Social institutions collided from 1000 to 1600 CE, halting population growth. Gaia brought the Medieval Warm Era, nourishing prosperity from 800 to 1200 CE, until the Black Plague infected the Old World. The sixteenth-century mortality wave of the Americas reinforced population shrinkage; declining agriculture reinforced the cooling of the Little Ice Age. Meanwhile, earlier prosperity had encouraged ambitions among warriors: their bellicose emotions revealed links of social and biological human nature as they destroyed empires in China and the Mediterranean. The Mongols regime supported commerce and knowledge exchange, yet their legacy brought further warfare. Maritime encounters brought other collisions, especially after the tenth century. Transoceanic routes, completing the global trade network, spread disease, conflict, and mortality. Inherited representations of the world met with challenge: the major religions each experienced doctrinal schisms. The sixteenth century, while it offered innovative elements of global expansion, also reproduced the collisions of previous centuries, revealing the inherent challenges and limits to the human order.

Seventeenth-century empires of east and west built four types of profitable colonies. They maintained port cities, labor systems, and trade in precious metals. A comparison of oceanic shipping shows that, while Europeans dominated long-haul routes, Asian shipping dominated the dense Indian Ocean trade. Capitalism entered this scene, gradually gaining global leadership. Its most basic institution was the profit-making enterprise, combining local and international trade. A second institution, the proprietors’ association, linked entrepreneurs to pressure states at home and abroad for pro-enterprise policy in commerce, taxation, diplomacy, and war. Such associations gained an early start in the Netherlands and thereafter in England. A Dutch–English alliance then created a third capitalistic institution, a network of national proprietors’ associations able to sustain pro-capitalist policy among states even as they warred. The chapter concludes with exploration of global cultural exchange and early signals of nationalism and democracy. The changes in economy, culture, and politics relied both on current agency and deep antecedents worldwide.