The Origin of Early Modernity

Abstract The earliest sustained use of the concept of “early modernity” by academic historians anywhere in the world occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century in Japan. This was a time when China and Japan were still under significant Western imperial pressure and Japan was engaging in its own imperial adventures in China and Korea. Early modernity was conceived partly in reaction to how the contemporaneous academic periodization of Ancient-Medieval-Modern was used to justify imperialism. Inserting a new period between the medieval and modern challenged European and Japanese historical narratives, which claimed that modern nation-state sovereignty was an outcome of medieval development. Early modernity instead introduced a new, alternative trajectory towards nationhood and sovereignty, one not dependent on a stage of feudal militarism. It expanded the possibilities of modernity into more culturally and historically pluralist terrains, offering a vision of modernity not necessarily bound to modern imperialism. This in turn created space for critical reflections on the nature of global modernity, reflections that continue to be seen in early modern history writing today.