Before Exclusivism: Was the Early Modern an Axial Age?

Periodization schemes emerge from and serve specific perspectives on world history. Religion has played no small part in discussions of the early modern era, to the extent that the twentieth anniversary issue of a flagship journal featured a study of its own articles on religion.¹ Yet there is hesitation to take an overall view, one encompassing the whole of Afro-Eurasia or the globe and defining the early modern by its religious sensibility. From the perspective of the world history of religion, if we are to speak of an early modern it would seem to be that period preceding the present regimes of theological and national exclusivisms. The early modern was that era in which pluralism was presupposed, in which the same historical dynamics generated both pluralism and pushback against pluralism. As such, perhaps the Ottoman experience of the early modern might be taken as paradigmatic. Walter Andrews and Mehmed Kalpaklı’s “Age of Beloveds” notion hints at this,² but I would like to suggest a slightly different formulation. I wonder whether there might be, in the early modern, something analogous to Karl Jaspers’s concept of the axial period.

In his 1949 classic, The Origin and Goal of History (English translation, 1953) Jaspers argued that the centuries around 500 BCE form an axial period, “the most deepcut dividing line in history,” in which humanity as we know it “came into being” in a great “break-through.” In the context of imperial consolidation in China, India, and “the West,” a “spiritualization” occurred, marked by the parallel lives of the great spiritual figures and the emergence of traditions that shaped life for the next two thousand years, down to the modern technical age. Confucius and Laozi in China, the Buddha and authors of the Upanishads in India, and, in “the West,” the Hebrew Prophets, the pre-Socratics, and Zoroaster all lived during this era.

Interest in Jaspers’s concept among historians has gone in two directions. In one direction, some have engaged more deeply in comparative history of this axial period. In the other, some have adapted the term “axial period” to describe other ages when parallel religious developments can be identified. Jaspers himself considered certain other such “strange synchronisms” in world history, including the similarities between the teachings of Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism and Protestantism, but rejected them, arguing that only in the axial period as he defined it did such synchronisms become “historically all-embracing.”

I would like to argue, first, that in the case of the early modern the “strange synchronisms” go well beyond those mentioned by Jaspers, and second, that if the light of Jaspers’s axis period still reaches us in our technological age, it is as refracted through the prism of the early modern. Several major traditions of today, while having roots in the axial period, are not understandable without awareness of their redefinition in the early modern era, and the Reformation paradigm within a Western Civilization meta-narrative has obscured larger Afro-Eurasian trends which become more fully visible with a wider lens. The task is complicated by our reductionist definition of religion in Anglo-American and related societies, itself a consequence of the very cultural shifts we are talking about. Yet we want to avoid making religion seem to be an epiphenomenon, or a mystification of economic or social or political life.

The pluralism of the early modern, heralded in the Mongol era, spread throughout Afro-Eurasia with imperial consolidations after 1450. Persistent Ottoman efforts to capture Constantinople (1396, 1421, 1453), which coincided with the Ming court’s several naval excursions into the Indian Ocean (1405–33), point to strong intention to transcend classical boundaries in a new era of intercultural encounter. The Ottoman conquests of 1453–1540 unified the commerce of southwestern Eurasia and northeastern Africa, overlapping with similar integrations (Ming in East Asia and Songhai in the Sahara) and conquests (Kızılbaş in Tabriz, Timurids in Hindustan). These events reconfigured commerce across Afro-Eurasia and created the social conditions in which the reality...