If you would like more than one century as the endpoint of a range, then centuries is correct? “The period of the 16th through 20th centuries” is the early 20th century at the London Yen University.

I don’t know about “correct”, but both sound okay to me. What is the sense of a singular “century” in your title? There are two “t”s, so there are two noun phrases in the phrase logically singular, since it refers to a single century. (The instance of “century” in the first noun phrase is elided by a process called “right node-raising”).

However, in the quote given in your question, you’ve just a single “the”, so here there is only one noun phrase, whose head noun should be plural, since it refers to two centuries.

Can I ask a question on Quora? I would argue in favor of centennial. The clause says between the 17th and the early 20th century? The century after 17th is acceptable to exclude, but if you could read the sentence better, the second the is included.

An alternate option would be to recast the clause as from the 17th until early 20th century, or perhaps from the 17th century until the early 20th.

According to COS:

“the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”/ “from the twentieth to the twenty-first century”/ “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

technologies”