The 1600s in Ten Events

In October 1600, seventy thousand samurai fought for six hours on a fog-drenched plain at Sekigahara until Tokugawa Ieyasu broke the coalition against him. The victory bought Japan two and a half centuries of internal peace under a shogunate, with the imperial court in Kyoto reduced to ritual. In the last hours of the same year, Elizabeth I granted a London syndicate a monopoly on eastern trade. The English East India Company began as pepper merchants with six ships; two centuries later it would govern a subcontinent and field armies larger than most European states.

The Dutch answer came fast. In 1602 the States-General merged half a dozen quarrelling spice ventures into the VOC - history's first multinational corporation, with the legal right to wage war, coin money, and sign treaties, and the invention that made it possible: the tradable share. Five years later, one hundred and four English settlers landed on a swampy peninsula in the James River. Two-thirds of them were dead within a year, but Jamestown held, and English America had begun.

In 1609 Johannes Kepler published Astronomia Nova, showing that Mars moved not in a circle but an ellipse, sweeping equal areas in equal times. In the same year Galileo built his own telescope, and in 1610 he rushed sixty pages into print as Sidereus Nuncius: the Moon was cratered, the Milky Way was made of stars, and Jupiter had moons of its own. Europe read it within weeks. The ancient certainties of natural philosophy did not survive the decade, and in 1633 the Roman Inquisition made Galileo kneel and abjure the Copernican view he had done more than anyone to prove.

The other great event of these years was not intellectual. In 1618 a Protestant crowd in Prague threw two Catholic regents out of a chancellery window, and the resulting quarrel became the Thirty Years' War - the most destructive conflict Europe would suffer before the twentieth century, killing perhaps eight million people. The next year, at Point Comfort in Virginia, a Dutch warship traded twenty and odd Africans taken from a Portuguese slaver for provisions, and English North American slavery had a beginning.

The 1640s were the century's hinge. In 1644 rebel armies under Li Zicheng broke into Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself in the palace garden; within weeks the Manchu-led Qing came down through the Great Wall passes and took the capital. Nearly three centuries of Ming rule ended, and China's last imperial dynasty began. The Manchu conquest had been prepared a generation earlier, when Nurhaci united the Jurchen tribes under a banner system in 1616.

Europe's 1640s were just as violent. Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642 and lost the civil war that followed; in January 1649 he was tried and beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and the doctrine of divine right took a wound it never recovered from. Between those two moments, in 1648, Catholic and Protestant negotiators in two Westphalian towns ended the Thirty Years' War and, with it, the wars of religion. Westphalia made the sovereign state the basic unit of international relations - the framework diplomacy still assumes.

The century's last decades gathered its threads. Shah Jahan's mausoleum for Mumtaz Mahal at Agra, begun in 1632, was declared finished in 1653 after more than two decades of work. Japan sealed itself in 1639, admitting only Dutch and Chinese traders at Dejima and developing for two centuries in enforced quiet. In 1683 a relief army under Jan III Sobieski broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in an afternoon, and the long Ottoman retreat from central Europe began.

Then in 1687 Isaac Newton published the Principia: three laws of motion and one law of gravitation, in three slim Latin volumes, explaining falling apples and orbiting planets with the same mathematics. It is the century's proper conclusion. A year later William of Orange landed at Torbay, James II fled, and in 1689 Parliament wrote the terms of the new monarchy into the English Bill of Rights - no taxation without Parliament, no standing army in peacetime, free elections. Within three years the physical universe and the English constitution had both been put down on paper.

The seventeenth century is best read as a century of settlements. Sekigahara settled Japan. Westphalia settled who could decide religion. The Qing conquest settled China for two and a half centuries. The Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights settled who could tax in England. Even the Principia is a settlement: an argument that had been open since Copernicus in 1543, closed with mathematics.

Every one of those settlements was bought with an enormous amount of violence, and several of them - chartered companies with private armies, the Virginia tobacco fields - laid the foundations for the imperial expansion of the next two centuries. To see the century that produced these problems, read the 1500s; to see how the institutions built here were used and undone, follow the pattern of imperial rise and collapse across the whole millennium.