The Encyclopedia of Early Modern History offers four hundred years of history in one work. Experts from all over the world have joined in a presentation of the scholarship on the great era between the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The perspective is European. That does not mean, however, that the view on the rest of the world is blocked. On the contrary: the multifaceted interrelatedness of European and other cultures is scrutinized extensively. The Encyclopedia of Early Modern History addresses major historical questions: - which ideas, inventions, and events changed people's lives? - in which ways did living conditions change? - how do political, social, and economic developments interlock? - which major cultural currents have begun to become apparent? - how did historical interpretation of certain phenomena change? The individual articles are connected to one another as in a web of red threads. The reader who follows the threads will keep coming upon new and unexpected contexts and links.