AMSCO 4.7 Changing Social Hierarchies Notes

Overview

AMSCO Topic 4.7, Changing Social Hierarchies (AMSCO p. 251-260), covers how societies between 1450 and 1750 organized people into classes and how those rankings shifted under new rulers, new wealth, and new conquests. The big pattern: some states accommodated diversity to keep their empires running (the Ottomans welcoming Jews, Akbar ending the jizya), while others suppressed it (Spain expelling Jews in 1492, the Qing forcing Han men to wear queues). Meanwhile, conquest created brand-new elites, like the Manchu in China and the peninsulares atop the Casta system in the Americas, and old elites like Russian boyars and European nobles fought to hold their ground against increasingly powerful monarchs.

Timeline of social hierarchies development. Image Courtesy of Tien.

The chapter opens with the Edict of the Expulsion of the Jews (1492), in which Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews out of Spain. Jews had already been expelled from England (1290) and France (1394). Huguenots (French Protestants in Catholic France) faced similar persecution and fled to other countries or colonies. States also propped up elite classes, like the boyars in Russia and the nobility in Western Europe, who both supported and challenged royal power.

Social Classes and Minorities in the Gunpowder Empires

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires are called gunpowder empires because they succeeded militarily by adopting guns and cannons when those weapons first became widely available. All three dealt with tension between military elites and absolutist rulers.

Ottoman Society

The Ottoman system was built around a warrior aristocracy that competed for bureaucratic positions with the ulama, scholars and experts in Islamic law. Within the military, the Janissaries gained so much power and prestige that they eventually tried to mount coups against the sultans.

As sultans grew weaker, viziers (powerful advisors) increasingly spoke for them in government. But the sultan kept real leverage through timar, a system of granting land or tax revenues to people he favored. Timar grants rewarded soldiers and kept them loyal.

Treatment of Religious Minorities

Relative tolerance toward Jews and Christians was one reason the Ottoman Empire succeeded. After Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, Sultan Mehmed II invited them to settle in Istanbul. Some became court physicians and diplomats, and Jewish settlers may have brought the printing press to the empire. Tolerance had limits, though:

• Jews could live only in specified areas of cities
• All non-Muslims paid the jizya tax
• Top positions in the empire were reserved for Muslims

Religious Toleration in the Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire began in 1526, and its greatest emperor was probably Akbar the Great (ruled 1556-1605). To hold his huge, fractious empire together, Akbar practiced religious toleration. He ended the jizya tax, gave land and money grants to both Hindus and Muslims, funded a Catholic church, and supported Sikhism.

Women in the Ottoman Empire

Wives and concubines of the sultan promoted their own sons as heirs to the throne, a practice called harem politics (the harem was the residence where a powerful man's wives and concubines lived).

Roxelana is the standout example. Kidnapped from Eastern Europe by Crimean raiders and sold into slavery, she was forced to convert to Islam and entered the harem of Suleiman the Magnificent. Suleiman then married her, which was highly unusual. She went from enslaved person to commissioner of major public works projects, and her son succeeded Suleiman. Viziers grumbled about a "sultanate of the women," complaining the harem had too much political influence. Roxelana's rise shows social mobility was possible in this era, but rare.

Other Ottoman Social Classes

Merchants and artisans formed a small middle class. Below them were peasants, kept poor partly by tribute payments that supported the Ottoman armies. At the bottom were the enslaved, including prisoners of war captured in Ukraine and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Barbary pirates operating off the North African coast (named for the Berbers who lived there) captured Europeans in the Mediterranean and sold them to the sultan or other officials. Some captives were impressed, meaning forced into service, as galley workers in the navy. As many as one million people were impressed between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Manchu Power and the Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) put an ethnic minority, the Manchu from Manchuria, in charge of the majority Han Chinese. Like the Mongols 400 years earlier, the Manchu were ethnically and culturally distinct from the people they ruled. Unlike the Mongols, they were determined to make their own culture dominant.

The Qing balanced two strategies. They placed Manchus in top government positions, but they also kept traditional Chinese institutions like the civil service exams and the bureaucracy, recruiting Han Chinese to work under or alongside Manchus. Over time, some (not all) Chinese accepted the Qing as legitimate rulers.

Conflicts with the Han

The Han felt Qing intolerance most severely. Non-official Han civilians could still wear Hanfu (traditional Han clothing), but every man had to wear his hair in a queue, the braided Manchu pigtail. The queue was a loyalty test and a humiliating challenge to traditional Confucian values. Refusing could mean execution.

The Qing also used Han Chinese defectors to massacre Han who refused to assimilate. General Li Chengdong orchestrated three separate massacres in Jiading within a single month, leaving hardly anyone alive in the city. Liu Liangzuo massacred the entire population of Jiangyin, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people. These defectors played a massive role in the Qing conquest of China.

European Hierarchies

Europe's hierarchy ran royalty, then nobility, then everyone else. Nobles were usually wealthy landowners, and nearly every European state had laws granting them special privileges. Though a small minority of the population, nobles owned most of the land and passed it down through inheritance.

Nobility Gains and Losses

In the Netherlands, Dutch landowners anchored local provincial government. In England, large landowners controlled Parliament, though they had to contend with radical religious sects and a growing middle class.

Elsewhere, nobles lost ground. A failed uprising in France in the mid-1600s convinced Louis XIV to keep power away from both commoners and nobles ("I am the state"). Gunpowder and cannons let monarchs destroy nobles' fortresses and seize their lands. Frederick of Prussia framed absolutism differently: "I am the first servant of the state." Writers piled on too; Thomas More accused nobles of "living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good."

Growing Acceptance of Jews

Jews gained a larger role in many countries starting in the 17th century. Jews who traced their heritage to Spain became known as Sephardic Jews (Sepharad is the Hebrew word for Spain), and many resettled around the Mediterranean, in northern Africa, or the Middle East. Jews from central and eastern Europe became known as Ashkenazi Jews. Under the influence of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, prejudice declined somewhat. Jews became especially important in banking and commerce, and the Netherlands, tolerant of religious dissent generally, offered Jews less discrimination than most of Europe.

Russian Social Classes

Moscow's hierarchy continued the structure of 11th-century Kievan Rus: boyars (noble landowners) at the top, merchants in the middle, and peasants, the most numerous group, at the bottom. Serfs were the lowest peasants. Bound to a noble's land in exchange for a plot and protection, serfs transferred with the land when it was sold. They were not technically enslaved, but their lives were brutally hard.

Boyars clashed with rulers much like Western European nobles did. When the boyars of Novgorod opposed the expansionist policies of Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible," who murdered his own son), Ivan defeated Novgorod, confiscated his opponents' lands, and forced their families to move to Moscow where he could watch them.

The Casta System in the Americas

European arrival, imported African slave labor, and diseases that killed tens of millions drastically reshaped social structures in the Americas (covered in AMSCO 4.3 on the Columbian Exchange). The result was a new hierarchy based on race and ancestry, where skin color signified power and status. In the Spanish and Portuguese empires, this was formalized for centuries.

The Latin American pyramid, top to bottom:

• Peninsulares, born on the Iberian peninsula
• Criollos, of European ancestry but born in the Americas
• Castas, people of mixed-race ancestry, ranked internally as mestizos (European + indigenous), mulattoes (European + African), and zambos (indigenous + African)
• Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans at the bottom

People were assigned their level at baptism and could only move up through intermarriage. Those at the bottom paid higher taxes and tributes, even though they could least afford them.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

Go deeper on this topic with the 4.7 Changing Social Hierarchies course study guide, which frames class and race from 1450-1750 the way the exam tests it. This chapter connects directly to AMSCO 4.6 on challenges to state power, since elite resistance and rebellion drove many of these hierarchy shifts, and it sets up AMSCO 4.8 on continuity and change from 1450 to 1750. Find the rest of the unit on the AMSCO notes page.

To check your understanding, drill stimulus-based questions with AP World guided practice, look up unfamiliar vocab in the key terms glossary, and try a comparison or continuity prompt with FRQ practice and instant scoring.