How Empires Reshaped Social Hierarchies from 1450‑1750

Spain and Portugal expelled their Jewish populations after the 1492 Reconquista to enforce religious homogeneity and to prevent converts from renouncing Christianity. The Ottoman Empire welcomed Jews fleeing the Iberian Peninsula; they contributed to commerce and the court but remained subject to the jizya tax and lived in designated quarters. The Qing Dynasty kept a sharp division between ruling Manchus and the Han majority, reserving high bureaucratic posts for Manchus and forcing Han men to wear the braided queue as a visible sign of submission. Under Akbar the Great, the Mughal Empire practiced religious tolerance, funded construction for multiple faiths, and initially abolished the jizya tax.

The Rise of New Political Elites

In the Spanish Americas, conquistadors created the casta system, a race‑based hierarchy that replaced diverse indigenous social structures. At the top stood the Peninsulares, Spaniards born in Iberia, followed by Creoles—people of European descent born in the New World. Below them were the Castas, including Mestizos (European‑Indigenous) and Mulattoes (European‑African), while enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples occupied the lowest tier. This system simplified complex cultural and linguistic identities into a rigid order that served the interests of a small Spanish elite.

The Decline of Existing Elites

Peter the Great dismantled the power of the Russian Boyars by abolishing their rank and tying all bureaucratic employment to direct state service, thereby consolidating absolutist authority. In the Ottoman Empire, the traditional timar land grants—once given to aristocrats for military service—were reclaimed by the sultan in the sixteenth century and converted into tax farms, redirecting revenue from local elites to the central government.

Mechanisms Behind the Transformations

The casta system emerged because conquistadors needed a clear, hereditary framework to organize colonial society, leading them to impose race and heredity as the primary criteria for status. Peter the Great’s consolidation of absolutism removed the Boyars’ autonomous power by making state service the sole path to bureaucratic positions. Ottoman revenue centralization shifted wealth from aristocratic timar holders to the state through the adoption of tax farming, weakening local military elites.