The economic watershed of the 17th and 18th centuries was a historically unique passage from limited resources that made material want inescapable to self-generating economic growth that dramatically raised levels of physical and material well-being. European societies— first those with access to the Atlantic and gradually those to the east and on the Mediterranean—provided increasing percentages of their populations with a higher standard of living.
The gradual emergence of new economic structures that made European global influence possible both presupposed and promoted far-reaching changes in human capital, property rights, financial instruments, technologies, and labor systems. These changes included:
A major result of these changes was the development of a growing consumer society that bene ted from and contributed to the increase in material resources. At the same time, other effects of the economic revolution—including increased geographic mobility, transformed employer–worker relations, the decline of domestic manufacturing—eroded traditional community and family solidarities and protections.
European economic strength derived in part from the ability to control and exploit resources (human and material) around the globe. Mercantilism supported the development of European trade and influence around the world, which, in turn, encouraged overseas exploration, expansion, and conflicts. Internally, Europe divided more and more sharply between the societies engaging in overseas trade and undergoing the economic transformations sketched above (primarily countries on the Atlantic) and those (primarily in central and eastern Europe) with little such involvement. The eastern European countries remained in a traditional, principally agrarian, economy and maintained the traditional order of society and the state that rested on it.