Modern era

The modern era[lower-alpha 1] is the period of human history that succeeds the Middle Ages (which ended around 1500 AD) up to the present. This terminology is a historical periodization that is applied primarily to European and Western history.

The modern era can be further divided as follows:

• The early modern period lasted from c. AD 1500 to 1800 and resulted in wide-ranging intellectual, political and economic change. It brought with it the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and an Age of Revolutions, beginning with those in America and France and later spreading in other countries, partly as a result of upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars.
• The late modern period began around 1800 with the end of the political revolutions in the late 18th century and involved the transition from a world dominated by imperial and colonial powers into one of nations and nationhood following the two great world wars, World War I and World War II.
• Contemporary history refers to the period following the end of World War II in 1945 and continuing to the present. It is alternatively considered either a sub-period of the late modern period or a separate period beginning after the late modern period. It includes the currently-ongoing 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 civilized 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 problems 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.