The Manufactured Millennium

The Puritans reconceptualized the millennium—their vision of peace in the world to come. As a religiously inspired end-of-the-world scenario, most political and legal historians see the millennium as the product of Christian universalism, whose exclusionary and apocalyptic nature the law of nations was designed to overcome. Looking closely at its changing profile among late seventeenth-century Puritans, we find that the millennium developed in parallel with and was informed by the cosmopolis that stood geopolitically and hermeneutically at the center of the law of nations. Once described in abstract terms lacking spatial specificity, the reorganized geopolitical millennium appears in three book-length sermons by Cotton Mather and includes a variety of jurisdictions in what the West had considered newly discovered territories, such as the New World colonies, as well as newly appreciated old territories, such as the Ottoman Empire, giving it many of the attributes of a cosmopolis itself.