Modern era

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The modern era or the modern period, also known as modern history or modern times, is the period of human history that follows the Middle Ages from about 1500 AD and continues into the present. It is a form of periodization that is applied primarily to European and Western history. From about the 1990s, it has been more common to referred to an early modern period from about 1500 to 1800 with "modern period" often reserved for events from about 1800 until today. The time from the end of World War II (1945) can also be described as being part of contemporary history.

The modern period saw wide-ranging intellectual, political and economic change, with European influence spreading around the Earth. It began with the Age of Discovery (including European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade) and the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, proceeding with absolutism and the Age of Enlightenment. The early modern period ended with Age of Revolutions and the French Revolution, later spreading to other countries, partly by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The modern period involved the spread of the Industrial Revolution across the world, the transition to nationalism towards the rules-based international order, continuing to the present 21st century.

The modern period has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an Age of Discovery and globalization. During this time, the European powers and later their colonies, began a political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics, science, and culture has come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the western world and globalization. The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization, and a belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.

The brutal wars and other conflicts of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development. Optimism and the belief in constant progress have been most recently criticized by postmodernism, while the dominance of Western Europe and North America over the rest of the world has been criticized by postcolonial theory.