Society, Religion, Gender and the Arts in a Connected World

How did people see their place in the world?

The previous lessons focused on rulers, wars and trade. This lesson asks about identity: how people were ranked, how they worshipped, what roles men and women were expected to play, and what they created. Strand C asks you to analyse how such ideas and practices shaped identity, citizenship and heritage, and many of them still shape our world.

Social orders: ideals and realities

Most societies had an official ranking of social groups. In practice, people's lives often did not match the ideal.

• Europe. In France, society was divided into three estates: clergy, nobility and everyone else. The first two had legal privileges, such as exemption from the main direct tax. East of the Elbe River, in Prussia, Poland and Russia, most peasants were serfs. Yet wealthy commoners (bankers, merchants, lawyers) often lived better than poor nobles.
• Tokugawa Japan ranked samurai above farmers, artisans and merchants. Osaka merchants grew rich and funded the arts, while many samurai fell into debt.
• Qing China honoured the scholar-gentry, men who had passed the civil-service examinations. Merchants were officially below farmers, but many bought land and educated their sons for the exams.
• South Asia had complex systems of caste (jati) that shaped work, marriage and community, but people also moved through military service, trade and religious movements.
• The Americas developed racial hierarchies. In Spanish America, the casta system ranked people by ancestry; in British and French colonies, law tied enslavement to African descent (see the lesson on the slave trade).

Women's lives

In almost every society, laws and customs placed women under the authority of fathers and husbands, and excluded them from most formal political offices. But women's roles were varied and often powerful:

• Rulers and regents: Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine II of Russia ruled great powers. In Africa, Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba (died 1663) resisted the Portuguese for decades, and in Asante the queen mother (ohemaa) had an important role in choosing the king.
• Indigenous nations: among the Haudenosaunee, clan mothers chose and could remove chiefs, a responsibility they still hold today.
• Law and property: in the Ottoman Empire, court records show women buying and selling property and going to court to defend their rights.
• Culture and learning: Parisian salon hostesses shaped Enlightenment debate; in Qing China, educated women in the Jiangnan region wrote and published poetry; Mughal princesses such as Jahanara were patrons of buildings and learning.
• Work: most women worked in farming, spinning and weaving, trade and domestic service; widows often ran family businesses.
• Constraints: among many Han Chinese families, foot binding marked status and limited mobility; Manchu women did not bind their feet. In Europe, Rousseau's influential Émile (1762) taught that women's education should serve men.

Religion: revival, reform and conflict

• Toleration and intolerance. France revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685); England's Toleration Act (1689) protected most Protestant dissenters. Joseph II's Toleration Patent (1781) protected Protestants and Orthodox Christians in Austria.
• Protestant revival. Pietism spread in Germany; John Wesley began the Methodist movement in England; the Great Awakening swept British North America in the 1730s–1740s, and some revival preachers welcomed enslaved and free Black worshippers.
• Jewish renewal. In eastern Europe, the Baal Shem Tov (died 1760) founded Hasidism, stressing joyful prayer; in Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn led the Haskalah.
• Islamic reform. In Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab called for a return to what he saw as the original practice of Islam; his alliance with the ruler Muhammad ibn Saud (1744) laid foundations for the first Saudi state.
• The Chinese Rites Controversy. Jesuits in China allowed Chinese Christians to honour ancestors and Confucius. Rival missionaries objected, and in 1715 the Pope banned the rites. The Kangxi emperor responded by restricting missionaries, and his successor banned Christianity (1724).
• The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, France and Spain and their empires (1759–1767), and the Pope suppressed the order in 1773.

The arts

• Europe. The Baroque style, dramatic and ornate, filled palaces such as Versailles and churches across Catholic Europe; composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel (Messiah, 1742) wrote Baroque music. Later came lighter Rococo decoration, then Neoclassicism, inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, and the Classical music of Haydn and Mozart.
• Edo Japan. Merchant wealth supported kabuki theatre, puppet theatre (bunraku) with plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") woodblock prints. Matsuo Bashō perfected the haiku; his travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North recounts a journey of 1689.
• Qing China. Cao Xueqin's novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the mid-1700s, portrays the decline of a wealthy family and is often counted among China's greatest novels. Imperial kilns at Jingdezhen produced porcelain prized worldwide.
• South Asia. Rajput courts such as Kishangarh and Mughal workshops produced fine painting; the Jantar Mantar observatories were both science and architecture.
• Africa and the Ottoman world. Asante artists made gold regalia and kente cloth; in Istanbul, the Nuruosmaniye Mosque (completed 1755) blended Ottoman and European Baroque forms.