Early Modern History

The Early Modern History Collection covers the transformative centuries from roughly 1400 to 1800, when printing, Protestant reform, oceanic exploration, and scientific revolution permanently altered European civilization. Machiavelli’s political analyses, Francis Bacon’s vision of science, and the firsthand accounts of explorers and conquistadors sit alongside the great Enlightenment historians — all available as free EPUB downloads.

The collection traces the religious wars that tore Europe apart, the rise of absolute monarchy and its critics, the Dutch and English commercial empires, and the intellectual movement that culminated in the American and French Revolutions. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, though set in antiquity, belongs to this era’s historical imagination and features prominently on the shelf.