17th century

The Age of Discovery turns into the Age of Colonialism.

The Renaissance becomes the Baroque, the age of naked power and greed, the age of reason, the first glimmerings of enlightenment. Thuggery tricked up as enterprise.

Absolute rulers play out their ambitions on the stage of the world.

Political wars disguised as religious ones; religious wars disguised as political ones.

The flowering of science and mathematics.

The birth of notions of freedom for the common man at the same time as a vast, cruel expansion of slavery for millions.

The 17th Century is the stage for countless events that shaped the way the world is today. In the nodes indexed below, I and others have tried to place many of them in their chronological context, and provide access to further nodes that explain them in-depth.

How I Made the Year Nodes is long enough to be off in its own writeup; follow the link.

Special measures have been taken to identify at least one Dutch painter who passed away in each year of this century.

You will notice that I have included the year 1600 in the seventeenth century, as I have little patience for pedantic statements about a year-counting system which missed the event it supposedly starts from by about six or seven years. But if you insist, here's a link to the year 1700.

18th century	How I made the Year Nodes	1600	16th century
Porno-tropics for the European imagination	Seventeenth Century	Narai	1699
1642	1685	1643	1628
Abbé de Choisy	Baroque	1658	sharawaggi
Interior with Peasants	Maba	1659	1666
1694	1601	1665	Juan Sánchez Cotán

The 1600-oughts

The 1610s

The 1620s

The 1630s

The 1640s

The 1650s

The 1660s

The 1670s

The 1680s

The 1690s