Anybody interested in the subject should read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It's an excellent fictionalized account of the time period, focusing on the s

Anybody interested in the subject should read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It's an excellent fictionalized account of the time period, focusing on the social and economic transformations (specifically, from a land-based economy and culture to a money-based one), which Stephenson posits is the birth of the modern world.