Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went through considerable social and cultural change. With stimulus from the Renaissance, many intellectual and practical innovations emerged that led to the creation of new nation-states, new commercial activities (especially the emphasis on capitalism), new religious attitudes, and eventually many explorations of the rest of the world. This was the beginning of the Europeanization of the planet, the results of which are still seen clearly today. In this period of intense change also came many innovations in botanical classification. Important contributors to new classifications lived in Italy, Netherlands, England, France, and Germany, essentially the regions that had also supported the production of herbals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The classifications of Cesalpino, Ray, and Tournefort were particularly significant, all being natural systems, seeking groups based on constellations of different morphological characters. Nomenclature also evolved during this period, with single-name genera becoming widely accepted. There can be no doubt that to understand modern systems of plant classification one must seek origins in the seventeenth century.