SUMMARY:

Chapter 6 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “The Seventeenth Century: Alternative Scenarios, Troubled Times.” The seventeenth century had played such a decisive role in the formation of the social order that we call “modernity” that the chapter had to be divided into two parts. Indeed, the rise of the Counterreformation, the devastating Thirty Years War, and the English Revolution signaled the arrival of a new type of social imagination that gradually formed the concepts of the regular (“modern”) state, national sovereignty, and centrally standardized religious rituals and practices.
Part 1 of the chapter reviews the radical transformation of the Northern Eurasian polities that sought individual answers to the universal challenge of accommodating human diversity in the situation of radically intensified social interactions. The spread of firearms and printing played a decisive role in toppling the traditional “feudal” social structure, making the power of ideas and deadly violence accessible to a much wider stratum of the population. In China and Persia, in the Crimean Khanate, and in Rzech Pospolita there were no ready solutions to the new challenges, and the consequence of new political and cultural arrangements made in the early 1600s would not become obvious until much later in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century.