Periodization

[originally posted on my teaching blog, History Survey, on 5/22/07]

In order to make the past intelligible, we organize it into discrete chunks of time, that is, periods. In Western history we refer to the ancient era, the Middle Ages (or medieval period), the early modern era, and the modern era. The definition and delineation of each period is somewhat flexible, depending on what makes analytic and narrative sense for the subject at hand.

Ancient history in the Western context refers to that vast period of time sandwiched between the advent of civilization in Mesopotamia and the end of the Roman Empire in the latter part of the fifth century.

The term Middle Ages refers to a span of time lasting some 1,000 years, from the dawn of Christian Kingdoms in Western Europe to near the end of the fifteenth century. The term reflects the sensibilities of Renaissance humanists, who rediscovered the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, and who looked back on the millennium in-between with some disdain.

Western historians used to begin the modern era right after the Middle Ages; however, now we split the last five hundred years or so of Western history into two periods. The early modern era begins with the sixteenth century, give or take some decades, when the printing press changed the way Europeans communicated, when the world the Europeans knew expanded vastly as a consequence of overseas "discovery" and expansion, and when states and bureaucracies as we know them were in their initial stages of formation. The early modern era ends sometime in the eighteenth century, depending on what topics or regions one is looking at.

Historians' definition of the modern era varies by topic and region. Modern European political history in the western part of the continent usually begins with the French Revolution, although one could also lump the Enlightenment into this period. Some histories of Germany begin a little bit later with the Napoleonic Wars. Historians of Britain, on the other hand, can go back to the early eighteenth century, when Britain began to develop a consumer economy, early features of industrialization, and a parliamentary political system that recognized the legitimacy of a loyal opposition. The example of Russia, on the other hand, shows how flexible one must be with periodization. Even though it was much more backward than western Europe, historians of modern Russia will probably begin with Peter the Great at the end of the seventeenth century, because he established political institutions that survived down to the Russian Revolution in 1917.