shi'a scholars and religious institutions.

At the same time, the policy put pressure on Sunni populations, and uniform belief did not emerge immediately. In the Safavid case, religion helped build the state but also hardened political and confessional boundaries.

Mughal India

Akbar ruled over a population made up of many religious communities. He removed the jizya tax on non-Muslims, brought Rajput elites into imperial service and sponsored debates between representatives of different faiths. Through these policies, he strengthened alliances and positioned the emperor above rival religious groups.

Aurangzeb followed a more explicitly Islamic style of rule, restoring the jizya in 1679. Even so, many Hindu officials remained in imperial service. The difference between the two rulers cannot be reduced to tolerance versus intolerance. Both used religion as part of wider strategies of imperial government.

France under Henry IV

During the late 16th century, the French Wars of Religion weakened royal authority. Henry IV converted to Catholicism, then issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598. It gave French Protestants restricted rights of worship and certain political guarantees.

This settlement used limited toleration to restore order while keeping Catholicism as the kingdom’s dominant religion. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the edict, reflecting a later preference for confessional unity. Religious policy shifted as rulers changed their view of what state security required.

Religions spread through merchants and migrants, as well as missionaries, rulers and local converts. People converted for many reasons: personal conviction, political advantage, education, marriage or coercion. Conversion was usually a gradual process, not a single event. Converts often reshaped the new religion around local practices.

Christianity in the Kingdom of Kongo

King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized in 1491. His successor, Afonso I, gave Christianity a more central place in royal government. Churches and schools helped it expand, as did written correspondence and diplomatic contact. Links with Christianity also strengthened the monarchy’s standing at home and internationally.

Kongolese rulers played a leading role in conversion; it wasn’t imposed entirely from abroad. Local interpretations of Christian belief emerged, while many earlier practices continued. The result was selective adoption alongside missionary expansion.

Islam in Aceh

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Aceh Sultanate in northern Sumatra grew into an important Muslim political and intellectual centre. Trade linked Aceh with scholars and merchants across the wider Islamic world. Its rulers sponsored mosques and teachers, along with works of religious scholarship.

Commerce and royal patronage supported Islam’s expansion, but local teachers and communities shaped how people understood it. Religious growth accompanied the consolidation of the sultanate, though it cannot be reduced to state commands.

Catholic missions in New France

During the 17th century, Catholic missionaries, including Jesuits, worked among indigenous communities in New France. They learned local languages, set up missions and taught Christianity through teaching and ritual.

Some indigenous people converted for spiritual, diplomatic or material reasons. Others resisted, or combined Christian beliefs with existing ones. Disease, warfare and colonial dependency shaped these encounters, so religious choice is difficult to separate from wider pressures.

Confessional identity became a source of violence when it overlapped with disputes over territory, political authority or social control. Such conflicts brought legal discrimination, forced conversion, exile and killing. Yet rulers sometimes chose compromise when prolonged warfare began to threaten the state.

Sunni–Shi'a rivalry

The rivalry between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Shi'a Safavid Iran was both religious and geopolitical. In 1514, Ottoman forces defeated Shah Ismail I at the Battle of Chaldiran. At stake were confessional allegiance and control of eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

Each state viewed some religious communities as potential political threats. Persecution and propaganda sharpened Sunni–Shi'a divisions, though diplomacy and trade continued in the intervals between wars. Religion intensified the conflict, but strategic interests also shaped it.

The French Wars of Religion

Between 1562 and 1598, France suffered a series of conflicts involving Catholics, Huguenots and competing noble factions. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 killed large numbers of Protestants in Paris, with further violence following elsewhere.

These wars weakened royal government and devastated communities. Henry IV’s conversion, followed by the Edict of Nantes, brought the main phase of warfare to an end through limited toleration. Political stability had eventually taken priority over complete religious uniformity.

Christians in Japan

At first, Japanese rulers allowed Christian missionaries to preach and accepted the presence of converts. Concern later grew over foreign influence and the political loyalty of Christian communities. Toyotomi Hideyoshi restricted missionary activity in 1587, then ordered the execution of Christians at Nagasaki in 1597. The Tokugawa authorities introduced broader prohibitions in 1612 and 1614.

Many Christian peasants took part in the Shimabara uprising of 1637–1638, although taxation and local oppression also drove the revolt. It led to more intense persecution. Despite executions, surveillance and compulsory registration through Buddhist temples, Christianity survived secretly in some communities.