ABSTRACT
The Europeans were open to new influences, new ideas and new ways of doing things, unlike the Chinese who visited the coasts of east Africa in the early fifteenth century to collect tribute from people who were expected to acknowledge that the Chinese Celestial Kingdom was far superior to all others. Nearly all people in early modern Europe lived in polities which were socially stratified and utterly undemocratic. These facts seem to be beyond dispute. However, some historians still hold that the early modern social structure can be meaningfully explained in terms of a 'society of orders'. The European intellectual and social response to the plague was twofold. One response was to see the pestilence and all other diseases as scourges sent by God to punish His erring people. The second intellectual response to disease was no less characteristic of western Europeans who in the years after 1450 created the modern capitalistic world system.
